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You can create a tremendous amount of anxiety when you decide to learn how to quit smoking because you are sure you will never make it through your “smoking” events without smoking. Since you can’t imagine it, having never done it, the anxiety keeps building up. If you don’t overcome your anxiety, the next step is for you to smoke because you are sure that you will end up doing that at some point anyway.

But it’s not the situation that causes you to smoke - it’s your anxiety about the future situation. It’s your fear of failure that leads you to fail. I’m not going to suggest that you should never think about the future, because that’s impossible. It would be ridiculous to pretend that you will never think at all about certain situations, and whether or not you’ll smoke. But if you start to worry and get anxious about them, simply remind yourself that you can only choose whether or not you smoke in present time. You have no way of knowing how you will handle a situation in the future. You can never know whether or not you will smoke at the party on Saturday night until you are there, making your choices.

The key to success when quitting smoking is being willing to not know for sure. Of course, it would be comforting to have a guarantee that you won’t fail, but the fact is, there is always a risk, and that’s just the way life is. You might smoke again and you might not. All you can do is choose for now not to smoke and hope you continue to do that.

By all means anticipate a strong desire to smoke when you are in a particular situation: just remember that you can only manage that desire at the time you are experiencing it.

You can only smoke in the present time. And you can only choose not to smoke in the present time. Accept that you are not able to predict which choice you’ll make in the future. When you deal with not smoking in the here and now, you put yourself in a position of control.