07 Small rewards can be habit-changing!

There is an added value to the suggestion of giving yourself small rewards intermittently, apart from taking you out of your blue moods. It is actually an effective way of changing bad habits and establishing better ones in their place. I am especially thinking of breaking an addiction like smoking, at least it may work for some people (it did, for me!). And its less painful than many other methods people have tried!

It works like this. Every cigarette is obviously costing you a tidy bit of money, especially over the course of the day. Firstly, stop buying or carrying full packs… just buy one at a time to cut down the frequency, though it may seem a bit contrived and bothersome at first (and it gets you some walking exercise, assuming of course that you don’t drive to the corner shop!). Then, for every cigarette less that you smoke (because you don’t have a pack or half a pack with you, you can’t be bothered to walk to the shop, or you consciously restrain yourself), give yourself a bonus…mentally or physically, by putting the change into a jar. You’d be surprised at how the savings mount up.

Sit down and calculate how much you’re really spending on your cigarettes. As you cut back on your smoking, once a week go out and get something with the cash you’ve saved. For me it was LPs or books…one a week. For you it may be something else. Over time, hopefully you’ll be less obsessed with your smokes (don’t tell anyone, but there have been times in a misspent youth that we’ve actually crawled around picking up butts off the roadside!), and will have a glow of anticipation for your next book or whatever (till these real things last and are not replaced by digital substitutes!).

There is another sure way of quitting smoking, which I have successfully used twice: a complete change of scene. For me this was my stints abroad. The first time, I’d be damned before I shelled out a couple of pounds for a few fags (equally for a cup of coffee) when I was only getting ten pounds a day as student allowance (and it probably cost one-twentieth back home). Then I came back, and my friends forced me to start smoking all over again. The second time, I stopped smoking again on the flight out, and this time, when I came back after three years, I told my friends to go jump in the lake. It’s been some twenty years now, and I haven’t even touched a cigarette… but then, I do have an awful lot of music and books!