Breaking your bad habit is 'in the cards' - Addiction & Subtraction

But why did they want to look cool, or to have that buzz? It takes some time to get addicted to cigarettes, so if a person continues doing it in spite of limited benefits, you have to wonder what is the motivation. One might argue it is to ease pain, even if it is just some minor, universally human pain.

Here's how it works: negative thought causes discomforting or outright painful feeling within the body.

Once negative feeling and emotion roots itself in the body it keeps invoking similar painful thoughts. Such thoughts in turn keep causing alike feelings and the vicious cycle continues feeding on itself and growing itself, like a weed.

To uproot the weeds you either need to eliminate negative feelings or eliminate negative thoughts.

Meditation, mindfulness or conscious breathing attacks this from the "thoughts" side. "Positive thinking" philosophy also tries to resolve this vicious cycle by replacing negative thoughts with positive one. This works well for very moderate cases of negativity, like temporary irritation or non-life threatening negative events.

The problem comes when people with stronger, deeper, longer living pains (such as strong anxiety, or depression) tries to resolve it this way. Stopping thoughts no longer works because thoughts in that case are just a consequences of deep emotional pain within the body.

The only solution in these case is to locate and resolve the pain directly within the body.

In other words - you cannot think or meditate your way out of depression. You have to approach it from the body feelings/body emotion side directly, bypassing any thinking.

The real solution is to dissolve original pain. If pain is no longer there - the urge for painkillers (addictions, substances, porn, drugs and actual painkillers) fades away.

Replacing one painkiller with "healthier" one or distracting the person away - doesn't work.

That's why diets are such a huge business. People think that to lose weight they need a better diet, without realizing that they use food as a painkiller to distract themselves from some deeper, inner pain. Without looking at- and taking care of the real cause - people jump from one artificial solution to another one, from one failed resolution to new one, while unresolved inner pain continues calling the shots.