I quit cold turkey 20 years ago after 30 years of off and on smoking (mostly on). A few days in and the physical withdrawal hit hard. Went away after a few days.
I changed at lot of habits at the same time, better diet, more exercise, less drinking and actually lost a lot of weight.
Never really had the urge again but now, after years of not caring, I hate the smell of cigarettes.
My trigger to quit was listening to a tobacco industry guy explain how the industry had been lying about health dangers for years.
Hang in there, you can do it and will feel much better.
I quit smoking a couple of times. The first time ended after a while when I just started smoking one night because we were around friends who smoked. Quit again a few months later, but still snuck cigarettes on work trips or bad days at work.
Third time was it: I realised that the cigarette I was inhaling before I got on a plane to go home actually tasted terrible and I didn’t really want it, I was only smoking it because… and I couldn’t come up with a good reason why to finish the sentence. So I chucked the pack and the lighter in the bin, haven’t smoked since and haven’t wanted to either. A few twitchy days while the nicotine jones cleared, but no gum or patches, just waited for it to be gone.
If you pick 'em up again now, you’ll only have to start again and go through the last eight months all over again.
I quit 9 years ago after reading Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. I did just like he said to do, put that last one out and never lit another. I struggled for a few days but I kept focusing on the counter, on how many I’d not smoked, how much money I’d saved, “moments of life” I’d saved. I gained about ten pounds but it eventually settled back down after I stopped needing to chew on things. Crunchy salty food and crushed ice helped. I liked grinding my teeth on anything. Beef jerky, caramels. After about a week it was all about breaking the habit.
I only quit this one time, before never for more than a day even when I was really sick. I smoked 22 years and just quit with that book. I still can’t tell you how it worked.
I quit about five years ago, and yesterday was rough. What keeps me on the wagon?
Quitting really, really sucks.
Really. I am not putting myself through that again. "Cause it sucks.
I knew I’d quit after about six months when I made an emergency stop at the corner store to pick up a pack of gum. I found gums and mints the most useful substitutes at the start.
I have one trigger left and I have found a really good alternative behavior, so I’m doing okay. I’ve had bad days since, and needed a nicotine supplement, but I really don’t see going back to smoking.
I quit maybe 4-5 years ago. I only smoked for a couple of years during a hard patch in life. I have made one improvement in my life that was good enough and I decided that should cover smoking and I stopped that day.
I could only tolerate smoking one brand though and they stopped selling it nearby. I could still get it, but I didnt.
The prescription drug Champix worked for me. Just take it for two months and you can even keep smoking during that time, if you want. After about two weeks you will probably stop, if you want to.
I was given the lowest dose of the patch when prepping for my foot surgery this past summer. Lowest because 1) I’ve been smoking a half pack or less a day since I was in college (only have smoked an entire pack whenever I was either stressed out or drinking), and 2) I can go for hours without having one.
I think I lasted 2 days on the patch because I just couldn’t stand even that small amount of nicotine in my system all at once.
Ditto gum. It’s just too much, even the lowest dose.
For me, it’s less about nicotine and more about habit. I’m driving somewhere? Must have one. Must have one after eating. Must have one to break up whatever it is I’m doing.
I had a friend whose habit was very similar. She discovered that it was the act of inhaling/exhaling that was the hardest to break, so she used to blow bubbles instead of having one.
My husband smokes more than a pack a day. He has a mild case of COPD and blames me for his continued smoking because “if you stopped I would too.” I call bullshit on that.
If you threaten to take them away from me I’ll go into screaming crazy mode. It’s the easiest way to ignite my addiction, so to speak.
I don’t recommend it. Dragging around that oxygen bottle and dying choking and gasping from emphysema is fairly unpleasant for all concerned. Unless a heart attack gets you first.
A buddy of mine just celebrated his fourth year of no tobacco. He says the urge is as strong today as it was his first day off cigs.
His secret? A cig quitting app on his phone that keeps track of everything; the money saved, number of cigarettes skipped, health improvements, etc. He shows the app to people (it is very interesting data) and would hate to go back to day one.
I smoke the equivalent of a cigarette or two each year via hits off other peoples’ euro-style joints (mixed weed and tobacco). I smoke marijuana all the time, but those laced with tobacco are distinctively trippy. Do not like.
I quit in 1965 the day I had a heart attack. First I spent a couple weeks in the hospital which was non-smoking, which got me over the worst. There were no patches or gum in those days and cold turkey was the only possibility. Of course, fear of dying was a good motivator (hey, it worked! I haven’t died even once since). I had smoked for 13 years, as near as I can figure. For about 10 years, I imagined that if I was given a diagnosis of something that gave me 6 months to live, I would start smoking to enjoy those six months, but that feeling eventually faded. Now I find the thought of smoking revolting.
Just hang in there. You can do it. You will not regret it.
After about thirty five years of smoking two packs a day (unfiltered Pall Malls), I finally managed to quit after almost ten years of repeated efforts. Even if you relapse, don’t give up. Try it again. And again. And again. Sooner or later, it will take.
I started smoking in the sixth grade (1964) I quit in 1997, at which time I was smoking more than 2 packs a day. I used the Nicorette patch for two weeks. Once the physical nicotine withdrawal was over, I still had cravings for a couple of months. Whenever the cravings got hard, I would work out in my head how many seconds it had been since my last cigarette.
Well, sometimes it is. My brother was a four pack a day smoker for decades. He would get up every hour at night to feed the monkey. He finally had to quit when he started having some cardiovascular issues, but it was way too late. Diabetes set in, along with emphysema, and he had vascular surgery, eventually losing both legs before dying at age 78.
There are some solid data on the effects of quitting. The definitive long-term study on the effects of smoking was carried out from 1951-2001 on a large group of British doctors.
Doll & Peto 2004
The data on the effects of quitting are summarized in Fig 4. If you quit by around age 40 (provided you didn’t quit because you already have a major disease caused by smoking) then your expected mortality is almost indistinguishable from from somebody who never smoked.
Reading this study was a huge psychological boost that really helped me stay off cigarettes for good, since I quit at age 39. It’s good to know that, statistically, making the right choices now and going forward means that being dumb for so many past years has almost no effect on my life expectancy.
If you quit at 50 or older, you don’t quite get to hit the reset button like this, but you still reduce your risk very substantially.
I went to a hypnotist in 1983 after ~ 8 years of smoking that had risen gradually from 4 cigarettes per day to 2/3 pack a day. Wasn’t my first time to attempt quitting but was the one that worked.
I came home, took all my tobacco pipes, pipe tobacco, carton of cigarettes, pipe cleaners, piled them in a pile in the back yard. Doused them with gasoline. Set 'em on fire. Done.
I’ve never craved a smoke since then. I can sort of remember what it was like but it’s like remembering how much I used to enjoy drinking Kool-Aid or sucking my thumb. Remembering it doesn’t conjure up a current interest. In 1983, when bars still allowed folks to smoke, I could go into a bar and drink beer next to people smoking, didn’t bother me to be around it. I can be in a room with smokers now, I don’t hate it or find it enticing either. (I don’t like to be in a room with air conditioner running and someone smoking, for some reason. Don’t like a faceful of smoke, but then most nonsmokers don’t)
The first two weeks involved physical withdrawal symptoms. I was restless and nervous. Went for long walks.
Both times it was about a two or three week stretch of hell to get the physical addiction out of me. But once that was licked it was easy to just not smoke when I felt the need to habitually.
The first time I quit I stayed off of them for about three or four years, and the last time I quit was in 2001, right when I was going through a divorce and losing a job and moving cross-country. I figured my life was pretty much out of control and if I could latch on to the discipline of quitting smoking, at least that would be something I *was *in control of. Seems to have taken. I recall burning through boxes of toothpicks, packs and packs of chewing gum and sacks of apples to get over the oral fixation.
I quit when I turned 35, which was in 1987. One thing I found helpful was drinking Dr. Pepper. It has a kind of burn when it goes down your throat that sort of simulates a drag on a cigarette.
I was a heavy smoker until 1979, before there were patches, gum, vapes, etc.
I made a list of all the brands milder than the one I had been smoking, in reverse order of nicotine content. I immediately switched to the brand right under mine, and they seemed very mild to me. I continued smoking them, without limiting the amount, until they seemed normal. Then I switched to the next on the list, until they seemed normal. After a couple of months, I was smoking Carltons, then the lowest brand available. They were almost like smoking nothing. It took about a month for Carltons to seem normal to me. I have to repeat that at no time did I make any effort to limit the quantity I smoked. One afternoon, it occurred to me that I hadn’t had a cigarette all day… and I didn’t want one. That was it. Since then, I’ve never had any desire to smoke. Now I can’t stand being around anyone who’s smoking.