You must stop smoking to stop term damage. Recently in the press, three tobacco companies had been ordered to pay $15 billion in damages after losing a historic court case. This highlights just how devious the tobacco companies where and how dangerous smoking is to the human body.
When I look at all the smokers outside office buildings, restaurants, stations, shops, airports and nightclubs, it still amazes me just how many young people still want to smoke – even when we know that smoking is the main cause of so many health problems. We all know for example that smoking causes 90% of all lung cancer, as well as many other forms of cancer. Amazingly, people still smoke after losing loved ones to lung cancer. You must stop smoking now to stop long term damage.
The appeal of smoking when you’re young
I have to remind myself that I was a heavy smoker for many years, particularly in my youth. Of course, when we are young, we feel that we are going to live forever. And if not…who cares? But that sense of immortality starts to run out as we pass the 30-year-old mark. We begin to feel a little worse for wear: Recovering from late nights out takes longer, and that feeling of immortality begins to feel like a distant memory. And yet like all good smokers I remember those rescue moments, when I was “dying” for a cigarette (I always thought that was a funny expression). That feeling of comfort, enjoyment, relief, and completeness tinged with a disgusting aftertaste was always reasonably acceptable. It was only when I recently heard the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ that the cause of those moments really hit home.
What is Cognitive Dissonance?
Cognitive dissonance is a term for all the things we tell ourselves, and believe to be true, in order to do the things we know we shouldn’t do. It’s our way of disconnecting from the awful truth that these cigarettes are
- slowly killing us
- rotting our lungs
- increasing the ageing process,
- ruining our skin
- making us feel tired
- reducing sexual performance
- costing us a fortune (they’re an expensive product that we pay for often with our very lives).
Stop smoking now to protect your most precious asset
If health is our most precious asset, then we are losing this health to poisonous cigarettes. Our lives are becoming shorter and shorter with an almost certain, unpleasant and premature end waiting up ahead.
A hard fact about smoking
According to the world health organisation (WHO) “more than a 100 million people have been killed by smoking related diseases over the course of the 20th century”… If this is true, then it follows that most young smokers must still be turning a blind eye. They still trust in that immortal feeling, a feeling that makes the idea of a slow painful death impossible to take seriously. Combine this cognitive dissonance with the propaganda dispensed by big Tobacco, and smoking is rendered “acceptable”.
Doubt leads us to smoke
So despite all of the world-class scientific research out there clearly condemning smoking, we are lead to doubt. That is, we either can’t quite believe that smoking will be our fatal end, or, we think, “maybe I’ll be that one person that is somehow lucky enough to cheat fate”.
I was shocked to discover whilst writing this blog that scientists (admittedly working for the Nazis in the Second World War) have actually known that smoking causes cancer for more than 70 years. Even more astonishing is that these findings were buried after the war only to be rediscovered in the 60s and 70s by American scientists. Despite these findings, tobacco companies still churned unlimited funds into creating doubt around the fatality caused by smoking. It is this doubt, combined with cognitive dissonance, that has kept Big Tobacco in business to this day.
For more information about quitting smoking successfully visit my website at at www.stop-smoking-in-1-hour.co.uk.