Chapter Five: Your Pros & Cons

         In this chapter, were going to evaluate the benefits and the detriments of your addictive behavior. You need to know exactly what your substance is doing to your life that is causing you to want to quit. You also need to know how few the benefits actually are. You might think that you already know this, but putting it down on paper has real power, and seeing the pros and cons side-by-side can have a major impact. So grab a piece of paper and a pen, or open up your smart phone or tablet and begin making a list.

The Pros 

          So, in this exercise you are going to sit down for about 15 minutes and carefully think about exactly what benefit your substance offers you. If you write that there are no benefits then you have failed. If there were no benefits, you wouldn’t keep doing it and so you need to be honest with yourself and actually write down the things that the substance does for you. 

           For example, a smoker can truthfully right now that smoking relieves their stress. Of course, that stress is usually caused by the withdrawal from nicotine in the first place, but smoking does lower the stress levels. Think carefully and write down as many truthful benefits as you can.

The Cons 

          Now you are going to sit down and spend about the same amount of time coming up with the negative things that your addiction is bringing you. This will probably be a bigger list than your pros list by a whole lot. Of course, that’s the goal of this exercise.

         But don’t put down things that aren’t actually true because it just tells your subconscious mind that you’re not taking it seriously and you’re not planning on actually quitting when you come to your quit date and that it’s perfectly acceptable to start using again whenever you choose. Write down all of the negative things that you can think of and then look at the two lists side-by-side.

Put Them up Somewhere 

          Now, print them out if you are able to, or write them on a piece of paper if you can’t and post them somewhere that you’re going to see them every single day. You need to remind yourself constantly that there almost no benefits to using your particular substance of choice and that there are lots and lots of good things about quitting.

          On hard days, it is going to be worth having something on your wall that constantly reminds you of why you are quitting in the first place. Don’t take these lists down until you get to the point where you’re not thinking about your addiction every day.