How I quit smoking

I started smoking in my early 20s. Since getting this new habit I smoked over 15 years, an average of 20 cigarettes per day, in total, more than 100,000 cigarettes. As I was in good health, I never felt any consequences of this slow poisoning. I liked to smoke mostly when I was working and when I was chatting with friends. It gave me self-confidence; it made me more creative, more optimistic, a better presence for the others. Besides, all my friends were already smoking, and I just wanted to be recognized as one of them, I did not want to have anything peculiar or different, I wanted to go with the flow.

It is one year now since I quit smoking and I don’t think I’ll ever smoke again. My life improved a lot, in new ways I never thought of in connection with quitting smoking. For instance, my life in hotel rooms got better. Before, I used to ask for a smoking room whenever I checked in a hotel. Smoking rooms have a bad smell, regardless the hotel category or cleanliness. Maybe they don’t smell if the hotel is new but this I cannot tell. Many times I had to endure that bad odor, being ashamed to go and ask for another room at the reception. I noticed that improvement from the first time I checked in a hotel as non-smoker and I was impressed of the nice flowery scent of the room. That was a hotel I used to stay in many times before, so I could immediately tell the difference of this new sensation.

I bet you are now asking why I managed to stop smoking and how I did it. I can’t tell you why, but I can tell you how. One day I got out of cigarettes and I was not in the mood to go out to buy some, as I was working on something new and I did not want to interrupt my ideas. So I postponed smoking for a while, to get ready with my new project. This is the keyword here: postponed. I never quit smoking, I just postponed it. When I finished what I was doing, it was already evening, I was hungry, so I ate something, then I got this idea: what if I don’t go to buy any cigarettes today? Will I feel better tomorrow? And I started this experiment of seeing if not smoking for a few days can lead to some improvements, such as climbing 6 floors and the stairs and not getting tired at all, or running for one hour and not getting out of breath.

Do you see my point? I never quit smoking. I only postponed it for the sake of my experiment. I must tell you that I never believed all those who were claiming that smoking hurts the body, damages the organs or whatever other stuff like this. How could I ever believe such stories when I was the living proof that they were wrong: I was there, with 15 years of smoking behind me and feeling great, in a wonderful shape, taking relatively long and difficult mountain hikes, despite of all that smoking and of not always following healthy eating recipes in the meals I used to cook. So I decided to try to see if there is any evidence of truth in that. With my mind set to the new experiment, it was rather easy not to smoke, but I got some cigarettes in the house, to have them just in case of emergency, as my friends who unsuccessfully tried to quit several times said that the worst of all was the thought that they were out of cigarettes.

After two weeks of experiment, I decided to stop it. I did not notice any improvement of my health or of my sport abilities. I still got tired at the 4^th floor when climbing the stairs, I still could not run one hour at once, I felt exactly as I used to feel before. So I took one cigarette and lit it. Then something unbelievable happened: the first smoke was really bad, awful, and stinky. I almost chocked. After I tried the second one, a thought just crossed my mind: how could I ever be able to smoke? It was so bad that I did not feel any urge to finish the cigarette. Later on, I tried again and I had the same bad taste so I went for postponing again the smoking. It’s one year now already and I’m still postponing my next cigarette. I don’t notice a health improvement yet, but I don’t notice a desire to smoke either. Besides, it seems that you are what you think of you. I used to think at myself as being a smoker. In time, I started to reconsider this by thinking of myself as non-smoker, and so I became today.

And I discovered that I did not lose any friend because of my new attitude, I did not lose my natural humor and optimism and I did not become more stupid. I did not get fatter, either.

Meanwhile, thinking of this, of how many people try hardly to quit without success, and of myself achieving this without even wanting to, I realized why I did start to smoke it the very beginning: I never knew what to do with my hands. Smoking gave my hands an occupation, it made me look like doing something, even when I was doing nothing, when I was just day dreaming, so developing the addiction was rather easy. Now I know that my hands don’t need such an occupation, they don’t need acting at all. I know that hands follow the brain, not the other way around.

And I can wear smaller purses, as I don’t need to carry with me so many items anymore.

I read a lot about people who suffer severe health injury caused by smoking and who are not able to quit for good. For them, I have this piece of advice: try this new experiment of postponing smoking, not for two weeks, but for twenty years, why not? Develop an internal dialogue with yourself on the topic of who you are and what defines you. Define yourself, not for a lifetime, but for a day time. Today I am a non-smoker. Today I’m acting as an optimist. Today I’m a dreamer. I can choose in the morning what I want to be and how I want to be acting and behaving for the rest of the day and stick to that, since it is only for one day. And if I choose the same thing for 365 mornings in a row, then at the end of the line, I’ve been a non-smoker or an optimist for a whole year.

Why not give it a try starting now? Then help someone stop smoking. Why not? It is possible.