Hello, and welcome back to the quit vaping podcast. As always, I'm your host, Andrew Cipriano, and I really hope this is one of the last episodes you'll have to listen to to quit vaping permanently and make it easy. Without any willpower. So in today's episode, I'm gonna talk about the blame game. Woo hoo.

So pretty much I used to do this and I still catch myself occasionally, you know, wanting to do this is I would blame outside circumstances for my actions. And I think a lot of us are doing this. So let's talk about it today. It is not the vaping company's fault that you're addicted to nicotine. It is not your parents fault that you're addicted to nicotine.

It is not your friend's fault. It is not the school district's fault. It is not, um, some random person in some other country that you live in making vapes and shipping them to your country's fault. It is not like any of the economic forces of the world or God or whatever you believe in's fault that you use nicotine.

And I don't say that to blame you in like a shameful way, but I say that to empower you in an empowering way. So when it comes to what I do, I'm a life coach. So what we do in life coaching is we help. Uh, people take full emotional responsibility, and when you take full emotional responsibility you also, by consequence, take responsibility for your own actions.

I want to get this straight. Sometimes there are things that happen to us that we can't control, okay? That does happen. Horrible things happen to good people, and that's not what I'm referring to today, but when it comes to using nicotine, or any kind of habitual action you're taking that you are in control of, When it comes to actually your actions, not someone else's, you always have full control of them.

And it might not always feel like that. And the reason why it doesn't feel like we have full control is because of things like addiction, not knowing how our mind works, not knowing how to process emotions, right? If you're having problems controlling your actions, it's an emotional problem every single time.

Because remember, we are driven to act by motivate. I'm sorry. We're driven to act by emotions. That's how it works. Emotions drive all action and inaction. So when it comes to vaping, it's at its very core, it's an emotional problem that we can solve with emotions. But do you know the moment that you export responsibility for your actions or your addiction, you're powerless to solve it.

So the reason why I say don't play the blame game because you're the one that loses that game every single time in order to create the life that you want, become the person who you want to be quit using nicotine. You have to actually take responsibility for you being the one that's continuing the addiction.

So that's where we're going to start today. Now, I understand, and I have a, I don't morally agree with how the nicotine companies advertise to young people. We all know the story about Juul. How they made, I think it was 13 billion dollars doing some predatory campaigns to young people, putting young people in their ads, like directly marketing to young people, right?

That's, that's not cool. That's predatory. Yeah, there's people in the world who don't have high moral standards. Well, that exists, right? So now, what's the cure? Do we? Try to fix the world, make it a beautiful place where everyone's happy and there's no evil. Or do we just take responsibility for our, what we can, which is always our own lives?

Well, I'd say the second option is going to be more effective for you. I often see that people try to go change the world before they change their own lives and wouldn't recommend that especially. Um, excuse me. It's someone who owns a business now. That's just not gonna work for you. Long term. So when it comes to the addiction, I want you to take full responsibility for it.

And again, I'm not using the word blame as a shameful thing here. It's an empowering word. So take full responsibility that you are the one that is created, perpetuated. And it's full control of the addiction, which is nicotine, right? And let's start off by calling it addiction because it is, it's an addiction.

So whether or not you want to call it a habit or not, I don't care. It's nicotine addiction. It's an addiction. And that's fine. I'm not, again, I'm not trying to say that as like a triggering word. That's not what we're doing, but it's just so that you can take responsibility and call it what it is. Because without being able to be truthful about our lives, it's very difficult to change them.

You know, we have to start with truth and awareness and only then, only then can we change our lives. So remember, nicotine addiction is yours and yours only. You're nursing that addiction. It's your baby. And there's reasons why you're doing it. And I'm not saying you're wrong, but the reasons that you're.

You know, that you're addicted to nicotine now is because you do believe that there's somewhere where it's benefiting you. You have to, or else you wouldn't be using it. Logically, that's the only thing that makes sense. And then there's some also some emotions that most likely you're not willing to experience in your body and it feels easier to experience them with a dopamine hit over them with nicotine, right?

So remember when you use nicotine, uh, what happens in your body is that you, you get a dopamine hit in your brain and it feels good in your body and it, it often is confused with an emotional, it's easy to confuse that dopamine hit as It's a cure of emotion, but it's not what's happening. What's actually happening is I want to imagine like you're throwing a blanket over your emotion.

So like I have an uncomfortable emotion in my body, an uncomfortable urge. Same thing, emotions are urges and I don't want to feel that. So nicotine is going to help me solve it and it doesn't actually solve for the emotion or the urge. It just covers it up with dopamine. So it's like throwing a blanket over a pile of poop.

Well, really you want to clean the poop up, right? You want to process that poop and get it out of the room. But when we're using any kind of a substance. In place of feeling our emotions, we're just covering them up and that doesn't solve them. You might think, well, what's the difference if I'm covering it up or not?

It's like, because that emotion is still there and it's festering because when you don't learn how to process your emotions, you actually aren't able to create the life you want. So it's not about the emotion in your body. The second you hit the vape. It's about the emotions in your body in the future that you're not going to know how to process.

So it's going to actually stop you from creating the life that you want, because if you cannot process your emotions, I guarantee you with a hundred percent certainty that you're not going to become the person you want to become. Every single person that you look up to in your life, they're able to process your negative emotions.

That's why you look up to them. They do the hard things. That's why you look up to them. We don't often look up to people who are in complete lack of emotional control and regulation. And I advise that you don't if you do. So that's what I want to be honest with about today. It's just like, You know, when it comes to the addiction, the only way that we can fix it or cure for it, if we don't want to be using nicotine, I'm not talking to people who want to be using nicotine, that's not my people, then we have to be honest with ourselves, right?

So we take full responsibility. Now that we've taken responsibility for the vaping, right? Okay, I get it. It's my thing. How do I solve it? All right. So there's two parts you want to do. We had to first identify what you currently believe about nicotine. So if you want to do this, like just write down everything you believe, like nicotine helps with stress.

Nicotine helps with anxiety. Nicotine feels good. Like All these thoughts in your mind, these sentences in your mind, you want to get them on paper. And if you're really having trouble doing this, I advise you get a coach. Like, find a life coach is going to help you like life coaches pretty much help you find belief systems in your brain that are creating results you don't want that you're completely unaware of.

It's a big part of coaching. So if you're addicted to nicotine, there's belief systems there. There have to be, I'm going to say it again. There have to be belief systems that nicotine is serving you in your life or you would not be using it. It's as simple as that. So we want to get all those beliefs out and then we want to question them.

Like, you can all coach yourselves. This is pretty much what coaching is like questioning your beliefs to see if you want to hold onto them or not, because we get to believe whatever we want. But if we're blaming the tobacco companies for making us addicted, guess what we're not doing. We're not taking accountability for our own belief systems.

Even if a tobacco company sold you a belief system at some point or another, if you're using nicotine, you would have had to have believed it yourself. Now it's officially your belief system. Let's take accountability for it and change it. So like, for example, I do a whole series on this in my first couple episodes, but like, let's say.

Um, nicotine helps with anxiety. Actually, nicotine doesn't help with anxiety. Remember, it covers it up and in addition, drug addiction creates anxiety in your body. So there's no possible way that your life is less anxious with nicotine. It just isn't, it's not logically possible. So that's one right there, right?

So write down all your beliefs, get them on paper, look at them in the eye. Don't shame yourself for having them. That's not what this work is for. Remember, awareness first, then compassion. So I want to write down all my beliefs and then be compassionate. The only, you know, most people, what they do is they shame and they guilt themselves.

I shouldn't be addicted. I hate myself. I'm stupid. I'm an idiot for starting. Don't do that. If you do not have your own back, you end up as an addict. That's what happens. You're beating yourself up. You're going to be addicted to shit. That's just how it goes because you don't treat yourself good when you're beating yourself up.

So don't do that. You know, you're going to be your own biggest fan and you have to have your own back throughout this process. So write down your beliefs and then have compassion. What, you know, is it true that anxieties and nicotine are actually helping? Do I actually like it? Like sit down and ask yourselves from such a clean place, not a blame place, do I actually like nicotine?

Is it actually providing for me in the way that I think it is? And like, get curious about your life. Question everything you believe about nicotine. Question everything you've been told about nicotine that you do believe. Like you just want to get to the truth in your own life. And I promise you, it's so funny, but the truth will set you free.

The reason why people have problems in their life that they can't solve is cause they don't understand that there's a part of them that believes in that problem. And they keep creating that problem for themselves. So understand your beliefs, change them. And then the next part of it is learning how to process your emotions.

So remember, urges are just like an uncomfortable vibration in your body, just like an uncomfortable emotion like sadness or fear, anxiety. So it's uncomfortable. So what you want to learn how to do is process an urge. I talk about this in other episodes, but pretty much you want to just sit with it with compassion.

Be curious the exact same way you do with your belief systems. And like awareness plus compassion plus curiosity pretty much equals the life that you want. And when you're addicted to nicotine and you're blaming other people, none of those things are available to you. And you're going to sit and truly you're going to be a victim, right?

Because the definition of a victim is somebody who is disempowered. And when you're blaming other people for the actions that you are actually capable of taking or not, you're very disempowered. So don't live your life like that. And if you realize that that's how you've been living your life, it's okay.

Do not beat yourself up. This is about awareness and then compassion. So I'm not victim blaming here, but I'm saying you don't need to be a victim in your own life. It's complete opposite. Actually, I'm empowering, blaming. If you're not empowered, I'm gonna blame you for not being empowered, but from a loving place because you get to empower yourself in life.

If you want to quit using nicotine, I'm telling you the formula. Change your belief system about nicotine. I'm not saying gaslighting yourself, literally get to logical beliefs of why nicotine isn't serving you. That's what I've done. I'm not gaslighting myself. I used to be guessing myself. I just had to think critically about my addiction and then learn how to feel my emotions from a place of love.

And guess what? Nicotine addiction, real easy to drop. So so many people I see play the blame game and like, I was guilty of this too. And I see like a lot of the companies that want to like help people quit vaping. They're like, Oh, it's tobacco company's fault. It's like, no, actually, yes, I think they're predatory and I don't agree with their morals, but it's actually every single addicts responsibility to drop the addiction or not.

So yeah, there's always going to be. Nicotine. There's always gonna be porn. There's always gonna be alcohol. There's gonna be, like, sugary foods and overeating available. There's always gonna be those influences available. So when we blame the people who are creating the influences, we're totally missing the point.

Blame the people who are using it from a loving way, because that's the person who can decide whether or not they want to use it. So that's like the first step, you know, take responsibility for your addiction in such a loving way. And it's always from love that you take responsibility for your life because the most loving thing you can do in your whole life is give yourself as much power as you can to create the life that you want.

And whenever you're blaming someone else, you can't do that. And then I want to leave you with one last piece of insight today is like, do this with everything in your life. It's not just the nicotine. If you have any results that you're not happy with in your life, you're creating them because there's a part of you that believes you either should be creating them or you have to change your beliefs, change your life.

This is the most important work you can do. I'm like, I will die on the cross saying that it's the most important work you can do is understanding what you believe and how to change it because your beliefs will become your reality. And if you're unaware of your beliefs, then you will create a very unaware reality that you do not want, and you'll feel very out of control over it.

So thank you guys for listening. This is a great episode. I will see you next week.