Quit by Choice

You will almost certainly have cravings when you quit, and they’ll almost certainly be both pretty intense and fairly frequent in the beginning. But, as long as you approach them the right way, they’ll get both weaker and less frequent with every passing day.

The right approach is not to fight the craves. In fact, fighting them is the worst thing you can possibly do: There’s an old saying, “What you resist persists.” Fight your craves and they’ll fight back. And they’ll wear you down; after all, they’ve had years of practice at this, and your resistance actually makes it easier for them to win.

The right approach is to accept your craves as a normal part of recovery. Just notice them, acknowledge them, make a deliberate, conscious choice about how you will respond to them and let them pass, and they’ll do just that: pass. See this post for a more in-depth discussion of how to do this.

Here’s something your inner addict doesn’t want you to know:

The cravings will stop whether you feed them or not.

You can prove it to yourself: Picture yourself in the hospital for an extended stay. It’s nothing all that serious, but you can’t just get out of the bed and go wandering out of the hospital whenever you feel like it. You’re stuck in bed, you can’t smoke, and the cravings are intense, especially the first day: you think you’ll go crazy if you don’t get a smoke.

But you can’t smoke.

For a while you fight the craves, but then you realize that it’s not helping (or you get tired of fighting) and you just let them roll over you. At this point, if you’re observant, you notice something: the craves just stop, all by themselves, whether you resist them or not, and more importantly, in spite of the fact that you can’t feed them.

The cravings will always stop, no matter what.

And you don’t have to be in the hospital (or any other place or situation where you can’t smoke) for this to work: no matter why you’re not smoking, whether it’s because you’re not “allowed” to smoke or because you choose not to smoke, the craves will stop whether you feed them or not.

Prove it to yourself: the next time you get a crave, just say to yourself, “Oh. Having a crave.” No big deal; happens all the time. Choose not to feed it and go on to the next thing you need to do. Don’t give it another thought.

What happens?