Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When you use something to cope
Set small rewards for staying off it and let them grow the longer you go, so the next one is always near and a slip costs something you can feel.
A vague future benefit competes badly with something available right now. A jar you add to daily, a treat at day three and a bigger one at day ten, a run of ticks on the calendar you would hate to break: the shape matters more than the size. Put the densest support into the first days and weeks, because that is usually where previous attempts came apart.
If you are using something to cope and it has become hard to stop, please speak to a doctor before changing anything.
Qur’an and Sunnah
for anyone who feared the meeting with his Lord and restrained himself from base desires (Quran 79:40), Paradise will be home (Quran 79:41). Restraint is met with something, and here you are only arranging for a little of that to arrive sooner.
وَأَمَّا مَنۡ خَافَ مَقَامَ رَبِّهِۦ وَنَهَى ٱلنَّفۡسَ عَنِ ٱلۡهَوَىٰ
for anyone who feared the meeting with his Lord and restrained himself from base desires
Qur’an 79:40read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A preliminary randomised trial of a treatment teaching smokers to sit with discomfort rather than escape it showed promise specifically for people who had lapsed early in past attempts. It was a pilot, so it is a lead rather than a settled finding. What it points at is that the early stretch is a problem in its own right and deserves its own plan.
Brown RA, Reed KM, Bloom EL, Minami H, Strong DR, Lejuez CW, Lejuez CW, Kahler CW, Zvolensky MJ, Gifford EV, Hayes SC. (2013). Development and preliminary randomized controlled trial of a distress tolerance treatment for smokers with a history of early lapse.. Nicotine & tobacco research : official journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A reward you can reach today can compete with a craving today, and a distant one cannot.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
A tablet is not safer because of where it started out. Taken by someone it was never prescribed for, it is simply an unprescribed drug.
Sometimes the drinking or the smoking is not the first problem at all. It is somebody's own treatment for an attention difficulty or an anxiety nobody has looked at yet.
Distant health warnings move almost nobody. The cost that lands is the one showing up this month: your memory, your marks, the work you know you could be doing.