Chenolitude

Why can’t smokers simply quit smoking? Granting they do, why do smokers relapse? Joel Spitzer’s Never Take Another Puff is an interesting guide towards understanding smoking, its impact to smokers and the society at large. Moreover, it serves as handbook on how to quit smoking and on how to stay quit.

Fact it is that smoking isn’t only a bad habit. It is an addiction, which requires a smoker to sustain nicotine level into the body every 30 minutes (or so) to avoid the diminishing effects of this drug. (Drug? Yes it is. Nicotine is no different from heroin or cocaine.) In so doing, smokers are aware that smoking isn’t really healthy. However, smokers cannot stop because they lack the essential information how to do so. Thus, making government campaigns to Never Take Another Puff failure at their every inception. The smoker then reaches for his cigarette first thing during every assault to his smoking.

Why not? Smokers believe that cigarettes relieve stress, fuel concentration, boost confidence, and push boredom away to enumerate a few. Furthermore, smokers associate smoking to their one true friend, a best friend, who stays for better or for worse. With such mind-setting, each smoker is faced with fear to carry on a life sans cigarettes. Also, he thinks that he leaves something valuable behind. However, smokers would learn later that these are lies.

One of the many perks of being smoke-free is calmness not only of the spirit but more specifically of the heart. Did you know that smoking pumps up the heart 20 times faster, thus pushing the heart to overwork its regular capacity? Yes, I could tell so much about Never Take Another Puff. However, this book has wisdom that only Spitzer’s magic could impart. Coupled with Allen Carr’s The Easyway to Stop Smoking and John Hipolito’s Freedom from Nicotine – The Journey Home, quitting smoking and staying quit have never been more enlightening and pleasurable.

For one, gone are the days when smoking is the cool, intellectual-looking, and sexy in-thing. Not only that it stinks. The authors espouse the view how smoking has become dreadful, pitiful, and filthy. Moreover, it signifies weakness of character for failure to take command of oneself. Smoking further denotes an anti-social behaviour. These days, the restriction on smoking specifically in public places stem from the truism that smoking ranks first among the causes of premature deaths with all other causes combined. Likewise, the restraint is in consonance with everyone’s right to clean air, harmony in nature, and ecological balance.

Reading Never Take Another Puff (with the other two books) brings the reader back to the classics, such as The Time Machine by H. G. Wells and The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. They ratiocinate that a person lives only once. While he has freedom, it isn’t synonymous to unfreedoms (like smoking). A person’s existence carries with it living a quality life worth the short while.

NTAP!