Stress is a natural reaction to life-endangering situations.

Smoking is the worst possible strategy for stress management.

Smoking adds toxin to poison and makes the situation infinitely worse. In fact, for the smoker the stress management cigarettes are the worst cigarettes of all.

Let's make this clear beyond any doubt.

If, god forbid, a snake got you in the heel and sank its fangs into your flesh, launching its venom into your veins, you would be in both pain and trouble. Now, if you take a yellow scorpion and get it to sting you as well, it may take the pain of the snakebite away and distort some of the other symptoms associated with it, but would it really make your situation better?

The answer is, of course, no. A scorpion bite on top of a snakebite can benefit you only with a faster death.

In this simile, if stress is the snakebite, the scorpion is the cigarette. By smoking while stressed you don't contribute to consumption of the stress fuel norandrenaline that was released into your blood. Rather, you further contaminate your system with yet another psychoactive toxin - nicotine. The nicotine hit may distract you from the stress hit, but your stress is not dealt with, not exhausted and not resolved.

Considering that you are no longer a smoker, should we worry about stress as a potential drawback to the fume? As mentioned above and in the last Session, stress is most people's excuse for a relapse.

You too will get your measure of stress - we all do - and you may use it as an excuse to return to the bad habit of smoking. That pattern is deeply entrenched: circumstances will arise and you will automatically do what you've done before. You'll feel like smoking a cigarette, and under the influence of massive stress all the good reasoning not to do so will weaken and you may succumb and smoke 'only one'. But one is never only one, and so you will soon be smoking again.

Unless you prepare an alternative strategy, and practice it many times on the small daily stresses, you will be susceptible to the relapse threat. You have to train now and prepare yourself for the day of challenge so that when it comes, it will find you ready for it. Instead of succumbing, you will employ the well-practiced new technique.

That is the way of doing it.