When you have an addiction you keep your friends down as well: true friends stick by your side, anything you can’t do because of smoking they won’t be doing neither, more than one life is affected when friends accept you for who you are. If they can do that, can’t you accept that you are dragging them around every time you take a drag?
Do you realize that your smoking habit loads you with more responsibilities than a non-smoking individual? Ask yourself this question. Do I want to be responsible for the outcome of my life as well as theirs? Responsibility, is multiplied when you are a smoker, people, generally speaking, tend to function in pairs. We call these pairs “best friends.” There is a forsaken code of conduct that we do whatever our friends are doing, scientifically speaking, we call this influence—and our friends have a lot of it, or shall I say YOU THE SMOKER have a cargo of influence that you’d never think of. Consider this:
My experience: Whenever my friend takes a breathing break at the gym, I don’t want to leave them lonely so I too take breaks even though I am fully charged…
My experience: Whenever I am upset at my computer I call it “stupid, and I slam it” ( bad internet connection). When my wife is writing in her notebook and she gets upset, as if she inherited my traits, she does the exact same thing “insult, then slam” –bad habits due to her being my friend and associating my habits with her own life.
Smokers are under the belief that they need cigarettes. Well, most people are vocal about it, sharing this with none other than their best friends. What we do as smokers is we demonstrate to anyone around us what it is to ‘need’ something. Some of our best friends are family members, or our own children. So what we do is we model the obsession as a stress reliever, we gossip about the fix it presents for the moment. There’s a saying, when you are doing something bad, do it away from children. Because children will perceive this, and feel accustomed to acting the same way towards it or associate it with other things they may encounter—just like our friends. Examples would be: our habits rubbing off on them, and them showing the same ‘need’ for alcohol, cigarettes, or something worse.
*Image courtesy Flickr creative commons.
