Hello and welcome back to the Quit Vaping Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Andrew Cipriano. And today we're going to talk about a concept that actually kind of applies to anything in life, but particularly vaping. Uh, if you guys haven't listened to episode two before and you're brand new, welcome to the podcast.

Um, I'd recommend you go and listen to that episode because that is kind of the foundational episode that I talk. About like how I help you with life coaching and how I help you quit vaping by understanding your thoughts and your emotions. But today's episode is going to be a more wide reaching episode.

So you can apply this to vaping or overeating or what kind of job you have or like literally anything. It's one of the most foundational things that we teach as life coaches. And it's going to be a topic that just really helps you in all of. The areas of your life, uh, obviously vaping included. So today we're talking about beliefs that serve, and that might sound like a strange concept to you.

So let me explain it a little bit. So just some backstory, you are allowed to believe whatever you want. That might sound crazy. I get it. Like, listen, I used to work in a psychiatric hospital where there would be patients there that were experiencing psychosis. And what that is is like a disconnect from reality.

They'd be believing things that weren't true. And. I was told never to like help people believe in delusions. And as a life coach, I give the opposite advice. It's like, believe whatever you want that serves you. As long as it's not coming from evil, malicious intent, or it's going to hurt you, then believe it.

And when it comes to vaping, like a large part of the reason why I don't vape anymore and have absolutely no desire is because I've learned to question my beliefs. And I've just replaced the beliefs that I was taught, the ones that weren't serving me, the ones that were making me addicted to substances.

I just replaced those beliefs with new ones that I chose deliberately. And concretely and consciously, and that has made all the difference in my life. So there are so many times like in this podcast, and you know, we're on episode 22, I'm pretty much teaching the same thing every episode, just in a different way.

And I'm hoping that it'll click with people in different ways, uh, on different episodes. But pretty much what I'm always talking about is you can just choose to believe whatever you want about vaping or anything in life. But today we'll talk about vaping. So like when it comes to vaping. You just question everything.

Like, what do you believe about nicotine? When I was growing up, before I had the capacity to actually question my beliefs when I was younger, right? So, your brain doesn't really fully develop until you're about 25, but somewhere around like adolescence, you can start to question what you believe about the world.

And this is called metacognition. And it's just metacognition because you're actually watching yourself think, and you can watch your own brain work. It's like the coolest thing ever. They can do that as humans. So when I became a teenager, um, I started questioning the things that I believed about life and I had never actually thought about questioning the things I was taught about vaping until I became a life coach.

So. As I was growing up as a kid and in my teenage years, I was taught all sorts of things about nicotine that I just assumed were factual. So one of the biggest things I help people do, especially my clients, is like, let's figure out what you believe about the world. And let's actually separate out the facts of life, like the real hard facts that we can prove.

Uh, like we always say, prove in a court of law, we separate those out from the stories you're telling. One of the stories that I. What's taught growing up about nicotine is that it helps with stress. And my dad still tells the story. So I talk about my dad a lot in this podcast because he has been smoking cigarettes hardcore for about 40 years now.

And I say hardcore cause he smokes about two packs a day and he recently quit cause he had to get surgery. And now he started up again because he actually just used willpower, which if you guys know me, I always recommend not using willpower to quit. I recommend you get to the root issue. And I, I pretty much use that.

Rationing for anything, right? You always want to get to the root issue. You don't want to try to treat the symptoms. So I see vaping as a symptom of your beliefs and your emotions, how you're processing emotions and what you believe about the world. And my dad still believes that cigarettes help with stress.

He's always believed that that was a very clear message. I was passed down from him growing up. Whenever you're stressed, whenever any kind of negative emotion appears in your life, you need a cigarette to help with that stress. And I wasn't actually. Cognizant of that belief for a very long time that that was optional.

I thought it was a fact. I just thought it was a fact of life that cigarettes help with negative emotions. And it wasn't until I was in my life coaching courses that I learned about something called numbing or buffering. And I've talked about numbing in a different episode, but pretty much numbing is just when you use external things to change how you feel internally.

So for example, you don't feel very good because there's stress or there's anxiety or some negative emotion. So you use. Something like cigarettes or alcohol or food to literally cover up the emotion. And when you start to learn about numbing emotions, you'll actually understand that you're not actually removing the emotion.

That's not what numbing is. So when you smoke a cigarette, it's not actually removing the anxiety. What it's doing is like throwing a blanket over it. So imagine there's like a big smelly pile of dog poop in the room and instead of cleaning it up, you just throw a blanket on top of it. And then obviously it's still going to smell, right?

It's still going to be there. Eventually, someone's going to pull the blanket off and it's going to have like mold all over it. It's going to have gotten worse. And that's kind of how you can picture your emotions, right? As you learn to use external things to deal with your emotions, you actually have to keep using more and more external things to deal with emotions.

This is how people, like my dad, right? This is how my dad is now smoking 40 cigarettes a day because he's never learned how to process emotions and the cigarettes have gotten weaker and weaker for him over time as his body's gotten used to them. Well, the same thing happens with vaping, right? It's the exact same addiction.

Nicotine is nicotine. So when it comes to your life, one of the biggest foundational skills that I will ever teach anybody that comes into my practice is like, let's look at everything we believe about life and let's start to learn the skill. It is a skill of identifying what we believe and how it's serving us in our life.

Let's look at how it's affecting us. So when I believe that cigarettes were helping with stress. Whenever I was stressed, I looked to nicotine as something desirable to help me with stress. So I decided to question that belief and I went down this rabbit hole and I really sat with myself one day and I'm like, does, does nicotine really help me feel less stressed?

And as I thought about it, you know, like I had never critically think about this one thought. Thought think, I don't think that's a fricking word. I had never critically thought about nicotine and its use for emotions because I just believe something I was taught without questioning it. One of the biggest gifts you can ever give yourself is to just question everything you believe, like just sit down one day, write down all your beliefs, everything that you possibly believe about life, and then question it rationally and actually bring focus to it.

So many of us have unconscious things that we believe. or conscious things that we believe that we've just never even questioned for validity if they're helping us. So I did this one day with emotions and cigarettes and I found in nicotine in general, I found that I don't believe that anxiety is actually being helped with the nicotine addiction.

I think that overall I'm more. Anxious when I'm addicted and I really started to pay attention to my life. I'm like, let's see if this is true or not. If it's true that nicotine helps me with stress and anxiety, then I'll keep allowing myself to smoke or vape or whatever. But I want to first just question that and look for evidence in my life.

So I spent about two weeks looking at my patterns with vaping. Not super hard. I wasn't like really being religious about it, but I was just looking at like, I was curious, you know, I became very curious about my belief system. So I found that. Um, the entire process that went around nicotine in my life was very anxiety provoking.

Um, I was very anxious, thinking about it all the time, especially when I couldn't have it when I was at work, or wasn't, when I wasn't supposed to be using it, like I was inside a school building or something. I found that the whole entire process, um, circling buying a vape was that of guilt and shame. And I just realized, you know, from building awareness in my life, I was able to see that I don't think vaping is actually helping me with my negative emotions.

I actually think that there's a lot of negative emotion being created by the addiction. And I, I believe that today now, and actually one of, one of the reasons that I don't even have a desire to go back to nicotine is because I sincerely believe that with, uh, any kind of addiction in my life, my life will have naturally more negative emotion in it.

And I don't want that. Um, I want my life to have. You know, the normal amount of negative emotion that comes with life. I don't want to add on any unnecessary stress and anxiety, uh, with addiction. So that's one of the beliefs that I changed just by critically thinking about it and asking myself good questions.

And really what I was doing, I didn't know at the time I was coaching myself, right? I was coaching myself through nicotine addiction. Um, I was just questioning what I. believed, excuse me, in a very, very curious way with a lot of compassion for myself without judgment. Um, because remember that if you judge yourself, you're going to cut yourself off from learning.

The moment that we bring judgment into a conversation with ourself or somebody else, they're going to get defensive ourselves included because we are being judged, right? So the best way to help somebody, whether it's you or someone in your life, even if you don't agree with their lifestyle, isn't to judge them.

It's to, you know, approach them and yourself with complete curiosity. You know, that's what I had to do. I'm like, is it really true that it's helping with anxiety? Let's look at it from a completely neutral, you know, ground without judgment or anything like that. And whatever comes up, comes up. And I won't criticize myself for having those emotions or those experiences.

And now today I am in the practice as a coach. You know, one of my main jobs is to consistently practice believing things that serve me. It's to deliberately choose what I want to believe about the life that I want and then create it by my beliefs. So like I'll do this today, even in my coaching practice, I say, you know, if I had.

100, 000 business. What would I have to believe about life coaching about my clients in order to produce those results? And then I can find beliefs, right? It's like, well, I'd have to believe that I'm an amazing coach. Let's start practicing that belief. I'd have to believe that I'm ready to make a hundred thousand dollars.

I'd have to believe that I am ready to accept 20 clients full time in my business. I'd have to believe that I'm going to add so much value to their life. I'd have to believe that. If anything comes up that I don't know how to do, I'm going to figure out how to do it. So like these are all beliefs that I've been practicing.

And because I'm practicing these beliefs, I'm creating the results in my life that somebody who has 100, 000 business would believe and create. It's pretty cool. So if you want to be someone who doesn't vape, you want to find out what someone who doesn't vape and who doesn't even desire nicotine would believe.

And I can tell you right now, some of mine, because I have no desire left. Um, I believe that, uh, nicotine doesn't actually help with negative emotions. I think that nicotine actually increases negative emotions overall in your life. I believe that addiction, uh, stops you from becoming the person that you are meant to become, like the strongest, best version of yourself.

I think that addiction, by its very nature, makes you weak because it makes you rely on something else outside of yourself. I believe that nicotine actually prevents you from being your best physically as well. And I know this because I used to have that, like, sharp pain when I breathed in. I don't know if this is accurate or not, but my brother told me once that somebody said, When you breathe in and it's a sharp pain when you're vaping a lot, it's because your diaphragm is inflamed and it catches on your ribcage.

I have no idea if that's right, but it felt like that, so I just believed it. Um, but I don't, I don't think that you can be your best physically when you are constantly, you know, inhaling chemicals into your lungs, even if they are quote unquote healthier than cigarettes. It's still not healthy. Right. And then one of the beliefs I also have is.

I'm allowed to vape if I want to. I believe that. I completely give myself permission. I believe that if I want to hit a vape, I will. And that's great because I think that a lot of people, when they quit, they limit themselves as if they like are using willpower. They say, no, I can't hit that. Nope. I hate myself for wanting it.

And I'm like, yeah, Andrew, if you want to hit a vape and you really think you want to go ahead. And I just know that I really don't want it deep down. I know I really don't want it. Like even if it looks tempting at a party, which it has in the Uh, two years, like it's looked like, okay, I could hit that, but I know deep down that like it isn't going to serve me in any way, shape or form in my life.

And I know also, to be honest with you guys, now that it's been so long since I've aped, I know it'll make me feel sick when I first hit it. I'm aware of that. So it's just like the, the benefits of not hitting one genuinely do outweigh the negatives. I'm not using any willpower. There's no force. Like I genuinely can just be in an environment full of nicotine and just not.

Have any desire to want to use it. So those are some beliefs that you can have and you can adopt and start practicing in your life that will help you to quit nicotine without having to force yourself, hate on yourself. Um, use willpower, chew 35, six a gum a day. Like, um, when you have beliefs that serve you, you create a life that serves you, you create a life that you want.

It all starts with your mind. It all starts with the first analyzing what you believe about life. And letting yourself the space, giving yourself the space and the compassion to actually see how those beliefs affect you from a neutral place and then deciding if you want to change them or not. That is coaching.

That's self coaching. It's an amazing practice. It will change. It won't even change just your life. It's going to change the life of all the people around you. It's going to change the legacy you leave behind. What you believe becomes a reality. So if you're currently vaping, it means you must have beliefs that somewhere in your life you're benefiting from vaping.

And I'm not telling you to force beliefs in that you don't believe or you don't want to believe. That's not my thing. Like, I'm not forcing myself to believe anything that I do about nicotine. I've critically questioned myself with rational questions and I've decided logically that this is probably the best place for me to be in my mindset.

Like, if I want to go back to vaping, if I think that it's going to be better for me, if I can ration my way back into thinking that, then I'll probably end up vaping again. But I don't see myself choosing beliefs like that that are going to ultimately hurt me. Because I don't want to live a life Full of addiction that doesn't serve me.

It's just my choice. So that's all for today. This is a great episode. Listen to it again. This is the skillset that allows you to create your dreams. Think about this lightly. This is actually going to allow you to be someone who vapes or someone who doesn't. Your beliefs are everything. And that's not just with nicotine.

That's with everything that you do or don't do in your life is because of what you think is possible and what you believe about life. That's it. Thanks guys. I appreciate it. Have a fantastic day. I'll see you next week.