Credit: Dangerous Minds / Boutefilkov via X

How far would you go to kick a bad habit?

For the vast majority of us, our bad habits are with us for life. This is said with absolutely no judgment by the way. I’m absolutely part of that group who has accepted beyond a shadow of a doubt that there will always be things that I happily do on a regular basis that will degrade my quality of life, especially in later years. I’m (pretty much) OK with that until the inevitable doctor’s appointment, which shows just how close to death I am as a direct result of them. Then I’ll most likely continue to do it, just less happily this time.

This is because, as pretty much anyone who has ever lived for more than a few decades on this earth can tell you, kicking a bad habit is one of the hardest things you can possibly do. I mean, changing your behaviour is hard enough, especially after you’ve accepted it as part of your daily routine. Then you take into account the fact that most bad habits are ones that most affect our cursed fucking brain chemistry in the most pleasurable way.

Drinking, eating and drugging to excess are all things that make the happy chemicals in our brain go absolutely spare in the moment. Once that moment has passed, those same chemicals in our brain just don’t operate in anywhere near the same capacity until we indulge in it again. Our brain basically guides us towards things that trigger those happy chemicals, so from then on, we become pretty one-track-minded in our pursuit of those highs. Very few things prove this quite like smoking does.

Why is smoking so hard to kick?

After all, smoking is an absolutely baffling behaviour on the surface.

The actual act itself is precisely as pleasurable as inhaling smoke and tar sounds, just ask anyone who smokes how it felt the first time they tried. Yet the vast majority of people who’ve tried smoking find themselves completely addicted to it, and that’s entirely due to the way it affects your brain chemistry as opposed to any more tangible reasons. Which, not entirely coincidently, is what makes the habit basically impossible to kick.

Any real smoker will tell you that once you’re hooked, the need for a puff will be there long after you’ve weaned yourself off it. Your brain will tell you that the immediate dopamine release that comes with satisfying an addiction is directly tied to cigarettes and absolutely nothing else will do. Thus, smoking is with a bullet, one of the hardest addictions to kick, especially taking into account its legality and ease of acquiring. Very difficult to tell yourself not to do something when you can rationalise it by saying, “If it was so bad, why does every corner shop sell it?”

Thus, people go to some truly heroic lengths to rid themselves of the habit. We’re talking everything from nicotine replacements to twelve-step programs to hypno-therapy to finding a new addiction to satisfy the cravings. However, very few people have ever gone as far as Kütahya, Turkey native Ibrahim Yücel, who spent 26 years in the grips of a two-pack-a-day smoking habit, even after his father passed away from lung cancer. Rather than waste any more time with programs, patches or gum, he went with a tactic slightly more medieval.

Yücel built a cage for his head out of copper wires. Basically, a set of braces tailored for his head that he would wear every single day with no exceptions save for meal times. His wife and daughter were the only people who had keys for the cage, and credit where it’s due, Yücel stuck to it. Applying the cage and wearing it every single day as a way of showing that we can overcome anything, no matter what our brains might tell us.