Quitting Cigarettes…
Out of context: Reply #15
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- monNom0
What worked for me after 10 years and many failed attempts was to recognize that quitting initially wasn’t so hard (despite the hype), but that it was too easy to start up again.I used nicotine patches for three or four previous attempts and they worked well to manage cravings. Or as a placebo to manage cravings at least. I used the lowest dose ones as the others were too strong when first applied. With the patches I’d get quit and then make it a few weeks/months, but then I’d have one cigarette while out with friends and within weeks I was back to smoking. I realized after the last time, having quit for 6mo and starting up again, that it was that first cigarette that was breaking the spell and putting me back on the road to smoking (“what’s one going to hurt? I quit. Now I’m a ‘social smoker’, I can handle this”). But once you have one, the next one is so much easier to justify to yourself, and the next even easier and suddenly you are smoking again.
So the next time I tried, I decided I wasn’t going to get tripped up by having just one. And sort of as a byproduct, that would mean I wouldn’t ever smoke again. It simplified the task and I wasn’t even thinking about forever, just the singular event of the craving where I allowed myself to smoke again, and understanding what that single cigarette would mean in the grand scheme of things.
Now I know it sounds a bit ridiculous, “just don’t have another cigarette and you will quit smoking”. But it was that insight of giving in to the craving in a weak moment as the inflection point of my quit/start cycle that allowed me to simplify my quitting into just don’t have that first one.
So the next time I tried to quit, I used patches for about three days but didn’t feel I needed them after that. Cravings came. Especially after I completed a task. I was rewarding myself with a cigarette so my brain expected one every time I finished something. Instead, I’d count to ten, or get a drink of water, or stand up and stretch. Within a minute the craving would subside. After a few weeks, I wasn’t getting as many cravings, but occasionally my mind would try to convince me I should have ‘just one’. I didn’t give in, and those impulses became less and less frequent, until they just didn’t happen anymore. That was 14 years ago and I haven’t touched a cigarette since. The longer I’ve stayed quit, the bigger the cost to having ‘just one’ cigarette, which I think has helped me to avoid falling back into the cycle.
Hope that helps. Maybe she’ll need to have her own “ah ha” moment to find the thing that works for her, but if mine works for her, she can have it.