Please forgive my presumption, but I wanted to stop in and wish you all good luck! I’m pulling for you.
::fingers crossed for all you quitters::
(I’ve never smoked, but my husband did. He’s been quit for about 2 years now, I think.)
Best of luck to ya! I will be three months free of the nasty addiction tomorrow.
I had tried everything to quit. Patches, gum, lozenges, zyban, chantix, cold turkey, and weaning off. Nothing worked. Then, I heard about The Easy Way to Stop Smoking.
I had planned to quit on Oct 10th. I finished the book three days early - on Oct 7th. That night I threw out all the smokes I had left and haven’t touched one since. It really has been easy this time. The book is only $15 at bookstores, had I known what a difference it makes, I would’ve spent 10 times that.
The problem with gradual weaning is that you really don’t do a darn thing to combat the addiction if you’re still smoking even 1 cigarette a day. Once you put that garbage back into your blood stream, you’ve satisfied the addiction, and it therefore still has a hold on you.
Cold turkey is really and truly the best way. And believe me, I tried them all, too; drawing bands around my cigarettes, eliminating one smoking time or place per week (first week no smoking while on the phone, 2nd week no smoking while in the car, etc., to try to break the habit of smoking), gum, patches, hypnotism, a 6 week clinic run by the hospital, acupuncture, Wellbutrin, everything.
Quite a few people report great success with the mental aspect of quitting by reading Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. It didn’t do anything for me, but it might be worth the price to see if it can help you change how you think about smoking.
The 2 things that helped me get through the hardest part of the withdrawal and the hand-to-mouth-and-sucking habit were water and deep breathing. I started carrying around a sport-top water bottle and every time I felt the urge to lift a cigarette to my mouth and pull a drag, I’d raise the bottle to my mouth and pull a drag of water instead. It got to the point that after the actual physical addiction was gone, I became almost as “addicted” to my water bottle as I had been to the cigarettes (went into complete panic mode if I didn’t have my water with me, much like I had if I had accidentally run out of the house without cigs!).
Also, there is a misconception about why cigarettes calm and relax people when they feel stressed. They think it’s because of the cigarette, when in fact it’s all about the deep breathing, since nicotine is actually a stimulant. As smokers, we become accustomed to frequently drawing a deep breath in, holding it a few seconds, then slowing blowing it out. As non-smokers, we don’t really stop to take long, slow, deep breaths very often, as there’s really not a reason to do so. But there should be. It really is calming and relaxing! So when you feel really stressed out and wish you could take a smoke break, do go take that break even though you won’t be smoking during it, and then take a bunch of deep breaths. Sometimes I even put my fingers up to my lips to simulate having a cigarette when I do this – do whatever works!
I wish everyone here who’s quitting the very best success!!
Shayna,
Five years, six months, two days, 13 hours, 21 minutes and 6 seconds “smober”. 30,188 cigarettes not smoked, saving $5,283.07 (at 2002 prices!). Life saved: 14 weeks, 6 days, 19 hours, 40 minutes. (http://www.silkquit.org/sqmmiv/meter.aspx)
Former smoker wishing you well.
However, I do not think your technique is the best.
To my mind “gradual cutting down” is about the worst way to quit. It draws out the withdrawal over a long period. Better to just get it over with - pretty well everyone I know who has quit successfully, has quit cold turkey.
That being said, of course different things work for different people.
I can’t remember my exact quit date anymore - sometime in August 2003. I quit cold turkey. I was going in for a sleep study due to apnea, and smoked my last cigarette before my appointment - I gave my half-pack of Marlboros to another smoker.
I didn’t get any sleep in the sleep study (ha!) and tried to go to work, but I ended up going home and sleeping. I slept about 24 hours, and I remember having only one bad day of cravings after that. The next step was not smoking at the bar, and when I accomplished that - smooth sailing! The whole key, in my opinion, is wanting to quit. It won’t work if you don’t want to quit.
Good luck!
Ooh - I found my quit meter!
Four years, four months, four weeks, two days, 1 hour, 46 minutes and 23 seconds. 48392 cigarettes not smoked, saving $4,839.35. Life saved: 24 weeks, 40 minutes.
Neat! Downloaded.
Good luck. 
I managed not to start smoking by calculating how much it cost over a year and then thinking what i would spend the money on.
Here’s a site that helps with that:
Think about it, if you smoke an average 20-a-day, you will smoke 7,300 cigarettes a year. Even if you buy cheaper brands, that still means you spend at least £1,500 on cigarettes every year. So the cost of smoking really mounts up.
What could you buy with that? A holiday, maybe. Or a new wardrobe?
My Mum gave up cold turkey when I came home from school after an over-dramatised health talk and told her she had to stop “or she’d die”. :eek:
I put a glass pitcher on top of my TV with a sign taped on it that says: NOT cigarette Money. Every day I’ll drop $2 (the cost of my habit) in there and be able to literally see how much I’m saving. $60 or so a month is nothing to sneeze at. Cheesy? Yep. Effective? I hope so. I didn’t really have any cravings today, and I’m celebrating with a pizza.
I am really impressed with you all. Like I said, never smoked never will, but I just had a thought. Twenty years ago my ex attended a seminar conducted by the American Lung Association. It cost $30, money back guarantee. He attended, came home convinced it didn’t work, never smoked again. I know there are these seminars out there. “Back then,” it was hyponotism, now it’s I believe called relaxation seminars. Has anyone tried them? What about those laser techniques (sounds weird to me, something to do with the ear).
I bought the ‘Easy Way to Stop Smoking’ book.
My quit day was today. Almost 24 hours now…
Goooooo Red! You can do it!
Keep it up, you guys!
I smoked my last cigarette February 7, 2000.
I haven’t smoked today or yesterday. Tuesday I bummed a cig off a coworker, because I was stressed and wanted it for comfort more than anything. The adult version of a security blanket. :rolleyes:
Today’s my big day!
(chugs some water)
We’re also supposed to start negotiations on the house.
(chugs more water)
IMHO, that’s the best move you could have done to succeed in quitting. You won’t get to this part for awhile, but slowly weening yourself off cigarettes just doesn’t work. The more time you put in between cigarettes, the more you value them.
You look forward to that next smoke and it becomes all the more precious to you. The more you ween, the more value you will put on smoking.
Just read the book and when you’re done you’ll be able to just not smoke.
i took a stop smoking course through my former workplace, but i’d already stopped smoking a few weeks before that. the reinforcement paid off, because that was about three years ago and i haven’t smoked since. the odd thing is i don’t remember my exact quit date. is that unusual??? :eek: you might check and see if there are any hospitals or clinics in your area that offer such a course. a lot of them don’t cost anything.
the posters who posted that you have to *want * to quit are absolutely right. i’d quit several times in the last 20 years and would start back up again when stress loomed.
the real acid test for me just happened a few weeks ago when the doc found a suspicious mass in my left breast. despite my panicky freakout (mammogram and ultrasound comfirmed it was just granular tissue) it never occurred to me to reach for cigarettes. if **that ** episode didn’t make me, i’d say i’m pretty much in the clear!
water and deep breathing as mentioned were invaluable. changing your habits that in the past made you reach for the lighter and smokes in the first place (like reaching for the phone) is critical as well.
rerouting old habits goes a long way to breaking the addiction cycle. i got hooked on online jigsaw puzzles!! i don’t know why, because i don’t do them now, but at the time for about six months, if i wasn’t at work, i was doing those puzzles. they were a godsend. 
someone also said to stay out of bars for a while? totally. beer and cigarettes just seem to be created for one another. coffee as well. it was probably six months before i was completely at ease around liquor. i can enjoy my beer now without jonesing for a cigarette.
best of luck to all you quitters. i’m going to download that quit meter for the home 'puter and see (roughly) hiow much i’ve saved. rather curious to find out.
i missed the edit window.
oh, yeah. one more thing. i agree: don’t try the diet and exercise thing until you’ve beaten the cigarettes. that’s too much and it’ll make you insane. so you gain some weight. big deal. a little extra weight is way better than smoking at any time! i did put on about 25 pounds, but a controlled, three-month program on a specially-prescribed diet pill took care of that and i’m back down to my regular weight.
i would recommend discussing such a thing with your doctor. if he or she has half a brain, they’d be happy to work with you if it means you losing the smokes.
Well I’ve started reading the book. I’m about 1/3 of the way through and it’s really resonating with me. I’m pretty confidant that, by the time I finish it, I will quit. I wonder if it matters if you read it a bit at a time or if it’s better to just sit down and read it straight through?
Anybody else have any updates?