How to Quit Smoking

You’ve made the decision to quit smoking you say? Make sure you really want to quit this time. Decide you’re going to quit no matter how scary you think it will be or how much you think you’ll miss smoking. Some people say “I really would like to quit but (you can fill in the words here)….” It’s a definite decision to want to quit. Your have to feel it! Know it! You have to be able to say honestly to yourself ---yes, I can do this!

Secondly, you need to consider that there may be difficult times in the beginning stages of quitting smoking. But there may NOT be. How can I say that? For me personally, I sort of sailed through quitting smoking. After 28 years of smoking just about every day (that’s 10, 220 days!) I quit seemingly with little effort. It’s true. It wasn’t difficult for me. I’ll explain in a moment how it happened in my situation. Oh, I remember how great smoking was! And even though I didn’t think about quitting smoking hardly ever (because it was too painful to even THINK of giving up smoking), in the innermost part of me, I wanted to not be a slave to cigarettes anymore. 28 years was enough.

Lastly, and the most important in my opinion, is to incorporate some quiet time---whether it’s prayer, meditation or yoga---into your daily and/or hourly life. I say this because you need to calm your mind down or it will be full of negative and scary thoughts about quitting smoking. Personally (and this just sort of happened in my situation without any work on my part), the morning that became the first day of my not smoking ever again---I remember how there was a calmness about me (I really think it was Divine help if you were to ask me) that seemed to come out of nowhere. When the thoughts started coming into my mind like “it’s time to have your cigarette now. It’s bedtime”, I wouldn’t let the sentence finish. I would hear in my mind “it’s time to have your……” and I’d gently let my mind rise to a peaceful place and deliberately not finish the sentence. I did this for days, then weeks. Finally one day months later I realized I hadn’t thought of smoking for an entire day.

I also want to say that, know you can do hard things. So what if it’s hard? You can do it anyway. You must have realized by now that the difficult things in life are usually---or always---the most rewarding? But, hey, it wasn’t difficult for me and you could experience something similar to what I did when I quit smoking.

On a personal note, I can’t tell you what freedom I have, now that I’m a non-smoker and have been for 8 years. I don’t have to plan where to have my next cigarette, sneak out so no one will see me because I’m embarrassed to be a smoker, pay the ridiculous prices for cigarettes, etc. I still like the smell of a cigarette sometimes, but I will never pick one up to smoke again because the freedom is out of this world!