Why the latest World No Tobacco Day campaign won’t work

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31st May is World No Tobacco Day, the one day of the year when the World Health Organisation advises smokers to quit smoking.
The focus of this year’s campaign is ‘tobacco and lung health’ but please forgive my cynicism, does anyone seriously believe that smokers don’t already know this stuff? Will targeting a different organ of the body (last year’s focus was heart disease) make them take more notice?
I am not knocking the WHO and the commendable job they do. I’m merely pointing out that smokers are fully away of the risks and it doesn’t help them to stop. Yes of course it makes them want to stop – but it doesn’t help them or show them how to stop. In fact, using scare tactics has the opposite effect. If you tell a smoker it’s killing them, the first thing they do is light up! Ask around and see what response you get.
Scare tactics create anxiety and smokers smoke when they’re anxious.
Another reason this approach doesn’t work is that it focuses on the physical and completely overlooks the mental; the mental belief that the smoker is ‘giving something up’ and whilst this belief is in place a smoker will always find it more difficult to quit.

You can stick a patch on your arm but it won’t remove your desire to want to smoke.
You can pop a tablet into your mouth but it won’t take away the sense of loss.
You can switch to vapes or e-cigarettes but you’ll always continue to believe that you’ve made a sacrifice plus the continued consumption of nicotine maintains the desire to take in more and so the cycle continues.

If nicotine addiction was purely physical, smokers would wake up in the night in pain of withdrawal. If it was purely physical, they wouldn’t be able to endure long flights without a huge amount of suffering and if it was physical, ex-smokers wouldn’t continue to crave cigarettes long after the nicotine has left the body.
Nicotine addiction is 1% physical and 99% mental and a mental problem needs a mental solution to fix it.
Allen Carr’s Easyway will get cigarettes out of your mouth, and your head, for good.

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