I hope this is one of the last episodes you have to listen to to make you a non vaper. So if this is your first episode, welcome. My name is Andrew Cipriano and I'm a life coach. If you don't know what that is, pretty much life coaches help you start doing things you want to do to create results you want and help you stop doing things you no longer want to do by teaching you how to manage your brain.

So if you have not listened to episode two and you're brand new to the podcast, hello. I would recommend that you go back and listen to episode two, because it tells you my framework for how to quit vaping permanently and easily with two things, your thoughts and emotions. And today's going to be one of the episodes where I talk to you about pretty much the most important concept I've ever learned ever in my studies of mental health.

It's really changed my life in such an amazing way and allowed me to stop doing things I don't want to do in order to cover up my emotions. So when we vape. A lot of the times why we're doing it is because we're trying to cover up an emotion, right? Remember that we do anything in our life. Anything we do in our life or don't do is based off of an emotion that we are experiencing or one that we want to experience or one that we no longer want to experience.

So in short, every single thing we do in life, any action we take or don't take is because of an emotion. Very, very simple. And there are studies where you can look it up if you're interested in psychology. They take, uh, Lab rats and they remove the emotional part of their brain and they don't even eat.

They don't have sex. They don't do anything. They just sit there and die. So without emotion, there is no action. Your emotions drive all action and inaction. Very interesting. Very important to know now in our society, and I've talked about this before, but in our society, we like to pathologize. Or we like to diagnose things that aren't necessarily abnormal or diagnosable.

Now I want to put a quick distinction here. I worked in the psych hospital for a year and a half. I have a four year degree in applied psychology. I know my way pretty much around psychology enough to know the difference between something that's clinical and something that is nonclinical, something that is normal and abnormal.

Okay, so let's get that out of the way first because people like to criticize life coaches and I'm not diagnosing here. But what I'm telling you today on this episode is a very important concept that negative emotion is normal and it doesn't always need to be diagnosed as something has gone wrong because when you experience anxiety, fear, boredom, panic, stress, any kind of emotion like that.

It's normal. Now, I want to offer that when you hit an abnormal amount of negative emotion, pretty much what happens is you are non functioning in one or more areas of your life. For example, if you have a clinical amount of anxiety, the reason it's clinical is because you are no longer able to function in your life because of your anxiety.

But a lot of people come to me and they say, well, I vape to get rid of anxiety, or I vape to get rid of stress, or I vape because I'm bored. And that's totally valid because when you vape, Your brain is going to release dopamine. So it's going to get rid of that emotion. Kind of, it'll numb it over, but it's not actually removing the emotion.

And the biggest message I can teach you as a life coach, as someone who wants to help you with your mental health is that you do not need to always cover up or fix negative emotion. Negative emotion is just as normal as positive emotion. You need negative emotion in your life because it's good to be anxious sometimes.

It's good to be scared sometimes. Occasionally it's good to be sad. Like, if you have somebody that you love deeply and they pass away, it's okay to be sad. You don't have to cover that up. You don't have to reach for your vape every time that you're a little bit anxious. Because in those emotions, There's nothing to cure for.

Negative emotion is completely normal. And now again, I'm making a discernment between the difference of normal amount of negative emotion and a clinical amount. If you think you have a clinical amount of negative emotion like anxiety, I'd recommend that you go see a professional with a license that works in mental health, preferably a clinical psychologist or a.

Psychiatrist, which is a medical doctor that works with mental health specifically and go get diagnosed because if you are non functioning because negative emotion, then that might be abnormal and you want to get that fixed. But people come to me all the time and the main reasons that they're vaping is to deal with negative emotions.

So if you've listened to this podcast before, you will know that I've talked about how vaping actually increases your anxiety and the reason is very simple. It's very logical when you are addicted to anything. When you don't have that substance, you physically get anxious, and that's literally what an addiction is.

It's a dependency on a substance, and when you don't have it, you get anxious. So clearly, if addiction makes anxiety, it's not really going to help overall anxiety. So I think that argument falls apart very quickly. And in addition, when you are vaping to deal with anxiety, there's something going on that's wrong here.

You think that anxiety needs to be fixed or covered up. Now, this is a huge problem because as a life coach, my one job is to help you understand your mind so that you can create the best life imaginable for yourself. When you pathologize negative emotion, what happens is you're saying there's something wrong with negative emotion and I shouldn't experience it.

Now, the huge problem with that is that when you want to live a big. Fulfilling meaningful life where you're actually going after things that you care about, there's going to be negative emotion involved. And when you need to cure for negative emotion, you either have to consistently numb your emotion with all sorts of substances just to survive.

Or what happens, and this is more often than not, what happens to most people is they just don't go after big goals. If you think that there's something wrong with negative emotion and you spend your whole life avoiding it with things like nicotine. The result of that avoidance is living a life. It's very small and not creating a life that you're very satisfied with.

Now, I want to say that I know there are vapors out there who have very good lives and meaningful lives and fulfilling lives, but when you think that there's something wrong with negative emotion, it's a thought error. That's always going to lead you to having to fix negative emotion. And when you have to fix negative emotion, you would do it with things like social media, porn, alcohol, medication.

Sometimes we can abuse those vaping, nicotine, all those kinds of things. And typically those things have net negative results. Like a lot of people who can't tolerate negative emotion because they think there's something wrong with feeling it. They are overweight, which there's no problem with that. But a lot of people who are overweight don't want to be, they're addicted to things like nicotine or gambling or cigarettes or alcohol, and they don't want to be.

Or they're living in a job where they're terrified of life and they're horrified to go after what they really want. So they stay in jobs they hate and they stay in relationships they aren't happy with and they stay in towns they grew up in unhappy. Again, there's nothing wrong with those things in general, but if you are not happy, well, then it's a problem for you in your own life.

Well, how do you fix those problems? You start to have a tolerance for negative emotion. You start to see negative emotion as non clinical and something that you can totally sit with and deal with, like an adult who is powerful, who creates the life they want. I completely understand what it's like to feel anxious and then hit a vape and then make that anxiety go away and you feel better.

I completely get it. I vaped for seven years. I understand. But when I stopped seeing negative emotion as something that needed to be fixed, it was much easier to quit vaping because I no longer had a reason to vape. Yes, the physical addiction was still there, but that only lasted two weeks. It's the mental addiction that comes with covering up negative emotion is the hard part to quit.

And when you are able to see negative emotion is nonclinical and sit in it and love yourself for experiencing the full range of emotions that comes with life. You're able to create the life you want. You're able to be compassionate with yourself when you're anxious instead of beating yourself up and hurting your body because of it.

You're able to set a big goal and sit in the vibration of fear and let it run through your body and then still take action forward even though it's there. You're able to create readiness in your body. You're able to create things that you want. You're able to be a strong person who can handle any emotion because all an emotion is is a vibration in your body that doesn't.

Need to be fixed or covered up. So next time you experience a negative emotion in your body, hear my voice in your head telling you that nothing has gone wrong and that you are totally capable of sitting in that emotion without needing to cover it up or do anything that's going to have a net negative result.

And I also want to offer that sometimes negative emotions have something to tell us. There are times where we're just randomly anxious and you can just sit with that emotion, but if you have like a lot of boredom in your life that you're constantly trying to escape, or a ton of anxiety, or a lot of stress, that might be an indication that your life is kind of stressful at the moment, or that your life is very boring.

And instead of vaping, we can actually go after the reasons that we have so much boredom in our lives. Remember that when we use substances, To deal with our emotions, what we're doing effectively is using substances to tolerate a life that we're not happy with. If you remove nicotine from your life, what's left?

What if you remove alcohol? What if you remove sugary foods or fast foods? Are you stuck in a job that you don't like? Are you just bored all the time because you have no meaningful goals? Are you working towards anything? Are you not happy with your life and you're lonely and you'd rather be in a relationship with kids, but you don't have any of that?

So you vape all the time to cover it up. Negative emotion doesn't need to be fixed, but sometimes we can just eliminate negative emotion altogether by dealing with the reasons that are causing it in our life. It's okay not to feel good sometimes, but if we're always not feeling good, maybe there's a reason we should go and dig and figure out what's going on.

Remember that a lot of the times in our society, we like to pathologize symptoms as if they're the cause. So when we are constantly using substances, we want to say, oh, this person's an alcoholic or they're addicted to nicotine or whatever, and we look at that like the problem. But what if we looked one step deeper?

What's the reason they're using these substances? Maybe there's a ton of negative emotion in their life. Maybe they're just not happy with their life altogether. And again, I'm not saying every single person who vapes is not happy with their life. I did it for a long time and there was a time and a place for it, but it ended up being that it was keeping me from living a full life because I was constantly trying to avoid anxiety.

And when I learned how to process my negative emotions, Quitting vaping was easy and it allowed me to become the kind of person who owns a business today who creates value for other people, goes out and makes consistent content in a podcast and helps other people. And I'm strong enough now to tolerate my own negative emotions and a lot of the negative emotions of the people around me who need my help.

Covering up negative emotion is something you've been taught to do by your society because society makes a lot of money off of you when you're constantly using nicotine and alcohol and gambling and overeating and you are strong and you can tolerate negative emotion and when you become the kind of person to tolerate negative emotion and to actually courageously put yourself in front of it, You become the kind of person this world needs a lot more of who can stand up, go after their dreams, be a role model for the people around them and not be addicted to substances in order to tolerate a life that they're not satisfied with.

Nothing has gone wrong when you experience negative emotion. It's completely normal. Everything's exactly how it should be. You've got this. Have a fantastic day.