It's a truly amazing book that read in a few hours and simply states very simple facts about smoking, the kind that you know but refuse to know. It force you to reconsider your smoking. That cigarette in the morning feels good? (no it doesn't) The one after lunch? (neither)... Step by step you naturally come to realize that every justification for smoking, all the fear of withdrawal, all the drama around smoking has no foundation.
You can just quit. Don't mess around with excuses, just quit. Next time you want to smoke just think "Not worth it" and forget it. But read the book.
EDIT: Allen Carr https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Allen_Carr
You don't use any nicotine replacement (gum, e-cigs, patches...) and it's not stressful like the willpower method (I tried a plethora of different ways to quit in the past) and the process is quite quick. I procrastinated on reading the book (looking back I was afraid) but eventually decided to bite the bullet and book myself in for a 5hour group clinic session.
The session took place in December 2008. I walked in at 9am afraid, skeptical and wondering whether I was really in the right frame of mind to quit. I extinguished my last cigarette at 2pm that day and have felt great about it since. I know I sound like an evangelist but this is one product I'll shout about. Colour me a fanboy.
Ping me if you would like more details.
Unless one is a chipper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipper_(tobacco)), it's an all or nothing thing. Just let go.
Just pick a method and don't let you talk yourself into having just one. After I turned 22 I realized it was about time for longterm damage to start and it wasn't socially cool anymore at that age.
Good luck!
As my supply dwindled, I rolled the butts into second generation cigarettes. And then those into third generation. Finally I ended with a fourth generation cigarette, the nastiest thing I've ever smoked - and it took me days to finish it.
That cigarette, plus overwhelming amotivation to leave home, was my cold turkey route to quitting successfully after hundreds of tries with other methods.
I actually tried chantix first and took it for a week and started getting depressed which lead to suicidal thoughts. I should have looked up the side effects first (duh! i know). Anyway after that crazy little mind f*, i just told myself that im going to quit cold turkey. Quitting cold turkey is rough, it sucks, its not easy but you gotta go through it. There are no shortcuts, no easy way out and no excuses. Just realize that once you truly commit, it gets easier as time passes. Its hard to believe that it gets easier when you're going through it but its true. For me (as well as other HNers), being stubborn I think was a key factor in getting over it.
Things that helped me cope: - Drink juice, real 100% not from concentrate pineapple juice helped me "cleanse my palette". - Stop over eating / eating greasy foods. It was a HUGE trigger for my smoking craving. Find your triggers and try to avoid them. One thing that really sucked was I had to stop attending my daily starbux sessions. Change is sometimes good. =) - Be in the right mind set. It helps if there is someone to support you. There are support groups and sites out there. Let your pride/ego go and ask for help. At least you can be somewhat anonymous online. - I hear running/ working out helps but I'm not much of a workout guy. Yoga and breathing exercises do help. Look up "breathing Yoga" to learn some techniques.
Again, there are a lot of resources out there to help. I hope that you got some good insight in this thread. Good luck!
Then a great thing happened; I started to think about it less and less. After 4 months I almost never thought about it, and cravings were very rare. The two or three cigarettes I've tried since quitting tasted just awful and made me nauseated.
Good luck.
I think that's an important point. Even if you don't quit this time, you have to keep trying.
I tried to quit at least six or seven times before finally succeeding eight years ago. The last time, I used nicotine gum for about a week. Before that, I had quit for up to a month, more than once, with help from either the patch or gum. All my relapses came during social situations.
I was up to a pack a day when I quit. I begun by realizing my habits. About once an hour I'd get up and go outside for a smoke.
When I decided to quit (the first time) all I did was delay to my next "appointment". In other words - get to work at 7am, 8am comes around and you want to go smoke. At this point I would squirm, fidget and think about the smoke, but not actually do it until 9am. Continue this process through out the day. I also kept my associative smokes (getting in the car, finishing a beer, having a coffee etc) in tact at this point. These served as a familiar refuge from the shock I was going through during the day.
I did this for a week or two (until it became easy), then applied the same process (recursion!) to my current habits.
Somewhere along the line, when I felt comfortable I took out some of the associatives (only have a smoke when I drive to work, not coming home).
I kept repeating this until I was down to 2 - 3 a day, then one day (without prior planing) said I was going to make it the whole day. I don't think it worked, but I kept trying every once in a while.
The first time I used this process I quit for a few months. The second (and current time) has been about 8. I still want to smoke from time to time.
Once again - YMMV but I didn't really WANT to quit. I liked smoking, but my unparalleled stubbornness helped me get through.
The idea was to have four rows of 13 notches for the 52 weeks of the year.
After about 6-7months I didn't need it anymore, but I still keep it to this day as a memento. It really helped to look up at it every time I had a craving and think 'look how far you have come'
It will be four years in October since I stopped smoking. I smoked for half of my life from 13-26
The critical factors I identified were a public commitment to stop smoking and a definite future date to quit.
Having the date set in advance, a few months away, gives you time to mentally prepare yourself, gets you used to the idea of becoming a non-smoker, and adds a very helpful fallback of "I really want to smoke, but I'm not going to throw away all those months of effort".
Making a public commitment (i.e. telling everyone who'll listen that you'll be quitting on [date]) makes your quitting date a bit more important, meaningful and harder to change your mind about as it approaches. It also increases the cost of recidivism: you'd have to admit you failed.
My doctor was one of the people I told about my intention to quit. He offered to prescribe a course of Zyban and I believe it made a huge difference. Just make sure you find out how long you're supposed to take the Zyban before quitting, and start taking it sufficiently in advance of quitting day.
Good luck!
But I haven't had much problems quitting any habbits thus far. Overall I get hooked quite fast, but if I try to ignore and overcome the need for e.g. playing Quake Live( or something like that) I seem to don't care anymore after 2-3 days. (until I play again)
I still want to smoke from time to time, because I really liked it, but the desire usually vanishes 10min later.
I quit by using patches for 3-4 days to get over the worst of the withdrawals, then went turkey, it's rough, but you just have to suck it up, try to exercise a lot, tell all your friends your quiting so they will hassle you if you fall off the wagon, think of the money your saving and try to stay positive, the first week is brutal.
Maybe im one of the lucky ones, I'm not as addicted to smoking as i am to caffeine, I can go for days or weeks and not bother to buy a pack(unless i know that there will be heavy drinking tonight), but if i miss one daily cup, well i believe most HN-ers know whats it like to have your whole sleeping schedule messed up for days.
Smoking i actually enjoy, i enjoy good coffee too, but im more worried about the withdraw, i was never worried about nicotine withdraw, so i don't conciser it a real addiction, not like coffee at least. Im not in a rush to quit, but i am careful, i don't want a second habit to turn into a hard addiction.
Or maybe it has and im just rationalizing my addiction. A tip if you really want to quit: don't rationalize, there is no rational reason to smoke, i smoke because i enjoy it, and the joy is just a chemical reaction in my brain. Don't rationalize, there is no rational reason. Just quit and be done with it. Don't think too much. Best way to kill an addiction is to starve it.
One of the folks in my dental office suggested (a) use mouthwash and, ideally, dental floss after each lapse; (b) make a chart and track your progress - make a game of it. That kind of jives with the patches, lozenges, etc. and adds some twists.
Seems stupid, doesn't it? Don't want to smoke? Well, then don't! But... some know... it's easy to make a long series of "Ok, just one more."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cigarette
And here's where I order my gear from:
i used nicotine gum to avoid the trip outside to smoke.. at least i could get my nicotine fix while still in front of the PC.. was like this for months then transitioned to ordinary gum.. that's the time when my will was really put to the test.
worked for me.. never smoked another cigarette since i went down this road.. nicotine-independent now for two years.
btw.. i've been a heavy smoker (1.5-2 packs/day) for 22 years straight, before this.
In the end, I wished I had just gone cold turkey. Quitting was totally worth it though (pack a day habit).
I tried quitting cold turkey several times, and it just didn't work. But I am not nearly as disciplined and goal-focused as I think many HNers are. So, I'll describe what I see as a "realistic" path for quitting that incorporates the common fallabilities of stimulant-prone, somewhat indolent nerds with plenty of bad habits, rather than idealistic supermen full of improbable willpower and an obsessive interest in veganism, yoga, body purification, etc.
To start with, meditate on the fact that 99% of the cigarettes you smoke are really "maintenance" cigarettes; there is no buzz, there is no genuinely pleasurable "high." You had that when you first started smoking, and that's why you kept smoking, but that feeling long went away. The only time you're going to get a buzz anymore - if you're lucky - is with your first cigarette in the morning. The rest of the time, you only think you're getting "higher"; in fact, your nicotine levels have just dropped, and all you're doing is replacing them back to "normal" level in order to avoid the irritability of withdrawal. Focus intensely on the pointlessness of this for a while, and decide you should quit if for no other reason than that alone.
I don't think I could've done it without the nicotine gum. The gum really helped. The delivery format was key; I tried patches first, but they neither provide that feeling that something is going on orally that smokers want, nor deliver nicotine fast enough in sufficient volumes. When you chew gum, it hits you 30 seconds in, so you satisfy the craving _now_, not in 45 minutes.
Like many technocratic novelty seekers, I tried the e-cigarettes, which were neat but proved to be a basically useless gimmick that didn't solve the problem to my satisfaction. They also broke too fast to function as a viable replacement; these products are of very terrible quality. The other thing about e-cigarettes is that there's nothing to stop you from puffing on them all day inside, which is exactly what I did. That sort of misses the point, and has plenty of unpleasant side effects. Besides, I'm sceptical that breathing in whatever is in them, however allegedly carcinogen-free and undeniably tar-free it is, is an asset to one's health.
I did continue chewing the (4 mg) gum for a lot longer than their 12-week instruction book suggests (probably about 9 months), but eventually got off of it too. I don't think it's because the gum is really particularly addictive; I'm just very easily given to form new consumption habits. It's really is a lot easier than quitting cigarettes because it doesn't have quite the same cognitive feedback, even if it is nicotine, although you do need to have a firm commitment to quitting it as well, and keep in the forefront of your mind that it is a transition tool.
Also, 4 mg gum is designed for people who do 25+ cigarettes a day, while the 2 mg version is for people who do a pack or less. Because I did slightly less than a pack a day, the 4 mg version was actually a pretty high - and sometimes overwhelming - dose. It dehydrated me and irritated my bowels. This turned out to actually be a good thing because it provides negative feedback that incentivises quitting the gum.
As I said, the gum is not nearly as addictive as some say it is, at least, not if you really hit it hard. It's too much of a "good" thing. Call it a little nicotine aversion therapy. I suppose this is an unusual approach and may be not for everyone, since the idea is to ween yourself off nicotine by cutting back. I kind of did the opposite and lost my taste for nicotine by blasting myself with it in this manner. I don't know that this is the best approach in general, especially if you don't tolerate the side effects of gum overuse well, but since your question is about how _I_ quit smoking, I tell you what worked for me.
The strongest pressure for me turned out to be social; even with the gum, the other thing that probably made the single biggest difference was going hermit for about ~2 months and not really seeing most of my close friends, almost all of whom smoke -- some only "socially", but nevertheless, the point is that smoking is what we'd do when we hung out. Smoking with them was just force of habit at that point, not really nicotine cravings per se. It has an intensely psychological dynamic.
I won't say I haven't had a single cigarette during this intervening time. Of course I've had some while out drinking with friends. But it's been more than a year since I properly quit and find that I am now at the point where cigarettes slightly disgust me (in a non-inebriated context) and under no circumstances do I find myself wanting to continue smoking on my own after I get back home. I don't even know why I do it once in a while with them; it's stupid. It's definitely not because I any longer derive any sort of perceptible satisfaction in breathing in smoke, especially since it irritates your respiratory tract a lot more if you only do it very sporadically. It's social inertia, I suppose - maybe a little bit of that feeling of solidarity that all smokers commune in now that it's been relegated to the margins as a seedy, non-mainstream habit. I'm not mentioning it to discourage you, but only in keeping with my claim to provide a "realistic" assessment above. All other things being equal, cultivating non-smoking friends makes things easier, but one doesn't generally choose one's friends that way.
An important thing to remember is that the rituals, habits and experiences associated with a smoke break should probably be preserved, just without the smoking. If you give up those too, you will find yourself unnecessarily miserable and feeling like you gave up far more than you have to. There is a strong point of view out there that you should jettison habits associated with smoking because they act as "triggers" and impede positive reinforcement, but personally, this was not my experience. It's far more important to find new ways and angles from which to enjoy the same stuff you used to do with a cigarette without a cigarette (which, after all, is probably a huge range of stuff) than to try to bend and contort your lifestyle and behaviour in improbable, contrived ways!
So, if you liked to drink and smoke, keep drinking, just don't smoke. If you liked to take a break with a cigarette and a cup of coffee several times a day, keep taking a break with the coffee. If you like going downstairs on smoke breaks with your coworkers because of the feeling of taking a break, keep doing that, but without the smoking, though be weary of the danger of putting yourself in situations where everyone else is smoking and you're not; if you can find some other way to take a "break" from work, I would.
In general, the theme here is that you should basically continue the habits you had in connection with smoking, whether they're good or "bad" habits, because otherwise you'll crave those experiences too, and it'll make things that much worse. It is likely to seriously jeopardise the sustainability of your quitting project.
Invent new habits, and new rituals that you can do without smoking, too. While I was on the gum, I invented a new way of taking a "break" and checking out of the drudgery of the universe; instead of going out on the balcony and surveying the world, cigarette in hand, I'd pop in a piece of gum and play BZflag for a half hour. It seems kind of trivial, is certainly not productive, and, well, nobody said the gum is really good for me either, but it was soon a ritual I looked forward to in place of a smoke break. It's those kinds of little reinforcement modifications that make all the difference. They new kinds of rituals furnish new qualia to associate with them, and new junctures in the passing of time to look forward to.
I still sit outside on my balcony and code, just with a cup of coffee or tea more commonly in hand now, not with cigarettes. However, I got a new, much improved outdoor table set, so in this tiny but nevertheless important way, I feel like I've moved on to a newer, better era in my life; it's a little treat for not smoking outside anymore. You need those treats.
Notably, nicotine impedes absorbtion of caffeine, meaning you need more caffeine to get the same effect as a nonsmoker. Giving it up has made me appreciate my coffee a lot more.
Also, periodically reading through http://www.whyquit.com and looking at all those charts that tell you what happens 1, 2, 12, 24, 72 hours, X days, X years, after you quit is also a great inspiration to keep at it.
One last thing worth mentioning, in which I will take a page from whyquit.com's sanctimonious narrative, is that you should not, under any circumstances, fall into the trap of believing that you're going to quit by simply cutting down. For most people, including myself, attempts to quit by going down to "only 3 a day" or some similarly inane idea will result in complete futility. You're not doing yourself any favours at all with that approach because by taking that route, you're saddling yourself with all the misery of magnified withdrawal because you're smoking less, while not doing anything that's going to make that withdrawal go away. In this suggestion - however well-intentioned - lies madness and oblivion. Don't do it.