So, you want to quit smoking, or at least you tell your friends that you do. But, have you told yourself?

They say that smoking is a physical addiction and that makes it impossible to quit. Often what happens, physically, in the human body is controllable with the mind.

They say you can't sneeze without closing your eyes because it is a human reflex. But you can train your eyes to stay open during a sneeze and you can train your mind to tell your body that it doesn't want that high derived from that puff of cigarette smoke.

Quitting is not an overnight thing, it is a goal that you must work towards over a long period of time. After all you aren't thinking about quitting for a week but for the rest of your life.

Remember the ads that made smoking look so glamorous. Start by reconditioning your mind to think the opposite. Tell yourself your friends, and you, don't look good with that white tube sticking out of your mouth or standing between your fingers.

Now carry it a little further, Tell yourself how silly people look with that stupid white tube sticking out of what would otherwise be a nice face.

Now think up your own reasons why you want to quit: so that you will quit spilling ashtrays on the carpet; so you will quit burning your fingers when the forgotten cigarette burns down to your pinkies; so you don't turn, with a cigarette in your mouth and burn a hole in the curtains when you look out the window.

Do you see where I am going with this? You condition yourself to want to quit.

Many people use crutches such as `The Patch' and `Gum'. And for some they work, but only because they wanted them to work. They had their own reasons for quitting. If they didn't have they wouldn't have tried to quit in the first place. But if their reasons weren't sufficient they only tried.

To succeed, you must have the desire to succeed. And you can develop this desire.

Secondly you must realize that it is not an overnight thing and if you go for two days without smoking and then light up it is not the end of the line. We are all human and all trials have their tribulations. If you don't get 100% on the exam you rewrite.

You may smoke one today and a pack next week but each time between cigarettes will become longer and longer until you can't remember when you had the last one. You just vaguely remember that at one point you tried to quit and finally made it.

Something that worked for me was telling myself that I had quit. I never said I was going to quit, I said I had quit. When I would reach for a cigarette, I would ask myself, "Why do you want that?" And I would answer myself, "I don't want that, I quit".

And I did, over twenty years ago. Still sometimes I find myself reaching for a cigarette and thinking how pleasant it would be but then I remind myself of what an ugly, filthy, habit it is.

After you have quit for awhile you begin to watch others and you see what a filthy habit it is: butts left everywhere; ashtrays dumped out of car windows; cigarette burns in carpets. And how dangerous it is: still burning cigarettes tossed underneath cars that they might roll under a gas tank; burning butts tossed out of car windows that they might roll into the grass and start a fire. How many times have I seen smoke issuing from a trash container because some careless smoker tossed a match or butt without thinking.

If you stop and notice them now they are all added incentives to quit smoking.

Notice them, but don't mention them. The best way to lose friends is to try to convert smokers. You can extol the virtues of having quit but never try to explain to a smoker the vices of his habit. This is a bad habit of reformed persons, trying to reform others. Restrain yourself.

Another habit to avoid is picking up a new habit. Many people that quit smoking replace the cigarettes with something else: gum; toothpicks; food; or sunflower seeds. These are not necessarily bad habits, except the extra food can put on a lot of extra weight, but the new habit can eventually switch back to the original habit. This makes quitting even harder.

And never count the days since you had your last cigarette. You are only counting the days until you start again. You can tell your friends, "I quit for seventy-two days last year".

Wouldn't it be better to say, "I quit some twenty years ago". And you can, with just a little determination and a bit of will power, if you really want to.