No, really; it’s the easiest part of this: all you have to do is stop smoking. And you already do that, maybe dozens of times every day. Think about it: every time you put out a cigarette, you just stopped smoking. No big deal, right? No stress, no hassle. You just put the cigarette out, walk away from it, and do whatever you need to do next.
The challenge is staying quit once you quit. That’s where most of us fail; we quit, but then, a day, or a week, or a month later, we go back to smoking again.
How Many Times Have You Gone Back?
How many times have you decided you were going to quit, threw away the cigarette you were choking on at the moment, threw away the rest of the pack (maybe even the rest of the carton) and all your ashtrays, lighters and other smoking stuff, and then found yourself digging through the garbage the next day to get them back, or driving to the convenience store or gas station in the middle of the night to replace them?
If you’re like me, you’ve done this (or something like it) too many times to count. It’s embarrassing, isn’t it? You make a firm decision that you’re not going to smoke any more, and the very next day (if you even last that long) you’re back to smoking again.
To me, this is the essence of addiction: it’s not how hard it is to quit (because it really isn’t hard at all), it’s how hard it is to stay quit once you decide that you’re not going to smoke any more. Or, to put it another way, it’s not how hard it is to stop, it’s how easy it is to get started again once you have stopped.
The Power of Repetition
One of the reasons for this is the amount of unconscious practice that we put into reinforcing the habit of smoking: if you’re like most smokers, you probably smoke when you get up, while you’re having your morning coffee, after breakfast, on the way to work, on breaks, on lunch breaks, after lunch, on afternoon breaks, on the way home, with a drink after work, after dinner, while watching TV, while talking on the phone, etc., etc., etc…
If you’re like most smokers, you’re not even aware of smoking most of those cigarettes. And that’s a huge part of the problem: we light up and puff away and we don’t even notice that we’re doing it. Here’s an interesting thought experiment: without thinking about it too long, or taking out your calculator, how many times would you guess you’ve taken a puff of a cigarette?
Jot that number down, and then take out your calculator and do this exercise (this is part of the American Lung Association’s “Freedom From Smoking” program, among others):
How Many Times Have I Practiced Smoking?
- Put the average number of cigarettes do you smoke a day in your calculator (e.g., a pack a day = 20 cigarettes, so start with 20).
- Now, multiply that number by 10 (the average number of puffs per cigarette) to get your average daily number of puffs.
- Now, multiply that number by 365 to get your average yearly number of puffs.
- Now, multiply that number by the number of years you’ve been smoking to get your approximate total lifetime number of puffs.
Pretty amazing, isn’t it? How close were you when you guessed before you did the calculation? If you’re like me (and most other smokers), you weren’t even in the ballpark. In my case, I averaged 20 cigarettes a day and I smoked for 35 years, so my lifetime total turned out to be 2,555,000 (20 X 10 X 365 X 35) puffs. No wonder it was so easy for me to go back again and again: I’d practiced smoking over 2 and a half million times!
How many times have you practiced smoking? Does knowing this give you any ideas about how you can prepare to stay quit this time?