Kick Your Craving

Stopping smoking

I smoked my last cigarette on Tuesday morning, almost exactly four days ago. As I mentioned in my post about how this blog started I have quit smoking many, many times before. I’m really good at stopping smoking. Staying quit is another matter altogether.

That said, I’m four days in and so far, so good. Also, I had a bit of an epiphany this morning which might be interesting to other people who want to quit smoking.

I’m using nicotine patches to help me quit smoking. This is against the advice in Allen Carr’s book, however it is the method that has proved most successful for me previously.

At 9am this morning I wandered down to the local Boots to buy some new patches, only to find they didn’t open until 10:30. Immediately, I had a mild panic (the same kind of feeling any smokers reading will know when you run out of cigarettes and there’s nowhere still open to buy any). However, I realised there was nothing I could do so decided to go home, make some breakfast and generally keep myself busy until the chemist opened in an hour or so.

Here’s the thing - as soon as I made the decision to do this, the “craving” I had felt went away. This reminded me of a similar epiphany I had when I attended an Allen Carr “EasyWay” clinic a few years ago. With “The Easy Way” method of stopping smoking, you continue to smoke through the treatment, which is in this case group therapy. The idea is that you get to the point where you no longer want to smoke at all, so it is easy to stop.

During the session, our therapist had us describe what withdrawal symptoms were like if we had experienced them, or what we thought they would be like if we hadn’t. Then we took a smoke break. Halfway through the cigarette break, she came in and told us to finish the cigarette we were smoking as that would be the last one we could smoke. That’s how the method would work - we would have to stop right then. All of us looked at each other in shock and quietly finished our cigarettes and returned to the therapy session.

Our therapist immediately told us she was lying and we would be able to continue to smoke until we were ready to stop. Once we got over our relief, she asked us how we felt when she had told us that we would have to stop right then. We all proceeded to describe the withdrawal symptoms we had come up with earlier - but, here’s the thing - we felt them even though we were still smoking cigarettes at the time. This nicely illustrated the point that most withdrawal symptoms are created in our own mind. The don’t really exist, if we don’t allow them too.

Back to this morning - I managed to last out until the chemist opened and got my patches, so I’m still smoke-free going into my fifth day.