Another vote for Wellbutrin/Zyban. I was extremely skeptical this would help me quit, but took it anyway after much badgerment from family and friends about my smoking. It was the damnedest thing: after 2-3 weeks on the Wellbutrin, I woke up one morning, went to smoke cig, and suddenly it tasted terrible. For the next few days, I’d smoke a couple cigs in the morning (bleah! ick!), then chew Nicorette the rest of the day, then have a couple cigs in the evening (bleah again). One morning I ran out of cigs and never had another.
I think people put too much into it analyzing and questioning. What I did when I quit smoking, weed that is, (but give me some credit it was still a habit I was addicted to) was I just decided I’m not going to do it. No gimmicks no tricks just a conscious decision to not do it. I think all the techniques and thought people put into it may actually be counter-productive. You simply make a decision to stop then and there and the rest falls into place
I agree. I gave up smoking about twenty years ago - I just decided I was going to stop doing it (I actually decided I was going to hate smoking, and that helped). I also figured that if I could stop smoking for an hour, I could do it for any hour, including the next one, and so on.
I’m sure some people find it harder than others to quit - we’re all different, after all, but I’ve noticed a theme in the current media (ads for quitting-related products and ads for goverrnment-sponsored quit schemes, etc) that quitting smoking is really, really hard - it’s so hard, you can’t do it without help. I think this is probably unhelpful.
Whilst I’d accept that it probably does help some people quit, if their specific problem was resistance to asking for help, I reckon that for others, it sets them up for failure - because ‘quitting is really hard’ is a ready-made excuse - I think it probably puts some other people off trying and for those who do try, it raises the stakes.
Patches, pills and gums etc just prolong the inevitable - if you really intend to give up, you will have to live without nicotine sooner or later, so why not sooner?
On top of all this, I know there are some smokers who are trying (at varying levels) to give up, but they don’t really want to - they’re trying to do it because of nagging from other people, out of some sense of duty or moral obligation, or something like that - they feel they should give up, but they don’t want to give up. They tend to fail, in my experience.
I’d been a smoker for 30 something years, since I started work full time. For about 20 of those years I smoked a pipe. There’s something about the rituals of smoking a pipe that lingers on a bit even when one has quit; the mouth-filling swirl of smoke from a nice fresh load of tobacco and the lovely smoke rings of the puff out. There’s also the really disgusting gloop that collects in the bowl and stem that makes me sick to think of now.
I’m a very recent non-smoker. I had my last pipe on the 31st of January. My partner quit the same day. He’s not using any patches or gum, but I am. I put on a patch each day. So far I’ve had a few times I’ve sucked on a lozenge (Habitrol 1mg) but I’m not really an oral person. I don’t like gum of any kind, let alone nicotine gum, and I’m not too keen on the lozenges either.
I got a quit pack from “The Quit Group”, the government funded national programme to help people quit. Some of the stuff in their books is useful, like recognising withdrawal symptoms, but some stuff just seems superfluous, like listing reasons to give up. If you’re a conscious adult in NZ, you can hardly be ignorant of reasons to quit.
Mangetout opines that patches, pills and gums prolong the inevitable. I see patches and lozenges as allowing me to remove the physical actions from my behaviour, and then remove the nicotine in a gradual process, unrelated to the act of smoking. So far it’s working for me.
What works for me may help others, and what worked for him may help someone else.
Point taken - and I am glad it’s working for you (no, really).
I guess what I object to is people being subtly conditioned into assuming they will need nicotine supplements - there seems (to me) to be a bit too much of this in the media, at least here in the UK - and oddly, it’s not all coming from the people who are selling them - the NHS is doing it too. Maybe that just means my non-expert notions on this are incorrect.
Without reading above for redundancy… sorry…
You need to give yourself the proper motivation. For me it wasn’t enough to quit simply for all the right reasons - there self-evident, you know them all, and yet you still smoke.
If you are like me, then it all comes down to - you are a drug addict. Your drug (nicotine) does not affect you like others do on a day-to-day basis, but it is one of the most addictive drugs known to man. You are an addict, and you will do anything for a fix.
I spent weeks really analyzing why I smoked - obsessing with it, trying to figure out why I did it, why I liked it, what I got out of it. Then I planned out a reduction strategy. I first made myself not smoke at any trigger times, just at pre-determined times. That eventually took out the enjoyment/habit and reduced smoking to what it actually was - a hit of the drug.
And that’s where I got the motivation. Every time I smoked, it was less and less about enjoying, relaxing, habitual, etc, and more about getting a fix. Evry time I started going, I just kept thinking I was doing this for the hit and nothing else.
Once I got myself convinced I did not want it, it was time to quit.
For the (at least) 10th time.
I went into it with my eyes open - I knew this would be difficult, let lots of people know, and decided I’d never smoke again. That’s drastic, but IMO, the only way to actually quit.
Then it’s just a matter of getting through the “3s”.
The first 3 days are the hardest days, with day 3 being the worst. Day 4 is easier.
The first 3 weeks are the hardest, with week 3 being the worst. Week 4 is easier.
The first 3 months are the hardest, with the end of month 3 being the worst.
If you can quit for 3 months, though, you get into the position where you have now put yourself and people close to you for this hard work and discomfort for a long time, and lighting up wastes all that work. For me, that was enough - it has now been over 10 years, and I am very proud.
Good luck - it is not easy, but it is worth it.
I quit smoking May 4, 2002 after eleven years at a pack a day. It was a Saturday night and my boss gave me the leftovers of his Zyban prescription. I took the pills for only two days, but stopped as I was having difficulty sleeping - including the next two days. I did not, however, have a single recognizable craving the entire time.
When I returned to work, I gave my boss back the leftovers from his leftovers and haven’t had a cigarette since - although I have on three occasions performed “cigarette tricks” upon request, without inhaling. I loved smoking. I started because I thought it would make me look cool to my friends - and it did, kids are so stupid. But I loved it.
I had tried “quitting” several times, but my heart was never in it. This time was different, and I still to this day do not know why. I miss, in a nostalgic sense, the smell when someone first lights a cigarette (match or lighter both, but slight preference for match), french inhaling, smoke rings, etc. I don’t miss the cost or the way my fingers and clothes smelled. Even if I wanted to, I could never go back now - aside from being married to a lifetime non-smoker, all of my best smoking memories are from a time when you could smoke in bars while drinking, restaurants after eating or while having coffee, and at people’s homes while socializing (the one and only craving I’ve had since I quit took place while playing euchre as the only non-smoker at the table).
Slight hijack:
While I understand, and to some degree agree with, your post - I would also submit that breaking a marijuana habit is not the same as quitting smoking. Smoking addiction is a physical one and the Surgeon General once described it’s characteristics as “similar to those that determine addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine.” In addition, I know a small handful (3 or 4) of smokers who have successfully given up one (or both) of these other two drugs and claim they would rather go through that again than give up their smoking habit (admittedly: no way to verify the truth of these statements, as none, to my knowledge, have ever given serious effort to quitting smoking).
A friend and his wife both tried to quit. They tried acupuncture with no positive results. Then they tried hypnotism.She quit immediately and never started up again. It did not work for him at all. But, I think he never really wanted to quit.
Do you enjoy smoking? I didn’t, which is why it was relatively easy for me to quit even though I may have poor will-power in other ways.
The one trick I’d suggest is to promise yourself rewards (e.g. lobster dinner if you make it for another 24 hours). Obviously this might work better if you have a spouse or parent offering the reward instead of yourself.