Cigarette smoking is a personal choice. However, if you are deciding to stop smoking, you may already realize that quitting needs more than willpower or scaring yourself with statistics of why smoking is bad.

Usual smoking termination systems often don’t work in the long term because they do not address the real reasons that people smoke. Listed below are five often unidentified reasons that people smoke. These reasons might surprise you.

Before you engage in your stop smoking process, take some time and identify the important underlying drives of why you choose to smoke. By understanding those real reasons, you can generate a personalized stop smoking plan that incorporates new strategies of coping and dealing with life.

1. Smoking Is a Lifestyle Coping Tool

For many people, smoking is a reliable lifestyle coping tool. Although every person’s specific reasons to smoke are unique, they all share a common theme. Smoking is used as a way to suppress uncomfortable feelings, and smoking is used to alleviate stress, calm nerves, and relax. No wonder that when you are deprived of smoking, your mind and body are unsettled for a little while.

Below is a list of some positive intentions often associated with smoking. Knowing why you smoke is one of the first steps towards quitting. Check any and all that apply to you.

• Smoking is pleasant and relaxing
• Acceptance – being part of a group
• As a way to socialize
• Provides support when things go wrong
• Smoking is stimulating
• A way to look confident and in control
• Keeps weight down
• Rebellion – defining self as different or unique from a group
• Something to do with your mouth and hands
• Shutting out stimuli from the outside world
• Shutting out emotions from the inside world
• Something to do just for you and nobody else
• A way to shift gears or changes states
• A reminder to breathe
• An way to feel confident
• A way to shut off distressing feelings
• A way to deal with stress or anxiety
• A way to get attention
• Marking the beginning or the end of something
• Coping with anger, stress, anxiety, tiredness, or sadness

2. Smoking Tranquilizer

The habit of cigarette smoking is often used to tranquilize emotional issues like anxiety, stress, or low self-esteem. In addition, smoking provides comfort to people with conditions of chronic pain and depression. Smokers with emotional stress or chronic pain often turn to smoking as an attempt to treat their pain. For instance, they may use it to reduce anxiety, provide a sense of calmness and energy, and elevate their mood.

The mental association between smoking and pain relief can make quitting quite difficult, as can the increased short-term discomfort that quitting smoking adds to a person already suffering with chronic pain, depression, or emotional distress. What are effective ways for people with chronic pain – whether physical or emotional – to make the decision to quit smoking? First, evidence shows that in people who suffer chronic pain, smokers have more pain than nonsmokers do. Also, accept that smoking cessation may indeed make you feel worse in the short run, but may be key to regaining enough vitality to live fully with pain.

3. The Feel Good Syndrome

Smoking is a way to avoid feeling unpleasant emotions such as sadness, grief, and anxiety. It can hide apprehensions, fears, and pain. This is accomplished partly through the chemical effects of nicotine on the brain.

When smoking, the release of brain chemicals makes smokers feel like they are coping and dealing with life and stressful emotional situations. Nicotine brings up a level of good feelings. Cigarette smokers are aware when nicotine levels and good feelings begin to decrease, and light up quickly enough to stay in their personal comfort zone. However, they may not realize that avoiding their feelings is not the same as taking positive steps to create a life of greater potential and meaning.

Perhaps these emotional responses are due not to withdrawal, but due to an increased awareness of unresolved emotions. If smoking dulls emotions, logically quitting smoking allows awareness of those emotions to bubble up to the surface. If emotional issues aren’t resolved, a smoker may feel overwhelmed and eventually turn back to cigarettes to deal with the uncomfortable feelings.

4. Smoking Makes You Feel Calm and Alive

Smokers often say that lighting up a cigarette can calm their nerves, satisfy their cravings, and help them feel energized. Indeed, nicotine in tobacco joins on to receptors in your brain that release “feel good” chemicals that can make you feel calm and energized all at once. Smoking acts as a drug, inducing a feeling of well-being with each puff. But, it’s a phony sense of well-being that never produces a permanent satisfying or fulfilling result. Smoking lures you into believing that you can escape some underlying truth or reality. However, smoking doesn’t allow you to actually transform your day-to-day life and live connected to your deeper hopes and dreams.

Instead, when you smoke, the carbon monoxide in the smoke bonds to your red blood cells, taking up the spaces where oxygen needs to bond. This makes you less able to take in the deep, oxygen-filled breath needed to bring you life, to active new energy, to allow health and healing, and bring creative insight into your problems and issues.

5. You Are In The Midst Of Transition

If you previously quit smoking, and then resumed the habit once again, consider the idea that perhaps you are in the midst of some “growing pains.” Perhaps you were feeling dissatisfied with some aspect of your life and contemplating making change. However, developing spiritually, emotionally, and physically brings with it the experience of discomfort. Old beliefs rise up, creating sensations of hurt, pain, sadness, anxiety, and uneasiness. You were feeling dissatisfied, restless, ready to change, but then felt the fear that change often ignites.

Smoking provides an escape from those uncomfortable feelings. However, smoking also brings an abrupt halt to personal transformation and the evolution of self. Although painful, these feelings are necessary in your personal development. Learning to accept feelings in a new way can help lead you out of disempowering or limiting beliefs, and into a life filled with greater happiness, satisfaction, contentment, or purpose. When you stop smoking and start breathing – conscious, deep, smoke-free, oxygen-filled breaths – your evolution will start up once again.

Why Do You Smoke?

If you smoke, then you do so because the act of smoking is personally meaningful to you. Therefore, if you are considering quitting, take some time and explore the reasons underlying your decision to smoke. Become interested, observe yourself, and get curious. Allow yourself an opportunity to turn into a smoking journalist, ready to uncover an intriguing mystery. Before lighting up your next cigarette, ask yourself:

a. What would I do with the energy that is freed up from smoking cessation?

b. How will smoking help or change the situation?

c. What situations make me smoke the most?

d. What emotions or feelings am I trying to avoid or deny?

e. If I didn’t smoke right now, what would I feel? How would I handle that feeling?

f. What positive functions do I believe smoking provides me?

The most important factor in stopping smoking is a genuine desire to stop smoking. You were not a born smoker; it’s something you learned to do. Learning new ways of coping with stress is possible, as is learning new ways to relax and raise confidence levels. Use the reasons presented above as clues to uncover the underlying reasons why you smoke. Then, in addition to making a firm decision to stop smoking, also make a compact plan to address your underlying needs. You’re not only kicking the habit, you’re also creating a new balance with your body, mind, and self!

Research has proven that employee satisfaction is directly associated to customer satisfaction, and, of course, customer satisfaction is directly associated to return on investment.

Human resources cannot be a function for hiring, firing and appraisals. They are the gatekeepers for employees and have to be concerned with the overall development of the individual.

HR managers need to work with marketing research and learn techniques to find employee needs, similar to the way marketers find customer needs. Then they should cluster employees with similar needs into groups and develop specific employee engagement programmes for each group. They should then market the programmes to employees through the marketing department.

Finally, HR should evaluate the results of these initiatives by thoroughly measuring employee satisfaction, looking at how it impacts productivity and return on investment.

Because employees should like the company more than customers do. That’s because the employee’s livelihood depends on the company. Customers always have a choice. How many customer satisfaction surveys do companies do in a year? And importantly, do they undertake the same number of employee satisfaction surveys?

Companies can definitely make good profits. But profits are better if they do it through employee marketing.

As economies get stronger and people have more choices, loyalty to companies is going to go down the tube. On the other hand, customers are going to demand more and more sophisticated services. That’s because with the kind of branding we see today, consumer expectations need to be matched with what the communication promises.

As a result, employee training becomes more expensive. Hence when you cannot retain employees, it’s a real drain of resources on the company. A new employee needs to be exactly the same, if not better, than the person before. If you do not take care of them, the company stands to lose.

By the time employees are 30-32 years old, they have changed jobs six-seven times. The new generation is not about “am I successful?” They are interested in “do I like it?”

It’s similar to marketing research. We go to customers and find their needs and identify barriers. Then we cluster customers according to the lowest price, best services and so on.

Similarly, when you segment your employee base you can develop programmes for each group and brand and deliver it differently. Some employees have weight-related problems, others have diabetes. Some have very good savings but don’t know how to invest. Others don’t know how to save.

Men think differently than women in terms of savings. For example, women don’t want to depend on children when they grow old and are too concerned about future health problems. Men feel they will never stop working. Sixty per cent of men covered in research had retired without planning for retirement.

Women are anxious about retirement and men are more emotional about retirement. When women are sad, they take more risks than men. When men are sad, they discount it and try to distract themselves from sadness. Since they manage emotions differently, you need completely different employee programmes.

Across the world, employees are all the same. Companies are going to realise that employees do not have just financial needs. They have spiritual, health and financial needs. They have long-term needs. People always want to be valued and respected for what they like to do.

In India, there’s always been this sense of the company being a family and that companies will take care of their family members. As companies grow rapidly, they will lose that family connection. The culture that the US and European companies are artificially trying to develop is naturally present in Indian companies.

But as they are growing, Indian companies have no option but to start focusing on customized programmes for employees. They should then test it by finding out what employees think about the programme and measure effectiveness like “did the programme change employee behaviour?” and so on. Over a 1-2 year timeframe companies should analyse if there was any change in employee attitude, teamwork and productivity. The data will make companies more interested in increasing investments on employee programmes.

Globally, among the Fortune 500 companies, we are analysing what employee programmes these companies run and co-relate that with their rankings. We want companies to realise that with better programmes they have better rankings.

Then companies can afford to pay lesser salaries because they have the reputation of being a big company to work for. So employees feel that in the long-term they are better off in this company even if they have to take a hit in the short term.