Sunday, March 02, 2008
I started smoking in 1970.
I smoked my last cigarette on December 12, 2006.
The most important key to quitting is deciding that you want to quit. For years I was in denial telling everyone including myself that I liked to smoke; that I liked the taste of cigarettes; that I really enjoyed smoking. But I was finding that I was enjoying it less and less.
It was a lot more fun when everyone smoked. I remember when it was cool to smoke and everyone on TV and at the movies smoked. All my friends smoked. Everyone at work smoked. You could smoke in the house. You could smoke in a restaurant. Now days you can’t even smoke in a lot of bars.
For the last few years I found myself feeling embarrassed to smoke. I caught myself hiding my cigarette when someone I knew saw me smoking in my own car driving down the road. I had been telling myself that I was getting tired of the hassle for a while.
When I actually did try to quit once, I almost went crazy. I didn’t have the right frame of mind. If you think it is a great sacrifice to give up cigarettes, then you are probably not going to make it. Or even if you do make it, you will be so miserable that it’s not worth it. You have to get to the point where you can see that all the benefits of quitting cigarettes far outweighs the advantages of continuing smoking.
Now some people might say that is like getting brainwashed to not like smoking anymore. Well, even if that was true, would that be so bad. Now that I look back on my smoking days, I would have been willing to do anything to quit.
But actually it is just the opposite of brainwashing…it’s deprogramming! You got brain washed when you first started smoking. Now you need to be deprogrammed. You say you really like the taste of a cigarette. Give me a break. You had to learn to like it. You might have liked donuts the first time you tried one, but I don’t think that you really liked the first drag you took on that first cigarette. More than likely, you gagged on it until you got used to it. You had to be brainwashed. What is it that you like about cigarettes? The way it makes your breath smell? The way it makes your clothes smell. The way it makes your car smell? How ‘bout the holes you burn in your clothes and your car?
When I first started smoking, cigarettes were 65 cents a pack. Now they’re $4 and up. That alone should be enough reason to quit. But it’s not. It never stopped me. I would have starved first before I would have let myself run out of cigarettes. It is an addictive habit.
But it’s not really that physically addictive. It’s more of a mental addiction. If I was just sitting around doing mostly nothing, I would find that I would probably “need” a cigarette every 15 minutes or so. And if I had to be anywhere that I couldn’t have a cigarette for an hour or so, it would really start driving me up a wall. I couldn’t wait to get another cigarette as soon as possible.
But I found that I could go for hours without a smoke if I was doing something that I really enjoyed. I would literally “forget” about smoking. Now if nicotine was really that physically addictive, I don’t think I could have forgotten about it for that long.
Well, anyway, I finally decided that I want to quit. So I went to amazon.com and searched all the books they had about quitting smoking. I read all the reviews and by far the book with the most positive reviews was Allen Carr’s “Easy Way to Quit Smoking”. I ordered it and started reading.
One of the things I liked most about the book was that he tells you not to quit until you get to the end of the book. That was great, so no pressure, right? I read it very slowly…just a few pages a night. It was very easy to read but I didn’t want to get to the end because I knew I would have to quit smoking.
But I found myself wanting to quit more and more as I read. The book is mostly very simple psychology and common sense. Like the stuff I was outlining up above about how you don’t really like to smoke…you just thing you do. He repeats himself a lot too so that the message is ingrained on your brain.
All I can say is that it really did help me to get my mind straight about it. Most of the information in the book is stuff you already know but you just need someone else to remind you. You don’t have to follow all of the advice in the book. I didn’t. For example, he says not to substitute anything else for your cigarettes like food or candy. He has good reasoning behind this notion but that just didn’t work for me. I personally used “fireballs” as a substitute sometimes. Also pretzel rods were a great help to me. And yes I still carry around fireballs and pretzels (I hold them like a cigarette and puff on them). So I can see why you might be careful about what you substitute for your cigarettes. If I had chosen candy bars as a substitute every time I wanted to smoke, I probably would have gained a lot of weight.
I talked to a lot of people who quit smoking before I tried to do it myself and I was amazed at how many different ways people had successfully quit smoking. One older lady who was a student at our computer school said her and her husband decided to quit together. They were both heavy chain smokers. But their methods of quitting were completely different. The lady used the patch (which Carr’s book does not recommend by the way). Her husband quit “cold turkey”. They were both successful. She says that her husband was only crazy for a week but she was crazy for months. What was really amazing is that they both carried around an open pack of cigarettes the entire time they were quitting. But they never smoked one and haven’t smoked for years now. I certainly don’t recommend doing this but it just goes to show that different methods work for different folks.
Another life long smoker I know decided to quit when she was around 50 years old. She managed to quit for a week but couldn’t stand it any longer. So she bought a pack of cigarettes and proceeded to chain smoke the whole pack until she got sick as a dog. She never smoked again after that. Hey whatever works for you.
I came up with an idea of my own that was not in the “Easy Way to Quit Smoking” book. I am going to claim this as my own original idea because I haven’t heard anyone else talk about it. I call it “air smoking”. That’s right, “air smoking”. You just pretend like you’re holding a cigarette in your hand and you take a big drag off of it just like you would a real cigarette. It sounds crazy, I know, but trust me on this. Air smoking probably helped me get past the really hard times more than anything else I did. It has already helped some of my friends quit smoking too. Just remember to try it if you get a really bad urge for a cigarette when you are trying to quit. Just hold those 2 fingers up to your mouth just like you had a cigarette between them and take a big drag…hold it…exhale…and take another big drag…feel better? Just keep smoking that air until the urge is gone. It’s amazing how well this works. And you can even do this in church. You think it makes you look stupid? So what. What would be stupid is if you really did have a cigarette between those 2 fingers. Once you quit, you won’t believe how stupid people look when they take a drag on a cigarette. One of my friends actually used unlit cigarettes while doing this but I don’t recommend it. If you find you need to hold something, try a pretzel rod , or maybe a pen or pencil.
Ok, here is a summary of what I did to quit smoking after smoking for 36 years.
First I decided that I wanted to quit.
I read the ““Easy Way to Quit Smoking” book by Allen Carr.
I carried around fireballs and pretzel rods to give me something to do and take my mind off smoking.
And finally, when I had a really bad urge, I would “air smoke”.
By far the most important step is the first one. Just decide you want to quit. There are so many good reasons to quit. The book will really help you to be inspired if you have made up your mind that you want to quit.
Oh, one more thing…I prayed a lot.
Good luck and God bless you.
Barry