Don’t Put It Off

Most people - in fact, I should say all of us - have a habit of putting off things for another day. This habit is called procrastination and it’s the guardian angel of smoking. As long as we have this habit of procrastination, we are never going to stop.

The funny thing about procrastination is that we only tend to postpone unpleasant tasks. The good things in life we try to do as early as possible and the things that involve hard word, giving up comforts, or a little bit of pain, we try to put off till the last possible date.

The dangerous thing over here is that in the case of most smokers there no real last possible date. Many people become serious about quitting after a first heart attack or a stroke. Don’t tell me that you too are waiting for a real warning like that. If we are waiting for a doctor’s warning, then we can’t be too far from falling terminally ill. There is absolutely no sense in putting it off.

There is a law in Physics that was put forward by Sir Isaac Newton. It states that a body continues to be in a state of rest or of uniform motion until an external force is applied. This same rule is true in the case of smoking as well. Smoking is not a habit that can die a natural death all of a sudden. It is something that has to be worked on. It is something that involves a lot of restraint and control. The only cases in which I have seen a smoker stop at one go is when the doctor shook his head and said “I’m sorry but you have only a few months left to live.”

Come on get a grip on your self. You are much stronger than you think. So why do you have to postpone it any further. There is no better day than today. It is not something that you have to wait till New Year to do as a part of your New Year resolutions. Do it today itself and you can increase your chances of succeeding and …gulp…surviving.

Just think about it for a minute. Did you really want to become a smoker? Was that really your ambition as a child, to grow up into a smoker? Chances are that you became a smoker as a result of habit. Look at yourself. You have a respectable job and you have people who you care about and who care about you.

If one of your friends were to approach you with a problem and ask you to think of the most sensible decision wouldn’t you do it for them? Now if you would do that for a friend, shouldn’t you be able to do it for you as well? If you are capable of taking sensible decisions for others don’t you owe it to yourself to take sensible decisions as far as your health is concerned? Of course you do, but then what is stopping you?