Meditation, a practice that’s over 7,000 years old, can help calm you during stressful situations, improve your mindfulness, and keep you calm and collected. Will an activity urging you to concentrate away from your jumbled feelings and thoughts help you quit smoking?
Many GPs and smoking cessation groups can attest to meditation’s contribution to quitting smoking. It has been found that meditating while going through a counselling program and with NRTs can refresh and motivate an ex-smoker to continue their quit journey.
Meditation is also linked to mindfulness, another practice that has helped ex-smokers succeed. Mindfulness keeps you abreast of what you’re currently doing, especially the impulses or urges you have. When you frequently practice mindfulness, you can “catch” yourself thinking of buying a cigarette and stop before you do so.
In today’s article, we’ll take a look at the benefits of guided meditation in helping smokers quit the habit.
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Reduced Stress
Many practitioners of meditation claim it has helped them deal with immense stress. Quitting smoking is stressful, and meditation can help you manage stress and even stop smoking for good.
Guided meditation therapies prove to help many smokers relax and sleep better, cope with stressful situations in a healthy manner, and kick the habit of smoking when they feel tense.
During your quit journey, there will be plenty of moments you’ll almost collapse under the weight of withdrawals and cravings. When you meditate and have a helpful support system, it can be easier to pull through.
Self Control
Paying attention to what you think and feel at the moment takes a lot of effort to achieve. But, if you’re successful, you have a better chance of resisting temptation and pushing on your quit journey.
Meditation encourages you to be aware of your thoughts. When you identify your triggers, it’s easy to rein yourself in. Meditation lets you list them down and remind yourself to make better decisions when you encounter them again.
Indeed, it is easier said than done, but by frequently meditating to quit smoking, you begin to experience yourself making better choices – like a new habit that replaces your decision to buy a cigarette pack.
Mindfulness
Imagine you had the power to see the future. If you knew that your continued smoking will result in lung cancer in 10 to 15 years, you would certainly want to give them the flick now.
Mindfulness isn’t exactly the power to predict the future, but the ability to be conscious of your actions. Habits are unconscious processes, like breathing, ensuring the heart beats, the stomach digests food and other bodily activities.
Some external activities, like buying a cigarette when stressed, become habits we’re not conscious of doing. You light up a cigarette on impulse as an automatic response. Mindfulness aims to eliminate that by helping you recognise the actions you’re about to take and note them.
When you meditate, you become mindful of your thoughts and also your actions, letting you take control over them.
Improved Concentration
Any ex-smoker will tell you it will be hard to work or study during your first two weeks off cigarettes. Your body is screaming for its regular dose of nicotine and the withdrawals from this will wreak havoc on your focus.
By practising meditation, you acknowledge that you currently feel anxious, depressed, and even physically sick. Then, you can tell yourself that a cigarette won’t make those feelings go away and you can only do so by enduring them.
It won’t be easy to believe what you tell yourself and might even sound silly to you during the first few days, but with frequent meditation, it becomes much easier to concentrate and have confidence in yourself.
Consider using nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) or nicotine vaping products (NVPs) to help handle your withdrawals better, improve your meditations, and busy yourself by deeply concentrating on exercising or new hobbies and activities.
Productivity
Speaking of new hobbies and activities, meditation helps improve your productivity.
During your meditation, you can refocus your attention towards the great strides you’ve made by weaning off cigarettes and improving your skills in drawing, writing, or any other hobby or activity you’ve been working on.
When you feel like having a cigarette, meditation can help remind you that the skills you recently mastered won’t be possible if you lit a cigarette.
Start on Your Quit Journey Today
Meditation to help quit smoking is a helpful activity to maintain focus and develop discipline. Practising it can be challenging at first, but over time, you can manage your stress, have excellent self-control, and become much more productive in doing away with smoking and better with life.
If you wanted to know about how meditation helps on your quit journey, we hope you found this information useful. In fact, if you want to know the best way to quit smoking for good, you’re in the right place.
Smokefree Clinic gives you access to many medically reviewed and trustworthy resources that can inform and aid you in your path to wellness, so have a look around!
If you’re ready to get started, Smokefree can connect you to bulk-billing Australian healthcare professionals who excel in helping patients quit smoking for good, including using responsible vaping products where appropriate.
Click here to book your bulk-billed telehealth consultation with an Australian healthcare professional and quit smoking today.