Sample: Health/Wellness/Personal
How to (finally) Quit Smoking
First day of fall, 2024. If you are still a smoker, it won’t be long now until you are bundled up outside with the other social outcasts, freezing your butt off, smoking a butt. Plus, you are more winded and tired than you need to be. You are tossing money at this monster week after week. The most compelling question I asked myself 13 years ago was, “What do I get out of this?”
I quit for the final time on December 26th, 2012, after multiple attempts. I found an approach that works, and below are the details of that process. I can summarize it as follows: Hit It From Every Possible Angle. I did this and got free of the torture of cigarettes once and for all after multiple times quitting for short (and long) periods of time and repeating that cycle.
Letting go of smoking was an act of self love. It was monumental and I prepped for it like one would a wedding or graduate school or moving to California. It required planning, self-reflection, resources and support. It started with realizing that, on the inside, I wasn’t a smoker. And I bet, deep down, you are a non-smoker too. This is a reasonable process, so breathe easy.
First, pick a date to quit, but not just any date. Set a date that is within the next 4 months and one week before a typical milestone date. For example, you won’t quit on New Year’s, but one week before New Year’s. You won’t quit on your birthday, but one week before your birthday.
The hardest stage is the first week. For a real conquering feeling, be free of it by the time the milestone happens. I quit the day after Christmas in 2012 so that I would be free of smoking when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s. This was a true new beginning for New Year’s, rather than setting myself up to fail. Rather than beginning an uphill slog on January 1st, I had the mark of true freedom under my belt, the worst behind me. I still remember that moment, the amazing feeling. I was at a candlelight ceremony at a woodland temple in Cohasset. Hundreds of us were there, but as we ushered in the new year, I had a beautiful conquering feeling, internally, entering the new year as a confirmed non-smoker. So, set a date that predates a milestone by one week. Between now and then, you can get the rest of these steps in place.
Pen and Paper - Get real with yourself about your patterns. Write until you come up with a memorable mantra that is true, regarding your slavery to the habit. It will be different for each of you. It has to resonate. Mine was, “Every time I go back to smoking, I feel 99 percent sick enough to quit for nine months before I try to quit again.” I had identified a pattern. I had quit many times, once for as long as three years. But realizing that each time I went back to smoking, I had proven to myself that I was going to feel sick for nine months before I felt sick enough to quit. Writing every day between now and your quit date will bring the non-smoking you to the fore. Ask yourself these leading questions, and then ask yourself the questions that arise from asking these:
How am I a non-smoker in my thoughts, plans, dreams?
What do I get from smoking?
What does it take from me?
What would my life look like if I was living truly, as a non-smoker?
How does smoking interfere with my goals?
Preemptive - Deal with the fallout of potential triggers in advance, or simultaneously. For example, in those past failed attempts at being permanently quit, I always returned to smoking because quitting had coincided with gaining ten pounds. I would feel better having quit, but feel worse with the extra weight. So I would return to smoking to drop the weight again. The cycle repeated.
When I finally decided to quit forever, I had to address this tendency before the quit date. I had to set myself up to maintain weight while quitting. I knew that gaining weight would trigger me back into smoking, so I needed aerobic exercise. I needed to expose myself to the discomfort of breathing heavy and feeling yucky at the gym to drive the point home. I started going to Zumba 3 times a week while I was still a smoker, in the several weeks leading up to my quit date. It was a little bit disgusting, smelling the smoky smell on myself when I sweated it out at the gym, but by the time I quit I was in an established workout routine. Momentum was in place. I actually dropped a few pounds while quitting smoking as a result of this practice. Trigger eliminated.
Support #1 - The first form of support I enlisted was provided by my health insurance company. Most health insurance will provide such support. The service I used was called Quitworks. A few weeks before quitting I called them and signed up for their phone support program. They assigned me a counselor and set up a series of calls for me. We talked once a week leading up to quitting and during the first several non-smoker months. They were available when I was wavering. Calling them during a craving was exactly what I needed to talk through it while it passed. Check your health insurance benefit and sign them up.
Support #2 - Ask ten friends who have quit to each provide you with one sentence that describes the benefits they have experienced. I did this when I was preparing to quit and the sentences they provided offered me perspective from the winning side of this challenge. Some of these non-smoking friends gave me quippy statements to rely upon like “You are one cigarette away from a pack a day”. Some of them just talked about the money I would save. Some of them told me, in the gentlest possible way, that to a non-smoker, a smoker smells disgusting.
Set Up a Financial Reward for Yourself - to congratulate yourself on the money you save by not smoking, give yourself a gift. Make a contract with yourself. Mine was a new pair of Rayban sunglasses, once I had saved $1000 from not buying cigarettes. The sunglasses cost $200, but it felt like free money. I wore those with personal pride for several years, and I replace them whenever they wear out. They remain a personal symbol of my achievement. It was a good choice for me as they are always either in my purse or on my face.
Use Nicotine Replacement. It costs less than half of what cigarettes cost. It has way fewer health risks. You can quit that next time. We deal with our addictions in the order that they are killing us.
Allow - Contemplate this: You are allowing something to leave your life. Surrender to its absence. This is not a fighting stance. This is a state of allowing. There is great relief in being in a mindset of “letting go of it” which is merely “allowing it to leave you”. It’s more peaceful this way. It’s like having to let go of your lawless high-school friend who drags you down or a toxic boyfriend that you once thought you loved. Maybe you cry, maybe you’re scared, maybe it’s hard, but you don’t fight it. Like anything else that needs to leave your life, you allow it to go. It’s a mindset. Handle this similarly. You know you can’t go back. You know it would just be the same, and getting worse. Allow it to get tinier and tinier in the rearview mirror and focus as joyfully as you can on the road ahead.
The Stick Becomes the Carrot - Fairly early in your non-smoking life you will experience moments when the stick has become the carrot. Note the tiny rewards as they stack up to confirm your new identity. Your hair smells good. Your closet smells fresh. You are calmer sometimes. You go outside to breathe clean air rather than to inhale dirty smoke. You’ll watch a smoker friend leave the table to go outside some cold night and smell the rancid stench when they return five minutes later, and privately congratulate yourself. These little moments add up, this evidence of the non-smoking life.
Observation of Your Cravings - The whole craving cycle is fascinating when viewed from a distance. In the months (and sometimes years) following your last cigarette, there will be instances, situations, associations, moments when cravings happen. The supports are in place, but may not always be there with you. Also, this can happen years after you quit, so sometimes too much time may have passed. Educate yourself on the cycle of craving. And when cravings happen, step back and witness the cycle within yourself, from the perspective of your non-smoker identity. Look upon it with fascination. It is a phenomenon. You’ll see the trigger. You’ll see the thoughts and justifications arising in you. You’ll see that cravings pass in 5 to 7 minutes. You’ll see yourself witnessing the cycle. You’ll see yourself not smoke. And you’ll see that you are still a non-smoker.
Self-Compassion - This is a meta framework, an underlying attitude that supports and enables this life change. Acts and attitudes of self-kindness and self-love are part of the non-smoker you. Warm baths, cups of tea, calls with friends, walks in nature, massages, self-appreciation and all forms of self care are aligned with the non-smoker you. Engage in them. Sooner or later, the former person you were, who smoked, will seem alien to you, unaligned with your true self. You’ll feel like you’ve always been a non-smoker, and now you are living that truth.
I assure you that it was really hard for me to arrive at this winning formula for getting free of cigarettes and aligning with the non-smoker that I truly am. If I can save anyone time by sharing this process, enrich anyone’s life with this experience, especially as we launch into my favorite season of Autumn, that would be sweet.