The difficulty of quitting varies a lot from person to person. I knew a couple back in the nineties, where one partner was able to quit using the patch. It just worked for him, and was reportedly not that difficult. He was done with tobacco immediately, and done with nicotine entirely within the month.

The other partner tried everything. Cold turkey, gradual reduction, patches, gum, change of location plus each of those, the works. As you can imagine given the domestic situation, she had exactly the right kind of support. None of it helped for over a decade. She was finally able to quit for good around 2010, and just a month later discovered that it was too late. Smoking had already given her the cancer that would end her life.

That said, this story kind of agrees with you. The partner who quit is still alive, and quite healthy. It might be easy, or it might be the hardest thing you've ever done. No matter how hard it is, though, lung cancer is even harder.

I quit cold turkey after 7 years of smoking and I'm really glad that I did.

So with that I can say: the pain of quitting doesn't last only a day, it's good you didn't experience depression, I never had depression before or after that but I was clinically depressed for 3 weeks, I was apathetic about life in general, would wake up and not feel motivation to do anything, I'd do them anyway because it was a routine (eat, shower, work) but I really felt I'd never be happy as I was before.

It began to fade after the first week, during the second week I'd still feel urges to have a cigarette after a coffee or lunch, or just when I was bored. Third week was easier and by the end of the first month I was over the initial withdrawal symptoms.

But again: it's not "just a day", it's not really "omg, this is so easy, I'm over it". I had to constantly remind myself to NEVER had a drag, I got drunk during the third week and it was a pretty good feeling to deny a cigarette a friend wanted to share.

I was a 2 pack a day smoker during the last year of smoking, that might have impacted how much the withdrawal symptoms lasted or how strong they were.

It's on of the best things I've done in life, it also gave me a huge boost of confidence to do other stuff, my mindset nowadays is "I quit smoking cold turkey, I can do almost anything when I commit to".

Yeah that first time you quit is easy. Then something bad happens in life and you smoke because you're sad. Now you know how easy it is to quit so paradoxically you don't actually quit. You turn into a every-other-weekend smoker. Then after months or years of on-off smoking you realize that it's no longer as easy to quit as that first time. Now that one smoke is actually going to matter.

Also, nicotine has the highest capture rates of any drug (over 30%) and the third highest dependence rate (after heroin and cocaine). Startup founders with unbelievable amounts of determination may be able to just give it up and say it was "easy" (I said the same thing the first time I quit) but many people are not so gifted.

A lot of this impression about the difficulty of quitting smoking arose in the 1980s and 1990s. At the time, smoking was omnipresent and taken for granted. Nobody asked permission to light up any place. If you were a nonsmoker out with friends, you'd sometimes be left nearly alone by yourself when everyone went out to take a smoke break together. I never smoked, but I reckon that these social factors made it much, much more difficult to quit and to stay quit.

A critical mass was reached in the 2000s, though, and now the bulk of social pressure is on helping people quit and stay quit. Frequently it's the smoker who will be alone in the cold on their smoke break. & besides, we have effective smoking cessation drugs like Chantix (how my wife quit).

The pain of cold turkey stopping and the hardship of quitting in general vary widely between individuals; and even to a lesser extent at different periods of time for the same individual, I think.

I once stopped smoking for ~3 weeks and I too found it easier than advertised, but not nearly as easy as you; also, the most problematic symptom for me was irritability (I was a complete irrascible bastard while stopping). And I know people for which it is very, very hard (cold sweats, migraines, etc. for two weeks).

It's great that you had it easy. I didn't. When I quit nicotine about two years ago, I got kicked into a deep depression that lasted about 3 months (Worth noting: I had a history with depression). I developed panic attacks (and I had no previous history with those).

On the plus side:

1. I quit and stayed quit.

2. I'm mostly back to my old self. No more depression or panic attacks. Not now, and never again!

3. The whole experience cost me so much that I doubt I'll feel much temptation to use nicotine ever again.

It's really different for everyone. So I'll put this out as a word of caution: my response to that one accidental cigarette has been (twice) that cravings increase over the next couple of weeks, then I was having one random shitty night, and feeling all "fuck everything", bought a pack at the night store, and was back at square zero.

I'm glad it works like this for you, though :)

Focus on the smell. Make it long enough (about 24 hours) to notice other smokers smell. That is the smell of other people being repulsed by you. You smell like that in every elevator, every time you introduce yourself to someone, and no amount of gum or tooth brushing covers it up. You can't smell it while you smoke, but the rest of the world can.

It was enough to keep me dedicated knowing I could confidently talk to anyone after I quit without having to wonder if they were immediately put off by my smell.

People who still smoke always complain that ex-smokers are the worst and most judgmental about smoking, and it's 100% true. It's because we feel seriously ashamed of ourselves for being so stupid for so long, it comes out as assholishness sometimes.

My Dad quit smoking when I was little, back in the days when people "chain smoked" (i.e. They used a lighter once a day, and just kept lighting new cigarettes with their butts). He credits his success with this tactic: He loudly told everyone he knew that people who can't quit smoking are pussies. Fear of total public humiliation was enough to keep him from relapsing, or so he claims. He never did relapse that I saw though. He also told us this story often enough that none of us kids ever touched a cigarette.

Goodluck. I just quit cold turkey a few years back and just refused to do it again. Now if I try have a drag of someone else's it tastes so vile that I can't see what I ever got from them. It can be done. Just do it!

Best of luck! It's disappointing how much of our world is designed to trick us into regressing into bad habits.

My dad also quit a long time ago; he's really proud of it, because he just decided to quit one day and it worked, without ever relapsing and without very negative effects. Or so he says. I don't really believe all of it, but the point to take away seems to be that it's all about willpower.

Good luck to you!

The easiest way to break a bad habit is to replace it with another habit. Just make sure it's a better habit otherwise there was not much point was there?