Some years ago I watched a T.V. show about quitting smoking. The program was pretty bad, uninteresting and I couldn't watch more than ten minutes of that program without a pause of more that 20 minutes of advertisement. The program was boring but I watched it entirely, from the beginning to the end. I had decided to quit smoking the next day, even if the program was bad and boring. That night I smoked my last cigarette. But even having been a fully-charged of advertisement, boring T.V. Show, I watched something positive: there were exposed five cases of heavy smokers. I saw myself reflected on them. They looked nice persons but they were in some way pathetic, just like me. They were people who had decided to sacrifice some marvelous things of the live to “enjoy” their cigarettes. For some of them the cigarettes were the most important thing in their lives.

A young woman with children preferred to buy tobacco to buying milk for them. One of her children started to have breathing problems because of the smoke but her mother couldn't stop even knowing that the tobacco was destroying her and her children physically and psychologically.

A mid-aged man had an only hobby, an only passion in his life: to smoke cigarettes. He just woke up in the morning and smoked his first cigarette/s. Breakfast and on way to the work. Seven hours working without smoking except for one cigarette at the working pause, it's forbidden in the company he works for. Work time finished. Going back home. He cannot smoke at home because his wife and his children asked him not to do it. He smokes in the garage. He spends hours smoking and doing some things to have his mind occupied. Time to sleep. He sleeps and breaths at night with an oxygen mask because he knows that if he don't sleep this way, he can die. He is risking his life for a stupid hobby that does not provide him any real satisfaction. His wife does not want to have relations with him. She says that he sucks for her, his smell, his cough.

Obviously these are some extreme cases but they were enough for me to feel a bit identified with them. I felt that I was, while not in their ways, also pathetic, like them. I realized that I really didn't enjoy the tobacco, as they also didn't. I felt slave and I felt stronger. I felt that I could defeat the tobacco addition.

Step 4: Nicotine addiction: the real reason why we do smoke