If you seriously want to quit smoking ...

[stockport6]

Hi,

 

I agree with the willpower. I have been smokefree for 7 years now after starting at 11.

 

One thing that was different this time though was the amount of work I did before i stopped. in the past I had picked a date, thrown all the cigs, lighters and ashtrays away and tried to force myself to stop not really knowing why i smoked in the first place. what I mean is i always believed what I had been told about smoking and quitting but that is just one side of the argument, the tobacco and pharmacutical side.

 

I needed to look at why I smoked, what did I get from it and what a cigarette ACTUALLY did. once I had both sides of the argument then i could make an informed decision.

 

Willpower is a starnge thing. I like to think of ot as the Angel and the Devil sat on your shoulders. The Angel telling you "stop, it is killing you, you smell and you are spending a fortune" and the devil telling me "you dont want to stop, if you just quit how will you cope with difficult situations, how will you feel normal again without a cigarette" and do you know the devil was always the loudest

 

That was until I made them both agree. Then I could use my willpower to do what I wanted rather than this internal conflict going on inside me.

 

If you think of it like a seatbelt. If you lean forward too quickly while wearing a seatbelt it will lock. No matter how hard you try to move forward after it locks, it will not move. If you spent all your energy trying to move it you would get exhausted in the end and just stop trying. Well guess what. if you lean BACK slighltly the seatbelt will release and you can move effortlessly forward.

 

The same applies to stopping smoking. use the willpower in the same direction with the strategies to cope with anxiety and stress and you will move forward without effort.

 

I had never before since the age of 11 wanted or needed a coping strategy for stress and anxiety, why would I when I had cigarettes that would appear to do it for me. Learning new techniques allowed me to do what normal non smokers do when the feel stressed or in a difficult situation. Deal with it. not run away and give all the responsibility to a bunch of dried out leaves rolled in paper (oh and I found out there is no magic dust in tobacco - it is just dead leaves)

 

Someone mentioned deep breathing. Sounds simple but it is one of the most effective ways to cope with stress and anxiety. You may think that sounds silly. "i know how to breath" but doing it correctly makes all the difference

 

try this

 

Place your tongue on the roof of you mouth.

Then breath in deeply through your nose until you lower tummy starts to rise.

Then blow out through your mouth as if you were blowing a balloon up

Make sure it takes longer to breath out than in (good way is 7-11 - breath in to the count of 7 and out to the count of 11)

Repeat until you feel your shoulders start to drop.

 

Once you have mastered this you can then start to say a word in your mind on the outward breaths. for intance I use the word CALM. I just repeat it over and over in my mind as I breath out. Eventually your body will start to remember how you felt when you said your word. Soon you will be able to just say the word in your mind and your body will react by relaxing without even doing the breathes.

 

It is the reverse of what your body is doing when you subconcioussly think about smoking. whenyou get into a situation the first thing your mind will think is smoking will help. And your body will start to remember how you feel when you want a cigarette. the shoulders and face will tighten up, there will be a hollow empty feeling in your stomach and the fight or flight reaction will be triggered. The only way to switch this off will be to deal with the situation or run away. 9 times out of 10 a smoker will run away i.e smoke.

 

I hope this helps

 

Ian

[stockport6]

Hi,

 

No. On previous tries I had all the usual side effects. annoyed at everyone, making excuses to start an argument with someone just so i could have a cigarette and it "not be my fault". However, this time I decided to wait and see what it really felt like without any pre-conceptions. and do you know what it didn't actually feel like anything really. I think in the past I had expected to wake up one day and feel different, like a non-smoker I suppose whereas this time I decided not to wait. I decided it was different from the minute I had my last cigarette. After all the only thing that made me a smoker was the fact that I smoked. As long as I did not light up again I was a non-smoker.

 

I did have some physical side effects. The most pronounced being constipation and broken sleep paterns.

 

I dealt with each situation as it came and coped with it. I stopped giving the repsonsibility to cigarettes and finally grew up.

[stockport6]

I went through many stages of quitting before I finally nailed this last one. I can tell you the diffrence though.

 

In the past i had always blamed everything on quitting, from an aching back to a tooth ache, I soon realised this time though that not everything is to do with quitting. It does tend to overtake your life but these things would have happened wether you quit or not.

 

The second thing is that i thought that I had to somehow exorcise every trigger i had for smoking, for example, i thought I had to deal with friends i had not seen for a long time, I thought that I may feel an emotion I did not feel very often such as deep sadness or euphoria and that these may catch me off guard. The truth however was much simpler. All I had to do was find a way of dealing with feelings of anxiety.

 

There was no other trigger other than anxiety. That knot in the stomach, the tension across the shoulders and into the neck and face, the hollow feeling that seemed to go on forever, That was not a craving but a feeling of anxiety. The thing is it had been hijacked by smoking. So no matter who you are one thing that is certain is that you will feel at some point in the future anxiety. This is the one emotion that keeps us safe, it is instinct. It is there to protect us and cannot be ignored.

 

Try writing down how you feel both emotionally and physically when you really want a cigarette. Those times when someone has said you cannot smoke or when you do not know when you will get another. Write a list.

Then go on google and look at the symptoms of anxiety. I found that there were alot that matched.

 

Thanks

Ian

[stockport6]

So how is everyone ?

 

It's been a few years so how is it going ??[/quote

 

Hi conniff

 

I am 14 years smoke free now.