I quit smoking cold turkey for my (then future) wife among other reasons. It seriously sucked for a couple weeks and, afterward, the thing that really kept me from relapsing was the realization that I didn’t want to go through those miserable weeks again when I had to quit for a second time.
At the time I was around a 15 year, pack-a-day smoker.
Question for former or current smokers: how hard was it for you to start smoking?
The reason I ask is that several of the Stop Smoking guides ‘remind’ you how much you coughed and sputtered when you first started smoking, and I’ve read bios where people discuss learning how to smoke (Patty Duke said she stayed in a park car for hours teaching herself to smoke), but I swear I never had a problem with it. I think that’s why I got hooked- it was so natural.
It probably “helped” that I was from a household with lots of smoke. I can remember my family going on vacation one Christmas and between my parents (my mother’s cigarettes, my father’s cigars) and my aunt and uncle and cousins we managed to set the smoke alarm off in our hotel room, and the same thing happened a few years later when my parents took us with them on a business vacation and had some of the other teachers into our room (teachers used to smoke like fiends in the 70s/80s- anybody else remember the fog from the teacher’s lounge at their school?).
I started smoking when I was surrounded by smokers at my job, one of whom I had a major crush on. The first time I picked one up and lit it, it wasn’t the “at last my arm is complete” scene from Sweeney Todd, and at first I only puffed I remember, but I don’t remember a period of coughing or choking. I doubt I went through more than 2 before I had the hang of it forever mastered.
I’m curious if this is anybody else’s experiences.
Never been a smoker, just wanted to pop in and wish you [del]luck[/del] strength.
Maybe this will help: Many of us non-smokers think smokers are foul smelling.
You don’t want to smell foul, do you?
mmm
Cold turkey, after trying a couple of tapering-off programs and never quite managing to quit. It’s been almost 9 years now. At the time, it was rough because my husband and I were both trying to quit but could never seem to be ready, willing and able at the same time. But finally we both managed to quit, and a few days became a month and so on. I have to say that from my point of view, one of the things that helped most was the fact that smoking was no longer permitted in offices, restaurants or bars. I really don’t miss it at all but I’m not sure I could stick to it if I was surrounded by smokers.
I’ve quit 3 times, the first 2 during college as the result of peer pressure, but resumed after a few weeks or months due to, well, peer pressure.
I finally quit in 2005, using the same cold-turkey method as the first time. Basically, I kept my last cigarette with me all the time, which reinforces the fact that you’re choosing not to smoke and not simply depriving yourself of it. Also, unlike previous tries, I told NOBODY until after the physical withdrawal waned a week or so later.
It was also completely unplanned. I just got down to the last 2 cigarettes and I had to decide whether to go spend another $40 on a carton or see how long I can do without. It was the day before Halloween, so there was plenty of junk food around to substitute.
I chose “other”. I tapered down the number of smokes/day until I was only having 2 a day. I had just gotten to the point where I didn’t like smoking anymore, so it wasn’t that hard. I bought my last pack and when I got low, I decided that I wasn’t buying another. I was ready to quit, my other attempts were always half-assed and never really stuck.
I had my last one January 21, 2011. I have been around my sister who smokes and other friends who smoke, but never was I tempted enough to actually have one.
I had some weird dreams in which I dreamed (dreamt?) about smoking. I would wake up and feel guilty as if I had actually started smoking again. They went away a few weeks into the whole thing.
I feel a lot healthier. I have a script for Flovent preventative inhaler and an albuterol inhaler. I was using the Flovent every day and the albuterol a couple of times a week. Now I use the flovent only if I feel like there is a tightness in my chest due to high pollen or a cold. I rarely use the albuterol, maybe once every 2-3 weeks.
Good luck!
This could describe me. My dad smoked heavily until he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer in 2002, so I was around smoke from in-womb exposure (though my mother didn’t smoke, they were in the same house, so I assume her secondhand exposure was pretty high) until…well, until I quit 5 yeas ago. I smoked my first one as a freshman in high school, and yeah, there was never any choking or coughing. I didn’t have to learn to do it. I just did it.
Cold turkey sandwich. Going to be eight years for me this April 11.
You have to want to quit. If you don’t you’re not going to.
I’ve heard it called developing a “can’t do” attitude; there are some things that I just can’t do.
I didn’t quit cold turkey so much as I made it very unpleasant for me to fall back. I had a chest cold and was still puffing away, so I did the natural thing and finished the pack (of course! :rolleyes: ) But once the pack was gone, I told everyone that I knew that I had quit smoking and asked them to please tease me mercilessly if they ever caught me with a cigarette, with smokers breath or showing any evidence that I had smoked.
It’s been almost four years since then. There were 4-5 times in the first two years when I was stressed enough by life that I decided to smoke. The last two times, the first puff was disgusting enough that I threw away the rest of the cigarette and the pack.
Oddly, I did not gain weight when I quit smoking. However, I was in my 30s then and much more active than I am today, so that may have helped. (I finally started gaining weight in my 50s, but that seems to have been the old middle-aged spread finally kicking in.) Food never tasted better either, just the same, so I did not receive any taste-sensory benefit. But healthwise, I think I did stop in time; no adverse lingering effects.
As for when I started smoking, it was right out of high school. I worked a job that involved a lot of idle boredom, so I started because I simply had nothing better to do. But I actually knew people who started smoking because their bosses gave extra coffee breaks to smokers; imagine trying something like that today.
I don’t remember starting smoking being particularly hard, no.
I’ve quit twice successfully for several years each time going cold turkey but it wasn’t easy.
The last time it was Chantix, but I kept smoking through two prescriptions. When the doc told me I on my last prescription, I kept smoking till I ran out of pills and then quit cold turkey. Unbelievable ! It was a piece of cake. That was 2 Novembers ago.
I had a real strong desire to quit that I picked a nice day to try. I gave my pack and lighter to my girlfriend (now wife), and said, “Today I’m going to quit smoking.” I picked her up off the floor, and said, “I want you to keep these on you, keep them out of sight, but if I ask for one, then give me one.” That worked – I only had 2 that day and 1 the next day and I’ve been free ever since – going on 20 years now. The absolute dumbest thing helped, though – I took a pen, a Bic pen that’s just essentially a white plastic barrel, yanked the pen/ink out of it, and that was my “cigarette” for about a month or so. I carried it around with me, “smoked” it, and I even cracked my window in my car and played with it in the car. Stupid. Dumb. Effective, though. I was quite the sight with my play cigarette, but it really helped.
I read the Carr book, which I do think is useful, the first time I quit, a bit over three years ago. This time I just stopped smoking and I have about four months clean. But I did retain his points about how it is to give it up. He’s right that almost every cigarette you smoke is not the really good one (the one you smoke after great sex, or while watching the sun rise with a cup of coffee, or whatever) and that the sensation of quitting, when it’s really bad, for the first two or three days, is still not terribly bad.
You don’t really enjoy smoking, the great majority of the time. It’s true that a cigarette is pleasurable but most of the ones we smoke are not; a few days without one, and the intense need to smoke one will disappear. Now all I have to contend with is some vague feeling that I’d like a smoke which I confront when I’m at the counter at a convenience store. But given that a month ago my nose apparently came back, and I can smell smokers when I walk by them, I can resist the urge to start again.
Same when I quit- taste never really improved (probably a good thing), but I could smell cigarette smoke on other people for the first time in living memory.
Okey dokey, I read Allen Carr, I really do find much of the info useful, and I took a leap of faith on the “You will not be bothered by withdrawal pangs”/“will not need willpower to get through them” was, in my case, just flat out not true. A day and a half of ups and downs after extinguishing and I was climbing the fucking walls and yelling at my furniture for breathing too loud.
A day and a half later I broke, bought cigarettes and a blue lighter (I mention the color for a reason). I smoked most of a pack then bought some nicotine lozenges. I didn’t want to use patches because they worked for me once but haven’t since, and I didn’t want to use an e-cigarette because they’re too much like the real thing and I need to get out of the habit of putting something in my mouth and puffing, so I chose the lozenges because I’ve never tried them before and because they’re not like actually smoking. I’ve been on them for about 36 hours, so far so good- the habit/the triggers are still hard, but without the actual physical withdrawal they’re manageable.
Today I am wearing new pants- I’ve never worn them before. (I mention this for a reason.) I am such a creature of habit that earlier today I reached into my pocket to get some change for a drink and pulled out a red lighter. As mentioned, I threw out my lighters the other day, and then bought a blue one yesterday; not only did I without even consciously thinking of it come across the red lighter in my house but, also without thinking about it, picked it up and put it in my pocket (because I’ve never worn these pants before so it wasn’t already there). I think I could fight the strong habit cold turkey, and I could probably fight the withdrawal cold turkey, but it’s the two in alliance that’s the bitch.
I still recommend the Carr book, but for me personally, with the reminder I haven’t quit yet, I say if you get to the point where you’ve either got to have a cigarette OR a NRT, go with the NRT. Once I get back in the habit of going full days without actually lighting up I think I’ll be a lot better able to kick the lozenges.
Good Luck** Sampiro.** I know it may not be of any help right now, but it is really amazing how much better you will feel (and smell) once the smoking habit is kicked. Please keep trying, I enjoy your posts so much.
You know what really works? Well, it worked for me, anyway. I looked at all the dumbasses around me who *were *successfully quitting. For instance, people at my job. I certainly knew that none of them had superhuman will power or were morally superior individuals in any way. I figured, heck, if those numbskulls can all do it, it can’t be that hard.
And then it wasn’t.
Mostly by not being a physical addict in the first place. I was never a heavy smoker, the highwater mark was half a pack a day. Didn’t smoke at home or on the weekends. When I got down to where I was smoking one cig a day, I had to ask myself why I bothered. Still have most of a pack that I bought in December just to have some to smoke while having drinks.
It’s no longer a habit at all and I don’t crave tobacco, but the first drag off a Camel, lit from a ZIppo, and followed by a swallow of a stimulating adult beverage is a thing of transcendant beauty.
I know the craves feel horrible and like they will be forever but really they only last for a handful of minutes, go for a walk or just distract yourself and they do go away.
Personally I found NRT and or gradually reduce method awful, to be 100% honest all you are doing is repeatedly subjecting you to withdrawal, which is the worst part of quitting.
That withdrawal is the reason I’ll never have a single puff again ever, I have no desire to feel like that again.