<p>mkm56:</p>
<p>OK, by way of a little background. I was a full time smoker by 1970 and the last time I had made a serious attempt to quit was the summer 1973. I quit, spur of the moment, just a fluke really, a little over 2 years ago. I got the flu, it hurt my sore throat to smoke, so I figured I would just take a day off until my throat felt better. My last cigarette was one puff from two packs I had just gone to the store at midnight to buy. I tamped it out after one puff and put it back in the pack to save it. That was the last puff I ever took. I was absolutely stunned when I went 24 hours without nicotine. I had to go a second 24 hours just to prove it had actually happened. By the start of the third day, I knew that this would probably be my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to quit. I made the decision to carry one and was confident on the morning of the third day that I would never smoke another cigarette as long as I live.</p>
<p>Quitting smoking is like those cheap woven bamboo Chinese finger trap toys – where you put a finger in each end of the woven tube and try to pull them out. The more you fight, the harder the trap tightens its grip. The secret is to relax, stop pulling against the trap, and your fingers slide right out. The same thing applies to smoking. It is almost impossible to use willpower to beat smoking. If willpower worked, smokers would just have two or three a day and not worry about it, but willpower doesn’t work. In fact, the more you try to deprive yourself of smoking, the tighter the trap.</p>
<p>It doesn’t help that the nicotine merchants (Marlboro, SmithGlaxoKline, etc.) spend millions of dollars a year teaching you that escaping nicotine addiction is impossible. You’ll turn into an ogre. You’ll go crazy. Yadda, yadda, yadda. The reality is quite different. There are more ex-smokers in the United States then smokers. About 50 million Americans have quit smoking and none of them are superman.</p>
<p>The very fact that you are buying “quitting aids” is self-defeating. What’s the message in that? “I can’t quit without help.” “It’s too hard.” “I’m too weak, I need something that will quit for me…” The reality is that it’s not too hard, you are not too weak, and you can quit without help. In fact, you can quit and be joyous about it. It’s a terrifically empowering thing. Believe me, Marlboro and SmithGlaxo don’t want you to know that!</p>
<p>I was very fortunate. Maybe it was luck. Maybe it was the hand of God, who knows. The day I went 24 hours without nicotine, a website popped up in Google when I went searching for information. </p>
<p>[WhyQuit</a> - the Internet’s leading cold turkey quit smoking resource](<a href=“http://www.whyquit.com%5DWhyQuit”>http://www.whyquit.com)</p>
<p>This is a non-profit free site that features the work of Joel Spitzer, who was one of the first people doing quit smoking clinics for the American Red Cross back in the 1970s. He’s run thousands and thousands of quitter through hundreds and hundreds of 2-week programs and has seen it all. This was back when government money was available for quit smoking programs, before the policy changed, all the money was redirected to the drug companies, and quitting rates plummeted.</p>
<p>Education and support is the most effective way to quit and stay quit. It all starts with understanding that we smoke for one reason and one reason alone. We are junkies and we live our lives to get the next fix in 30 minutes. The only stress cigarettes relieve is the stress a junkie feels when he needs the drug again. Light up, the nicotine hits the brain with a “Pow” in eight seconds like a crack pipe and – voila – the “stress” is relieved. But, guess what? Normal people never feel that “stress”. The only people who feel that “stress” are nicotine junkies. The only way to permanent end that “stress” is to stop being a nicotine junkie. How do you stop being a junkie? The same way that heroin users and alcoholics escape the trap. You have to stop using the drug. Period.</p>
<p>Once you understand that and understand that 50 million people have done it, then you simply accept the short period of discomfort from the withdrawal and the psychological re-brainwashing to undo the junkie thinking in the same way that you accept six weeks of discomfort if you break your arm. You just accept it as the price of healing. </p>
<p>The initial quitting phase is the hard part, IMO. In an educated cold turkey quit, it gets easier with every passing day and week and month (and year, so far!) You have to work at it. I would spend a couple hours a day at [WhyQuit[/url</a>] during the first weeks, just like you would have spent two hours a night in a quitting clinic back in the old days. And then stay with it. You want to gradually change the way you think about smoking. Now, when I see smokers standing outside the grocery store, I see a circle of junkies jabbing themselves with syringes. Kinda takes all the romance out of it.</p>
<p>Staying quit is easy. You can never use nicotine again. Research studies have shown that 95% of all ex-smokers who take one puff end up back smoking their full amount or more. It’s like heroin addicts. There’s no having a little heroin every once in a while after you’ve quit. Same with nicotine. I take it very seriously because I never plan to quit again. Every month, on the anniversary of my quitting, I spent 30 minutes or so reading a few of these stories from **The One Puff **files:</p>
<p>[url=<a href=“Freedom - Information”>Freedom - Information]The</a> One Puff Files - Navigating Withdrawal - - Understanding Dependency, Its Costs & Recovery - Freedom from Nicotine - Message Board Yuku](<a href=“http://www.whyquit.com%5DWhyQuit%5B/url”>http://www.whyquit.com)</p>
<p>That’s the support forum for [url=<a href=“http://www.whyquit.com%5DWhyQuit%5B/url”>http://www.whyquit.com]WhyQuit[/url</a>] and those are stories of people who had quit for months, years, even decades, and threw it all away because they thought it would be OK to have just one. When you see these people struggle to quit again – or die of lung cancer before they quit again – it makes you want to cry. Anyway, it drives home, for me, the concept of “never take another puff” and I renew my personal commitment to never take another puff for another 30 days until my next anniversary. I do it as an insurance policy, even though I haven’t thought of smoking a cigarette in more than 20 months. I’ve pushed all my chips to the center of the table; I don’t intend to ever smoke again.</p>
<p>When I say that I’m applying some of the same techniques to exercising, I’m trying to find positive motivation. I never thought about “missing cigarettes”. Instead, I took a long deep breath, felt the air draw into my lungs, and imagined how nice it was going to be when the wheezing stopped (it did, after a week or so without smoking). It was always looking forward to achieving a positive goal rather than moping around feeling deprived. Same thing with this exercise. I’m trying to keep seeing a little progress every day, every week, and taking satisfaction and empowerment from that to keep going forward. It makes me happy that I did my 30 minutes on the exercise bike tonight. Feels good. Makes me want to exercise again tomorrow. I’ll try to draw something from that for the next day. Writing about it here is a way of channeling that positive motivation. Staying focused.</p>
<p>Hope something in this monologue helps. Download some of the free books and quitting guides at [url=<a href=“http://www.whyquit.com%5DWhyQuit%5B/url”>http://www.whyquit.com]WhyQuit[/url</a>]. Their stuff is incredible. Their support forums are hard-core. You have to be off nicotine for 72 hours before you can join and then, if you ever use nicotine in any form, you lose your membership and posting privledges permanently. At least a third of their members are still posting and still confirmed non-smokers at the one-year anniversary – an astonishingly high percentage. Their approach works.</p>