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Friday, 1 September 2006
Quitting smoking ::
I smoked regularly for about a year when I was a teenager, then pretty much stayed clear of it until my wife and I split up 5 1/2 years ago. I’ve had it in my head to quit for some time now, but only in the last week or so have I looked carefully at why I do it and made an actual plan to quit.
At 19, I quit when I got a bad cold; smoking is much less fun with a cold, and there’s always the thought that smoking may have weakened the immune system to make the cold a bad one. I quit cold turkey that time, and can remember acting like a real bastard several times during that withdrawal. Remembering that, I didn’t want to quit suddenly this time.
Instead, I decided to wean myself slowly, starting by allowing myself a maximum of 1 cigarette every 100 minutes (saw this on a neighbor’s smoking cessation plan once, some years ago). That’s often enough to avoid nicotine withdrawal, but infrequent enough for the impulse to come up, be considered, and postponed.
Then, when I did smoke, I had to do so with the awareness of how many times I’d had to postpone the impulse before the 100-120 minute interval arrived. Was I smoking because I really liked it and wanted to, or purely out of habit? The more I postponed the impulse, the clearer it became that it was purely habitual. Of course, that’s easy for anyone else to see, but it seemed important and helpful to directly confront that addiction, that compulsion, and the mistaken idea behind it: that I need to smoke.
After about a week of being pretty good with the 100-minute rule, I noticed that I enjoyed it less when I smoked. I began to feel repulsion, and started taking smaller drags and smoking less of the cigarette.
Yesterday and the day before I only smoked 3-4 cigarettes; today only 2 (as of 11:45 pm). Those 2 today felt like huge rewards when I lit them up, and yet I didn’t enjoy them much at all as I took half-hearted, guilty, tiny drags. It doesn’t seem like it will take much longer of this to reinforce the idea that I won’t really enjoy them and stop lighting them in the first place.
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