Hey dude,
I'm not sure if any of this will help you, but I recently wrote my opinions on quitting smoking to a friend so might as well give it to you as well:
My theory on how to quit smoking is closely related to my hallucination about the structure about the time, which I have probably mentioned to you at some point.
Anyway, without going into that, here’s the basic premise; wrote this a while ago to quit myself.
For me, the urge to smoke is not the biggest stumbling block to quitting. If you have the urge to smoke I think that the best way to overcome it is through distraction techniques. Every time you want to smoke, do something else, yoga, meditation, writing, whatever it is that you never do but want to. This way, that 5 minutes can be spent towards the achievement of a goal more constructive and more rewarding than giving up something you actually quite enjoy.
Secondly, you shouldn’t harbour a desire to smoke, or a regret at quitting. If you feel this way then you might as well start smoking again. What you need to figure out is; do you actually want to quit? I wanted to quit – I didn’t care about the risk of cancer, I’ve never been particularly bothered by the cost, but I didn’t want my skin to dry out and become leathery, I didn’t want my teeth to yellow, and most of all, I didn’t want something to be in control of me.
You shouldn’t harbour regret about not smoking, or miss it, once you’ve made the decision to quit. This is a simple version of the “it’s happened, you can’t change it” principle, summed up in my favourite saying “there’s no point crying over spilt milk.” You’ve decided not to smoke again, so why worry about it. In the long run you’ll lose the desire to do it. [[[When I started smoking again after a long break I didn’t like it again, it had really lost its luster, you forget how much you have to force it on yourself at the start]]]
About the nature of time: When you first quit smoking, the time between the last cigarette and now is very small. At first 10 minutes, then 1 hour, then maybe one or two days. It can be tempting to think that because it’s so small there’s no point carrying on, it’ll never get any bigger. But if you break it down into fragments of time, you’ll be surprised how quickly it builds up; you get through one night, then a week, then two weeks. Eventually you haven’t smoked for a month and it actually becomes a shame if you break it and smoke, rather than an annoying thing. Eventually you stop counting the days since your last cigarette and don’t want one.
Also, as someone who’s meandered between being a smoker and non-smoker, I’ve noticed a psychological pressure to smoke when in the presence of other smokers. It’s as if, by not smoking, you’re letting them down when they offer you one. As if they’re looking at you with different eyes, classing you with “them”, the non-smokers. However, what you need to realize is that their ultimate emotion is jealousy; they’d rather have you with them smoking, not to respect you more, but so that you don’t escape the addiction that they can’t. If you stand with smokers while they smoke, and don’t smoke, when you go inside, you realize that actually they didn’t care, now that that moment has passed they no longer think about it, it makes no different to them now that you didn’t smoke. Yet you walk away from the encounter one cigarette less smoked. Think of it like this; imagine you were quitting at the age of 18 and you ignored that psychological pressure for 6 months; do you think anyone from those episodes cares now? No. And they didn’t care then. It’s all in the mind. At the end of the day we are all ultimately alone, it’s your body and your mind and you make your own choices. If you decide not to smoke there is no physical or mental reason that you should.
Hope any part of that helped,
MZ
