
How To Quit Smoking For Good
I know what you’re thinking: catchy title, huh? As in, tell us something more cutting-edge, like, “six things you must do to attract 10,000 followers.” Or, “17 ways to become rich and famous right now!”
But you know what they say: write what you know.
And I know how to not smoke.
According to the Washington Post, although smoking in the US has declined from 42.4% in 1965 to 16.8% in 2014, smoking still accounts for about 480,000 deaths annually here, and billions in medical costs and lost productivity.
So apparently, this article, with the simple, non-catchy title, is still needed, and I write it in hopes of helping you quit, if you are looking for wisdom. (Or send it to a friend who wants to quit — I promise, my method works!)
It’s hard to admit this even now, but I smoked for a total of about thirty years.
And I quit a total of about 30 times.
My parents smoked when I was a kid, my grandparents smoked, my big brother smoked, the cool kids at school smoked, so it seemed like the thing to do at the time.
I was only thirteen when I started. Looking back, and having raised two daughters myself to adulthood, it’s hard to imagine myself (or either of them) smoking at 13, although I suspect they did without my knowing at the time.
I remember what started it. My boyfriend, John, broke up with me. I was hurt and I derailed. I figured, what the hell, I’ll just do something trashy because I don’t care about myself, like he didn’t care about me, so I bummed a Marlboro Menthol from my big brother.
I nearly tipped over at first, but it didn’t take long before I was a regular customer.
And it was easy to tell my parents. I waited until they both had one lit up in front of the TV in the living room, which was pretty much most of the time, and I went up to my mom with a pack of my newly-bought smokes (from my brother, with my baby-sitting money, how sweet is that?) behind my back and said, “I have something to tell you.”
Between puffs, what could she do, lecture me? No, they didn’t like it, and for the most part, I kept it out of their faces, but I also recall reaching for a Salem Menthol first thing in the morning in high school, which is really hard to imagine now.
The first time I quit, I was 26. I irrationally thought I had throat cancer and got really scared. It turned out my husband and I just needed a humidifier in our North Central U.S. winter climate. My throat was just dry. Whew!
Four years later, during our divorce, I was out with friends and broke down and had a cold beer, which was something I rarely did, since I don’t like beer. Somebody was smoking and I bummed a smoke to go with my beer.
Next thing you know, I was buying smokes again.
The next time I quit, at 36, it was because I was in love with a non-smoker. He didn’t complain about it, but I felt self conscious about the smell, what with all the kissing and what-not. When we broke up four years later and I started dating again, I ended up dating someone who smoked, and it was a matter of, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ‘em,” or: kissing a smoker is easier to take if you smoke, too.
The next-to-the last time I quit, I was in-between boyfriends again, and once again, I started dating a smoker. That seemed like a fairly good excuse to smoke. It didn’t seem fair to ask a man to quit on my account, so I just caved. Over and over.
All this brings us up to the day I quit for good.
How do I know it’s for good?
- It was nearly six years ago.
2. I refuse to date anyone who smokes now.
3. The thought of sucking that poison into my body truly repulses me.
Sure, once in awhile the whiff of cigarette smoke passes by me and it smells, shall we say, familiar? Comforting? But for the most part, I choke when I have to walk through a group smokers who are hanging around the front door of a no-smoking building, and I usually make a fuss about it.
Can’t they stand somewhere besides right in front of the door?
Here’s how I quit.
In the past, I had tried cutting back slowly. I had tried quitting cold-turkey. I had tried staying away from smokers.
But in each case, I inevitably started smoking again for one reason: I was a smoker. That’s just who I was.
Or so I thought.
Almost six years ago, my weight had ballooned to 200 and I was not well. My diet was awful, I was drinking a lot of tequila with my boyfriend (who smoked, of course) and I wasn’t getting any exercise. I knew something had to change.
Job #1: get rid of the boyfriend.
Done. Easy peasy. Full-disclosure: it wasn’t because he smoked, it was because he was a really bad alcoholic. Kept forgetting to come home, etc. Ick. And I never drank tequila much after that, and not at all now.
But I digress.
Job #2: quit smoking.
It was really quite simple. I picked a day: Monday morning. I made sure I ran out of smokes the night before. I smoked a lot of cigarettes Sunday night.
When Monday morning came, and I fixed my coffee, I said to myself, “There are two kinds of people in the world — smokers and non-smokers. I am a non-smoker.”
I intentionally identified as a non-smoker.
Day one was ok. “I can do this,” I thought. No problem.
Day two, when I wanted a cigarette with my coffee (and I did!) I simply said to myself — and this was the key:
“That’s stupid. You’re a non-smoker. Why would you do that?”
I’m a non-smoker. I’m a non-smoker. I don’t smoke. That was my mantra.
I’ve not touched a cigarette since that Sunday night in December, 2011.
Soon after I quit smoking, I started to work on my weight. I lost 65 pounds in eight months. Why? How?
One of the excuses we use for not quitting — and it’s ok to admit this, no one is watching you read this — is that we are afraid we’ll gain weight.
That’s bullshit.
You’ll gain weight if you replace smoking with eating more, yes. So I figured I should attack them both at the same time.
It worked. My non-smoking self went to meetings, wrote down what I ate, started biking, and kept reminding myself that I’m a non-smoker.
Now I was a non-fat-person, not-smoking. I was non-smoking, fit person, who eventually started lifting weights, too, by the way.
The bottom line it that it really is all in your head. You are a smoker because you identify as a smoker.
I promise you, if you start building new neuropathways in your brain with the message that you are a non-smoker, you will soon be a non-smoker. The way to do that is to repeat to yourself, every single time you even think about smoking, “I’m a non-smoker.”
And it would be really stupid if you put a cigarette in your mouth and set fire to it.
As a non-smoker, why would you do that?
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