I agree. I am not willing to go through the quitting process again, so therefore I can’t start up again.
Sucks rocks, though, no doubt. I thought I was going to kill my husband that first week. I did it cold turkey- it made the most sense.
I haven’t had one in over 14 years, and I ain’t gonna start again, I guarantee it.
None of that applies to me. I may well quit sometime, but this line of thought wouldn’t help in the slightest. I actually do enjoy smoking, so lying to myself and saying I don’t wouldn’t be productive.
(It might apply to the OP, I don’t know)
Yep, yep, and yep.
Eleven years quit, for me. Don’t want to quit again (I did, for three years, before I lost my mind and started again for another decade), don’t want to spend the money, stand in the parking lot, smell like that again.
Quitting isn’t fun – if it was, would the drug companies be marketing to you?.
I still miss smoking sometimes. So what? I’ve gotten over other bad relationships, too.
(Still, wishing you all the best!)
Oh, do I feel your pain. But I turned my anger into fuel that fed my desire to quit. What kept going through my mind was that this one stupid product had me by the short hairs. I was NOT going to let it run me and was pissed that anything could have that much power.
My props for quitting included one of those Kooshes. I had carried around my cigarette case everywhere I went for years and the koosh was a good replacement for it. And, when I got too mad, I could throw it at things without breaking anything.
I was thinking about Hal Briston’s post, as well.
I didn’t hate smoking- I loved it. Sure, there were uncomfortable sideline issues, but nothing so bad that it was going to stop me from getting my fix.
I still miss the ritual of it, the high of a nicotine hit, the drama possible with a flirtatious and angry motion of the cigarette…
I have never lied to myself about my addictions, and believe me- I was hooked on nicotine to hell and gone. I actually think that quitting smoking was harder than quitting drinking and drugs (and I am an alcoholic and addict)- at least at that time, I still had nicotine to fall back on and change the way I felt.
When I finally quit smoking, I had nothing to mask those feelings with, and it was very hard.
I used the patch when I finally quit, about twelve years back, and I found it very helpful in toning back the ‘I hate you all and wish you dead’ rages. My other tactics were to keep busy and to become a rabid and somewhat obnoxious anti-smoker to my so-called friends who wanted to smoke around me or offer me a cigarette.
Good luck! It does get easier.
Today is day 13 for me. Cold turkey. So far, so good.
I tried using Zyban once, a couple of years ago. Hoo boy…for someone with insomnia, Wellbutrin is a very, very bad thing. Try quitting smoking while not sleeping for days and studying for tests at the same time. Psychotic would’ve been a step up.
I have to say that I enjoyed smoking, too. But I hated the expense and physical effects more.
I made it through today. Tomorrow, we’ll see.
Ditto. On all counts.
Best of luck.
I would think “Starting Smoking Sucks Donkey Cock”, so quitting should be a breeze.
I’m an alkie, too. And I second this. Quitting smoking was much harder than quitting drinking for me.
Good luck to you** Erie774.** Quitting does indeed suck donkey nads but it’s not impossible.
I’m sixth months into being a nonsmoker. The reason it’s working for me this time is that I finally stopped thinking of myself as “someone who used to smoke.” I try to just think of myself as a “nonsmoker.” I had to stop going to bars for a while, in fact, for the first two months I quit drinking entirely. It helped immensely. In reality I just had to stop thinking about smoking.
In the past when I would try to quit I would always think about the fact that I wasn’t smoking. Now I sort of pretend that smoking was never an issue.
I know it sounds lame but it works for me. The only thing I do or say to aknowledge my quitting is keeping track of the money I haven’t spent in these past six months. (Almost $1000 now)
The rare time I go out to a bar with friends and come home smelling like ass is good incentive too.
Just this past weekend I got extremely pissed off when I got home from going out and realized my nice wool coat had that old familiar stink. Off to the dry cleaners. :mad:
I wish the OP the best of luck and willpower.
The reason he cites are exactly why I’ve never smoked, I can’t imagine being so under the control of a chemical.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to pop to iceland (the super market) because I ran out of wine last night.
It helps a lot in resolve to quit if you get bronchial pneumonia and cough up blood twice in six months.
Good luck and just remember to not smoke, even when you wake up in the middle of a dream that you are smoking.
Great, I’ll go get infected! One time I quit because I had strep throat so bad that I needed a steroid shot to keep my throat open. I stopped smoking for 3 weeks until I was healthy again then lit up.
Sorry Hal, but I’m not lying when I say that I enjoyed smoking. I know that it is a stimulant but, damn it, it helped me relax. It was psychological, I know, but it worked. I also enjoyed the taste and smell (yup, I even liked the smell).
It has now been one week and the logical portion of my brain is telling me that the nicotine is gone, no more withdrawals. The illogical portion of my brain screams back, “Fuck you, Mr. Spock! Your logic and reasoning don’t mean shit right now! I know perfectly well that I need a cigarette and if I don’t get one I will be forced to shut you up with a home lobotomy! Now where’s my cordless drill?”
I keep telling myself that it is all in my head but I know it is really all in my hands. I feel them twitching, wanting that smooth paper cylinder packed with brown death. I can sense the heat of the coal as it gets ever closer to my knuckles. I can see the smoke curling around my fingers, trickling across my nails like fog in a cemetery.
So right now I am sitting at my desk, my legs bouncing like a pogo stick. My desk clock slowly ticks off another minute (which is a pretty good trick, considering it’s digital) to remind me, “You know, right about now you’d be going outside for a smoke break.” My coworkers come back from their breaks and I get a whiff as they pass me; that stale, noxious, poisonous, wonderful smell climbs my nostrils and tickles my olfactory nerves.
I don’t need a cigarette, I don’t need a cigarette, I don’t need a cigarette. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe I’ll convince myself.
The thing that stopped me after a year, after three, and after seven years was this: Smoking tobacco was the most dangerous thing I have ever done in my life. I was risking my life every time I lit up another one. I was lucky to slip the shackles of tobacco. I’ve done some mighty stupid things in my time, but none of that holds a match to the screaming stupidity of stepping on that smoking beartrap again.
erie774, have you seen the QuitMeters that are on the web? There are several, but here’s one. I thought maybe having one to look at and remind you how far you’ve come and how much you’ve saved might help you at those times when your brain is going “smoke now smoke now smoke NOW SMOKE NOW!!”
Also, my former smoker sister said the thing that tripped her up more than once was letting herself get in those social situations where it seemed like a great idea to light up and/or she just didn’t care about quitting in the moment. Like drinking, like going to a bar or a club. It’s Friday night, so take care. 
Other than that, I got nothin’, except gratitude that I never took up the habit. I can’t even give up potato chips; I doubt I could ever have stopped smoking. Good luck!
The thing that pushed me into quitting was Tiparillos. After my pneumonia sessions I decided to quit smoking. I took up Tiparillos on the thought that I wouldn’t inhale them.
They were so awful that I decided that nothing was better than that, threw the box in the waste basket and haven’t smoked since. That was something like 30 years ago.
Been there, done that. Two and a half packs a day for twenty-two years, then quit cold turkey. If it is any consolation, it does get better after the first week or so. I screamed in the car on my way to work for the first couple days (I leave at 5:30 a.m., so not many people were out to witness the spastic guy in the '03 Taurus going down I-75, officer). I joined the gym and ran myself ragged each evening to have something to do, then went to bed as soon as possible, figuring eight or ten hours sleep would put the cigs that much further behind me.
Believe it or not, after a few months it didn’t bother me to be on break with all my smoking fellow employees. And, my God, my lungs really did clear up and I didn’t do that little hack-cough every twenty seconds like I had been doing for 20 years.
Hope for the best for you.
Sir Rhosis
I started smoking when I was 18, so I could see if it was really as hard to quit as the meme indicated (although we called it “conventional wisdom” back in 1974, not “meme”). When I was 19, I threw my smokes away, along with my lighter, one night after finishing work at the pizza parlor.
When I was 21, I took a job as a graveyard shift security guard at a mobile home park. I was still a full-time student, at the time, and I rationalized that ciggies would help me stay awake. I left that job before I turned 22, and continued to smoke until August of 1990, on a dare from a karaoke buddy at the enlisted men’s club at SUBASE Pearl Harbor.
In 1997, after I went to work for a heavy smoker, I was out on a service call one afternoon, and one of the workers offered me a smoke, which I accepted. Two weeks later, I was back up to fifteen smokes a day.
In 2001, a few months after losing my job, I was still smoking. Always out of the house, though, and never in the car with Michaela aboard. Michaela, five years old by now, took to coming out onto the patio whenever I lit up. She’d put her little hands on my knees, gaze into my eyes and say, “Daddy, why do you want to die?”
I put them down again in November, 2001, and I haven’t looked back since. erie774, I see you’ve got a moppet of similar age. You might want to think about giving that a try. Good luck with it.
You’ve got to try this Chantix stuff, it rocks. 
I’ve been smoking 26 years. I quit once cold turkey (after reading Allen Carr’s book, which I highly recommend) and made it 3 months but it was torture. So a few of the old school hard core smokers at work tell me they’ve quit and it’s all because of this Chantix pill. I was skeptical because I had tried wellbutrin (Zyban) years ago and it didn’t do squat for me.
Your supposed to take it for 7 days before you actually try and quit. I’m on day three and I’m finding myself forgetting to light up at times I normally would have. My sister-in-law has been on it about a week and a half and she just reported to me tonight she hasn’t smoked in about two days and doesn’t even want to.
I seriously suggest you try it, what have you got to lose?