Quit by Choice

Blog

  • Admit That You Are an Addict

    I am a nicotine addict.

    I started choosing not to feed that addiction any more on November 19th, 2001. Since then, I’ve worked with hundreds of people who started making that same choice, and then, a day, a week, or a month or more later, started choosing to feed their addiction again.

    It always used to make me wonder how I was able to maintain my quit when people that had quit before I had, or around the same time as I had, or even after I had, had started choosing to feed their addiction again?
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  • How Can I Quit Smoking Cigarettes?

    I think two things are key; time and repeated conscious choice.

    By time, I mean our conception of time and the conventions we’ve built up around that concept; I don’t know how successful I was in presenting my ideas about this, but I wrote about this in a tale called “what time is it?” that you may want to read (it’s part of a larger collection of stories that I wrote during the first year of my quit that are posted at a site called “tales from the quit“).
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  • Timeline for Quitting Smoking

    No matter how old you are now, and no matter how long you’ve been smoking, quitting smoking now will give you some immediate benefits. For instance, you’ll have more money to spend on the good things (because you’re not throwing it away on supporting your addiction any more) and more time to do the things you want to do (because you’re not spending half your day smoking or planning how to get away to smoke).

    Most importantly, your body starts to heal itself almost immediately after you smoke your last cigarette. I was 45 years old at the time I was diagnosed with emphysema, and I’d been at least a pack-a-day smoker for over 30 years by that point, and I can personally attest to many of the effects described below:
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  • Help Me Quit Smoking Cigarettes

    If you’re anything like me, you used to use smoking to cover up a lot of “stuff”: as a smoker, there were a lot of issues I never had to deal with, because if they threatened to surface, I could always just smoke them away (in other words, I could always just bury them by getting a fix).

    In the early days of my quit, I used to write about how I was “digging deep”, and I encouraged other people to do the same; to look for those issues that we used to cover up with the smokescreen, take them out and look at them in the light of day, and decide what we wanted to do with them before they had a chance to sabotage our quits.
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  • Emotions and Smoking

    When I was smoking, I’d light up a cigarette at the first sign of any strong emotion, whether it was positive or negative. I think it was my way of emulating a stereotype (the “strong, silent type”) that I learned in my childhood (think of James Dean in “Rebel Without A Cause” or Bogie in “Casablanca” or John Wayne in pretty much anything).

    The “smokescreen” gave me something to hide behind so I didn’t have to let anyone else know what was going on inside, and I think that, eventually, it got so good at hiding what was going on inside that it even hid it from me. I remember many times getting into confrontations — especially in relationships — and storming away, lighting up, stuffing whatever it was I was feeling behind the smokescreen and pretending that it really didn’t matter.
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