a confession.
Few people can just drop a habit like smoking, your best bet is to try to replace it with something else. In my case it was a device of some kind, beginning with a palm pilot. When i needed a smoke i pulled the palm out of my shirt pocket instead of my smokes, fiddled with it for a while, and put it back. Now ive just graduated to a high end phone. So if i pull out my phone, dont assume im being rude.
I probably just need a smoke.
17 comments Og | Uncategorized
There’s an app for that!
/smartass
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
Awesome idea. I have never smoked, but I am using it.
Yep – with smoking, it’s all about breaking the habits you acquired. When I gave up the cancer sticks, I had to have the wife take the dog out to do it’s business for a month – that used to be my cigarette time. Had to get out of the habit of lighting up when the dog squatted.
Also chewed gum like crazy when driving to replace the cigarette that I would light up when I started the engine.
Since I barely liked cigarettes my method to quit was to carry a pack and not open it.
Every smoker will bum you a cigarette but if you have an unopened pack on your person they are less likely to give you a smoke.
Then you have a discussion with yourself every time you go to open the pack. After a week or so of that you can pitch the pack.
YMMV.
Whatever it takes! Quitting smoking is easy. I did it dozens of times. Took an MI to FINALLY make it stick. Working on year 8. I still sometimes notice the triggers, particularly walking outside at the end of the work day. That one still grabs me. Notice all you triggers and find some way to deal with them. Sounds like you figured one out. Won’t work well for driving which was one of my triggers.
990 days since my previous cigarette, today! Like Knucklehead, the triggers still go off but I only notice them a couple of times a week now. At the start, it was every 5 or 10 minutes.
My sis-n-law cut a straw down to cig size, filled it with packing and painted the tip red. She’d keep her smoke break, but use that instead.
I found out that carrot sticks helped me. I didn’t even start smoking!!
hahahhah…
Work at it. It’s worth it. My dad coughed up lung biscuits when I was young. I decided then it wasn’t worth it.
It’s been over 25 years now but I did put ’em down too. I’ve probably had five cigarettes in the last ten years and that’s not bad, considering. (They’ve all been when I was out drinking with friends, so that’s my biggest trigger, even today. There’s just something about good times and a highball and the smell of a cigarette …)
Triggers really are key. I worked myself down from two packs a day to a pack a week and it was by recognizing those trigger moments. This was all back in the era when you were not worse than a baby raper because you were a smoker, of course. But when I finally got to the place where cigarettes went stale before I smoked ’em — that took me the better part of two years — I was finally able to quit and make it stick.
I’ve known junkies who found heroin easier to quit than smokes.
However, you will get my coffee mug when you pry it out of my cold dead hands.
Jenny
A combination blessing and curse for me. Cursed with being born with bronchitis, I was always warned not to smoke. Of course that didn’t work on me.
During the period when I smoked 2+ packs a day I found I simply could not smoke when I caught colds because it would develop quickly into a grippe and often into bronchitis. So for 2 weeks a year (some time twice a year) I’d cold turkey quit.
The first time I decided to quit smoking (at around 20) I did it when the last cig tasted just awful, and I’d keep that in my head for whatever the time period was that it took for the habit to lapse.
The downside was I quickly gained 20 lbs. So I started smoking again in the hope my metabolism would speed up. Nope. I’ve never returned to my early 20s metabolic rate. So I quit again, same way — when the last cig tasted bad.
I then found I could smoke every once in a while, and would bum a cig from a friend (this was still in the 70s when smokers were still prevalent everywhere — even still on airliners). I got a kick out of people saying “I didn’t know you smoked.” I’d tell them I don’t, and I didn’t in anyway most people think of it — as a habit. Just before my first kid was born I quit entirely. So nearly 40 years now. But I know how not to make a habit of it. I think that’s the key.
Cigs come in packs of 20, and they do go stale, so maybe that is the problem for a lot of people. They smoke the pack — which costs a fortune nowadays (a carton of 10 cost 2 bucks when I started smoking) — before it goes stale. And it happens so fast that they’re hooked on the habit again. Just a guess.
Jenny,
I steadfastly refuse to have anything to smoke, ever. I never did stop enjoying cigarettes, I just decided it was time to quit. A couple things helped. After the MI the doc gave me a drug that is supposed to help with quitting – CHANTIX (just came to me). That stuff was so awful that after 3 days of it I decided going cold turkey was better. I failed that after a couple-three days when I discovered an old pack with a few cigs in a jacket pocket. Fired one up in the back yard. Stale as hell. Took a couple drags and said to myself, “How f’in stupid are you? Really, how stupid?”
Put it out and that was that. But I don’t take any chances with rekindling that habit.
Be relentless at it.
Oh, I can have a smoke once in a while, if I want to, but the times that I want to are so few and far between that I don’t bother.
Yep. Find something to replace the cigarettes….I skipped the crack and went straight to heroin
Might actually be cheaper too
Certainly more socially acceptable these days. ;)
I wasn’t looking to quit, but I received a large dose of negative reinforcement that was very compelling. We had an “incident” on the drill rig that nearly maimed me and nearly killed the helper. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured and nothing important on the rig broke. I was so shaken, though, that I had the driller shut everything down and I called a break. I got a cig from the truck and took a huge drag to settle my nerves. Well, I had lit the filter and sucked the fumes deep into my lungs. I puked my toenails up and couldn’t eat the rest of the day I was so sick. Each time I’ve tried to smoke a cigarette since, I get sick all over again. Cigars – no problem. It’s been 25 years and I almost never have a craving any more.
Probably in the last 60’s or early 70’s my Dad had a co-worker who’d quit years before, but still carried a pack for people who bummed cigarettes off of him. The pack was a pack of Lucky Strikes, in the green wrapper (the one they’d discontinued a couple decades earlier). The tobacco was so old the first drag would suck all the tobacco dust into the person’s lungs, leaving him with an empty paper tube in this hand. No one ever bummed a second smoke from him.
Thanks for the encouragement. I am tempted every so often but I suspect if I started again I’d be back to two packs a day in no time, so while I might be able to get away with ONE every couple of years, that’s really my limit.
I have good reason not to smoke — my mother quit smoking (after enjoying them for 40+ years) when she developed pneumonia and nearly died. At the worst part of it her lips were actually blue.
I’ll never forget how she looked … and how scary that time was. She’s not had a cigarette since. It’s a terrible way to quit but very effective. It’s even worked on me!
My favorite place to meet people for drinks was about the only place in town where you could still smoke in the bar … this year the entire building went smoke free and so that’s another trigger removed. I’m sort of wistful about it (it’s the end of an era) but I know it’s for the best.
Jenny
“In a cigarette it’s taste. In a sports car, it’s impossible.”