All too often, medical people ignore the strength of the behavioral habit in a smoking habit. The data I have seen indicate that the amount of nicotine in your blood can be maintained by relatively few cigarettes a day. If so, why to most smokers have a pack a day habit? Also, a drug addiction model does not account for the sudden urge to smoke AFTER you have "quit" for a while either. But the biggest problem with treatments that attempt to attack the behavioral habit directly is that they try to teach the smoker a "competing response" to the cues that trigger his/her smoking response.
Now consider what teaching a "competing Response" implies. The cues that trigger your smoking response, internal and external, are imbedded in your entire living environment-- home, coffee, people and friends, etc. You have associated these "cues" with smoking how many times over how long a time? Now along comes a Psychologist who tries to teach you a new response; a competing response-- to the "internal cues" that trigger your smoking response. Regardless of what this response is, it is supposed to "Compete" with your "smoking response" and replace it-- and you have about two weeks to learn it.
Now consider-- the cues in your everyday environment have been associated with smoking how many times for how many years-- and the New competing response has been associated with those cues how many times for how many weeks? Given you find yourself in a cue situation that previously triggered smoking, which response do you think is most likely to happen. Put another way, which response has a stronger association. That is why many "Behavior Modification Programs stress that you should avoid the situations (Places, friends, conditions) that were previously associated with smoking.
The flaw in the competing response based behavior modification procedures is that they rely on placing your smoking response in direct competition with a new habit (non-smoking) and it simply does not work very we--... By not working well, I mean that two years down the road, the research literature shows that, on average, 88% are smoking again.
PBYS also uses a behavior modification procedure, but the response you learn is entirely different-- i.e., not a directly competing response, but rather a response that extends the chain of responses that collectively make up your smoking response to an inordinate length while simultaneously taking away drug support. The total extended response becomes too long and cumbersome to continue, and you simple stop. Since I do not have a name for this effect, I have named it a "PITA effect.-- You will have to read another part of this web presentation to find out what the PITA effect is all about.
All too often, medical people ignore the strength of the behavioral habit in a smoking habit. The data I have seen indicate that the amount of nicotine in your blood can be maintained by relatively few cigarettes a day. If so, why to most smokers have a pack a day habit? Also, a drug addiction model does not account for the sudden urge to smoke AFTER you have "quit" for a while either. But the biggest problem with treatments that attempt to attack the behavioral habit directly is that they try to teach the smoker a "competing response" to the cues that trigger his/her smoking response.
