Addiction or Conditioning?

I've struggled composing this post. I was originally going to share with you how easy it was for me to stop smoking. I soon discovered that time had tainted my memory. Stopping smoking remains one of the most difficult things I have ever undertaken and also one of the most satisfying. It has been almost 9 years since I stopped. The process I went through was far more than just ending an addiction to nicotine. The physical addiction, as it turns out, was far easier to give up than the habit itself. By that I mean the emotional dependency. I had conditioned myself to smoke over the course of my lifetime. Hook them when their young and you hook them for life. That was the maxim that defined my habit. Smoking was part of my self image. I liked to smoke. I enjoyed smoking. But I knew it was creating and causing negative health issues in my life. I needed to change. But I didn't want to. Sound familiar?

I have realised that every time I made the effort to stop smoking up until that point I was only treating the physical addiction. I never addressed the real craving I had. Every time I lit up I was filling a desire in my mind for something. I was curing my stress. I was ending my boredom in that moment. I was giving myself a relaxing moment. I was taking a break. So every time I quit I was forcing myself to stop doing something that I really enjoyed doing. That's a recipe for failure. How do you ever stop doing something you really enjoy doing and why would you want to? So I changed my mindset. I gave myself something that was more important to me than the enjoyment of that smoke. I didn't realise it at the time though.

Three or four months before my fortieth birthday I remembered a story told to me by a woman I worked with in the early 80's. She stopped smoking and never went back to it by making the act of quitting a gift to herself. A birthday present. I remember her saying it gave her a different outlook, a different approach. So I committed myself to the same approach. Once I made that commitment to myself an interesting thing started to happen when I lit up. My resolve to stop became stronger and my desire to light up became weaker. I started to see that I was giving myself a gift of good health not giving up a part of what made me who I was. For the first time I really wanted to stop smoking. I'm not saying this was easy when I reached that fateful day of my fortieth birthday. I was pretty sick for a couple of weeks. The diffference from all the previous efforts that I had made was that I had no desire in my mind to start smoking again. I found myself wanting to not smoke. I had unwittingly found a way to break the conditioning I had built up over my lifetime. For the first time I thought of myself as a non smoker. Does that make sense to you?

Think now about this trucking lifestyle. Whether we are talking about issues of health, hours of service, speed limiters, or any other hot button topic, we are often stuck in a vicious cycle. A negative mindset that can be destructive in so many different ways. After 10 years in this business I've learned one thing that I'm certain of: Truck driver's love to drive down the most difficult of roads. I think it's the challenge. I've also learned that the best driver's in this business are always able to find a detour around the difficulties on those roads. That's a lesson we can all apply to our own personal paths. Life is a journey filled with many difficulties and many rewards. We can follow the same roads day after day or we can break out of that groove and try something new, something different. That new path may have a reward at the end that was unlooked for. The tough part is that the new path you discover usually looks like a donkey path through the mountains when you first notice the turnoff.

Happy Trails!!