The Quit Smoking Thread

[BenchRider]

This is just a polite reminder that you'll have to do this soon.

I smoked for approx 23 years. In the final month there was at least one day where I completed the third pack. That wasn't a party night where I was handing them out. That was all me. I quit cold turkey 2,258 days ago (That's 2018). I dont actually keep track anymore, but I was just going through old emails from my boss while looking for something and found a reply that marked this date for me, so now I know.

Here are the 5 best tips I can give:

1) Get the nicotine gum ahead of time. Try it before the day you plan to quit.
2) On day 1, take the day off from work. Tell your boss if you have one, or whomever in your life you want to bolster respect with and interact with frequently... and you tell them why you are taking the day off. You will make yourself liable to someone besides yourself now and it will make day 1 just slightly easier if you dont have to do anything.
3) Take pride in your steak of the # of days without smoking. Breaking the streak is a sin. To get started... there was a lot of saying to myself "If I had only just quit Sunday, I would already be at 2 days and that is the hard part!" Saying that to myself over and over again is something that took place in the 1-2 months before I was able to get up the guts and finally name my real cold turkey day. This is what got me to the point where I could do this. The streak is important even before it begins.
4) No running. It won't be sustainable for your body during the quitting period and it won't take up enough of your time. Lots and lots and lots of walking instead. I walked several times each day for 1-3 hours each time. Sometimes I would get home, start to go crazy again immediately, and just go back out and walk again. I suggest fight music in the headphones because it will be tough sometimes and you will need to make it dramatic if you want to win the fight. I had this on repeat much of the time when it got hard - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp74eazjsJo. Get yourself a nice portable charger to charge your phone from your pocket as you are walking.
5) Read the directions, all of them including dosage and risk of too much gum, but especially for gum use reduction over time. I followed the reduction schedule exactly as I recall. You dont really chew the gum. You put it in your lip like chewing tobacco and chew it only when it needs to sort of be reactivated. If you keep chewing it, you won't get as much nicotine into your system.

Assuming 2 packs per day @ $7.50 each, I have saved about $33,870.

Tell me when you are on day 1. Tell also when you fail. Failure is OK as long as you say something such as "I have failed, but I am not giving up and I have already started my streak again".

[moewan]

I smoked for 30 years, one day I was having a heater out on the deck, and I thought to myself, man I'm really getting no pleasure from this anymore, It's just something to do. Set down a half a pack of Marlboro Reds and just stopped, that was four years ago. I know that's not how it is for most people, but that was my experience. A while back my golfing buddy asked me if I miss it, I told him "Every $@#^&*! second of every $@#^&*! day" but I never picked up another one.

[dfs]

Yeah, that "never picked up another one" is the trick. I quit...20-30 times. For me quiting was easy. It was not starting again that was hard. Once I made that connection in my head that I needed not just to quit, but to not start again that made all the difference in the world. It's been 30 years and I look at the price a pack and wonder how anybody could do that to themselves. But every now and then deep in a bottle of wine or waiting for a ride to show up I wish I had one on me. I would pick the habit up again in a minute if I didn't think I would be back at a pack a day within a week.

[westofyou]

I quit 36 years ago, smoked for ten years. I lived with a bunch of woman and only one other smoked, Camel shorts which I hated. So I quit and whenever I wanted nicotine I had a Camel, a blend I detest with all my soul. Slowly I just stopped wanting, caring. Haven't had a drag off one in probably a decade.

Bernard Maupin the guy who wrote The Natural wrote another book I can't recall the name of, but it had this wonderful set of paragraphs about the meaning of a smoke, the relationship with the user, the time of day.. really poignant. Could have been about coffee in the AM, but it was about a smoke and it really rang true.

[RedTeamGo!]

If you want to quit buy a pack of pall malls

[westofyou]

If you want to quit buy a pack of pall malls

It's really a good approach, wean the nicotine need away with crap nicotine

[moewan]

If you want to quit buy a pack of pall malls

Isn't that what our beloved Marge Schott smoked

[Roy Tucker]

Smoking cigarettes is about the only bad habit I never took up.

[RFS62]

Smoking cigarettes is about the only bad habit I never took up.

Same here.

[Chip R]

Never took up smoking. My parents were kind of anti-smoking Nazis. They used to smoke before I was born and my dad lost a lung although I don't recall if that was due to smoking since he was fairly young when that happened. We used to have a little sign on our front door that told people not to smoke in our house. I started smoking the occasional cigar in college and still do but usually after my base ball games and golf. I went out with some friends to watch the Super Bowl back in the 90s and one of my friends only smoked when he got drunk. We'd had quite a bit of beer and he started smoking. I asked him for one because I wanted to see what the attraction was. So I lit one up and it was horrible. So bad.

[Kingspoint]

If you knew how much you stink when you smoke (whatever type of weed you smoke) and how much you stink up the environment around you within 100 feet of your cigarette, you might consider smoking less.

[OldFashionedRed]

My husband gave it up when I caught him lying about an ATM transaction in which he pulled cash to go buy the cigarettes while I was at work, but told me that he had bought a comic book and had put down a deposit on the book. A quick call to the comic book store, on speaker mode, with my husband standing there red-faced, cleared it up

[Kingspoint]

My husband gave it up when I caught him lying about an ATM transaction in which he pulled cash to go buy the cigarettes while I was at work, but told me that he had bought a comic book and had put down a deposit on the book. A quick call to the comic book store, on speaker mode, with my husband standing there red-faced, cleared it up

It's so hard for one spouse to quit while the other still smokes. My dad had a heck of a time quitting with my Mom still smoking. He pulled it off (you have to stay quit with the Spouse still lighting up every day), but it would have been a heck of a lot better if she had joined him. She eventually quit about 5 years later. Both of them quit around their respective retirement ages. It paid off a lot for both of them, but eventually he was down to 60% lung capacity and a pace-maker, but that wouldn't have been just from the cigarettes. A Steel Mill worker, he was exposed to quite a bit of other toxins.

[BenchRider]

My husband gave it up when I caught him lying about an ATM transaction in which he pulled cash to go buy the cigarettes while I was at work, but told me that he had bought a comic book and had put down a deposit on the book. A quick call to the comic book store, on speaker mode, with my husband standing there red-faced, cleared it up

Thanks for sharing this. I laughed.

[BernieCarbo]

If you knew how much you stink when you smoke (whatever type of weed you smoke) and how much you stink up the environment around you within 100 feet of your cigarette, you might consider smoking less.

Funny you mention that. I was talked into going to Riverbend, in Cincinnati, and I get it that is was a country band, but I came home smelling like camel cigarettes and weed. I had to detail my car before I could even go to work.