A few weeks before Thanksgiving of 1989, I got a call from my Mom – she told me that Dad had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and he was going into the hospital the next day so they could remove half of his right lung. She asked if I was thinking of coming home for Thanksgiving, and of course, I said I was. When I flew home for Thanksgiving, Dad had just gotten back from the hospital, and it was a great relief to see him.
You Can Quit and Stay Quit Forever
But (ironically) you can’t do it by deciding that you’re never going to smoke again.
When Will the Cravings Stop?
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.
Worry That You Could Quit Smoking
Did you ever decide that you were going to quit smoking on a certain day, and you were totally determined that this was it, that this was the one that was going to stick, that this was the one where you’d finally succeed? But there was this little voice in the back of your mind, saying, “maybe this will be too hard”; “maybe I won’t be able to do it”; “maybe I’ll fail”…
But you were determined to go ahead and quit anyway; you planned; you committed; you even told your friends and family that you were going to do it, that this was going to be the one! But the little voice kept whispering in the back of your mind, and as your quit date got closer, you became practically certain that it would be too hard; that you wouldn’t be able to do it; that you would fail.
The Wizard of Oz
One of my favorite movies of all time is “The Wizard of Oz”; I first saw it as a kid, way back in the early 60s, and it was nothing more than a fairy tale to me then; witches, wizards, talking scarecrows, flying monkeys… But the older I got, the more I saw in it, and the more I got out of it (if you’ve never seen the movie, go rent it or borrow it from the library or get it from netflix and watch it).