Face your fears.


Smoking is a conditioned behavior. Now I'm not saying that Nicotine isn't addictive (it is), but if that was the only reason people smoked things like "the patch" or Nicorette would help them quit with a much higher success rate. Where as both products show very low success rates.

Before I get more into why these are conditioned behaviors, let’s talk a little about what a conditioned behavior is. Conditioning comes with a couple of attributes: there are classical and operant conditioning, there are positive and negative conditioning, and there are continuous and variable conditioning. Let’s go in order.

Classical conditioning was first written about by Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov trained a number of dogs to associate the sound of a bell, with the coming of dinner. As a result the dogs began to salivate at the sound of the bell, a behavior normally reserved for the presence of dinner. Pavlov also noticed that if he rang the bell and didn't give them dinner, over time they would salivate less and less till they stopped (a process known as extinction). Operant conditioning is what your mom does when you act bad, or she wants you to do your homework. Personified by reward and punishment. If you want the behavior repeated, you reward, if not you punish. Now as mentioned before you can have positive or negative conditioning. Positive means the stimulus should cause the response; negative means stopping the stimulus should stop the response. These terms are unrelated to reward and punishment (i.e. you have positive punishment and negative reward). Finally, there is continual and variable conditioning. Continual means you condition every time the stimulus happens, variable means sometimes you do some times you don't.

Here is a good example: There are two parents. One who coddles her child every time it cries and one who only occasionally does (but mostly doesn't). Clearly the first is conditioning the child to cry where as the second is trying to condition the child not to. The fact of the matter is both children end up being conditioned to cry (as the one you occasionally does is exhibiting variable conditioning). This goes on for a while till the mothers learn about conditioning and both decide to cut the child off, cold turkey as it were (and actually succeed this time). So which one learns not to cry faster? If you said the one with variable conditioning, you are wrong. Yeah, strangely enough the mother that used to coddle her child EVERY TIME actually gets better results when she stops. This is because the mother who has been variable conditioning her child has taught the child that "sometimes I'll coddle sometimes I won't, but keep trying and eventually I will".

So back to cigarettes. What do you do what you smoke? If you're like me (and I've quit smoking more times than I want to count), you talk to other people, maybe you grab a beer, sometimes you do it after sex or when flirting, or maybe just after a really good meal. Notice anything? All of these are generally enjoyable behaviors. Now, not every time I do these behaviors do I have a cig, and not every time I have a cig do I do one of these things. Beginning to see where I am going with this? That's right, this is an example of variable conditioning. I have conditioning myself to believe the cigarette smoking is related to the good feeling I have with the associated behavior, and what's worse, I have conditioned myself to believe that this doesn't hold true every time but eventually will. Like the gambling junky, I believe that if I keep doing it, eventually I will feel good again.

So what's the best way to quit then? Well obviously conditioning myself by associating smoking with things that make me feel bad, but also by not smoking when I'm doing something enjoyable. The second one is allot like facing your fears, and is a product of extinction. Like Pavlov's dogs, if you face your fears and you don't die (or whatever it is that you fear doesn't happen) the conditioned response will slowly wane over time.

Of course this is assuming that your fears are conditioned responses, and that they won't happen when you face them.

taken from: Gone Fishing, a Look at Modern Culture by Jim Tzenes