Since Peter Jenning’s death from and Dana Reeve’s diagnosis of lung cancer, I have heard many people say they are going to quit smoking. I don’t smoke (thank God) but I do have other rather unhealthy dependencies on things such as caffeine, the Internet, prostitution, and crack cocaine (ok, not the last two but I wanted to sound hardcore).
I know a few people here have given up various addictions, and I’m wondering how you did it?
My grandmother, may she rest in peace, never smoked a day in her life, but she had emphysema. I don’t know whether it came from living near an abandoned mine shaft for so many years, or what, but sometimes these things happen even when we do all the right things.
Usually there are no easy ways to give up addictions. I’ve known some people who gave them up instantly, and others who struggled their entire lives. Some are helped by support groups. Others are very uncomfortable with things like that. I think that so-called cold turkey is more effective than gradual plans.
Yeah…I know it doesn’t always improve things. My mom’s grandma (I think it was) smoked a pipe since she was a child and lived to be just a few years short of 100.
This is only slightly-related to the mention of support groups, but I once thought about joining an Adult Children of Alcoholics program, but this particular group seed like a cult of sorts to me. I know that all AA-related groups are not like that, but I can see the potential for it.
I used to smoke 20-30 cigarettes a day, my wife told me that I was going to give it up when she became pregnant.
I didn’t want to give up but thought “I’ll go through the motions and be such a pain to live with that she’ll beg me to start again.”
On day one I she handed me a pack of nicotine patches, I put one on and within five minutes I though "I no longer feel the need to smoke… I’M FREE!!
It’s very difficult to see how an addiction controls you until you actually break out of it. But it was as much this realisation as the patches that did it.
That was five years ago and while I still get the odd “lovely fags” moment (Father Ted) I have no desire to be controled by that particular addiction again.
Lovely fags? What an interesting way to put it!
Yes ,I’m aware that the word fag has a slightly different meaning in the US!
It’s a reference to the comedy show Father Ted, he’s taken a bet to give up smoking, while he’s going cold turky someone knocks at the door. Ted answers and during the conversation the caller lights a cigarette.Ted can’t take his eyes of the cigarette. As the caller exhales the smoke forms into the words “lovely fags”.
This is the best the best demonstration of what an ex-smoker goes through when someone lights up. Most of the time your not tempted , but every now and then those magic letters form and it becomes a “lovely fags moment”.
“lovely fags” works best with an Irish accent.
My own views: first, you have to decide that you really want to quit whatever the bad habit is (as opposed to “I should quit because I know it’s bad for me,” or “I should quit because of what they say on TV,” or “I’m quitting because my wife wants me to so bad,” etc)–you have to want to quit for you, not for anybody or anything else.
Second, I agree that cold-turkey is the best way. I know two people quite well who have quit smoking and never gone back, in both cases they quit cold-turkey.
Third, you gotta accept that it’s gonna hurt. Giving up a bad habit is never a pleasant experience. Any rewards that come from it are of the long-term rather than the immediate variety. Accept the pain as unavoidable and resolve to not bend to it.
Finally, I think it helps if you try to pick up a positive habit at the same time you’re losing a negative one. Just try to make it something simple to learn–this probably isn’t the best time to try to teach yourself calculus, for instance. Something distracting that keeps both hands and mind busy is perfect.
Just my $.02, probably worth what you paid to read it. 
I don’t smoke but I certainly do have my own set of bad habits, so I may not be the best person to listen to anyway.
–James
DH smokes - not in the house, and not in my presence - he has to go outside to do it. He also doesn’t smoke in restaurants, etc., even if it’s permitted. In other words, he’s a “polite” smoker. It’s very rare that I even smell smoke on him, except for his winter coat, and he hangs that in the garage on purpose.
But he’s perfectly healthy (except for some colon troubles that are genetic). His cholestrol is way within limits, his lungs are perfectly healthy, his bp is fine, etc. And he doesn’t want to stop smoking - so there’s no way I can force the issue. Sure - I wish he didn’t, but HE has to want to stop.
Unless you have high blood pressure, insomnia, anxiety, heart palpitations, etc. that caffiene can aggravate, it may not be bad for you.
Both coffee and tea have been found to contain beneficial antioxidants, polyphenols, etc., and I believe there’s been research that indicates there’s no difference in health or mortality between people who drink coffee or tea and those who don’t. I’m more concerned about the corn syrup or artificial sweeteners in caffienated soft drinks than the caffeine itself.
Best wishes,
Jerry
I do have insomnia, anxiety, and high blood pressure, but not heart palpitations. At least, I don’t think I do. I’m not really sure what a heart palpitation feels like.
Just to note for those who are familiar with people who smoke all their lives and live to old age;
Scientists have discovered in certain genetic lines of laboratory mice, the mice can be injected with an oncogenic substance, develop a malignant tumour and ‘un-develop it’ again, so to speak.
The scientists believe that the mice with this trait have a genetic predisposition to fight the cancer that they have been induced with.
They believe a similar mechanism is at work with people who smoke and live to an old age.
I would prefer not to take the chance of being ‘pre-disposed’ 
I found a better competing addiction.
Exersize is always a good one.
Gives you energy in the day and helps you sleep at night.
Music is good too.
A lot of my family has used tobacco for their entire lives or just about their entire lives and none have developed cancer from it. I have cousins who started using chew tobacco when they were four or five years old. One is currently nine and dips snuff and his parents buy it for him. It makes me sad that this is considered normal in the isolated Appalachian culture in which they (we) live.
It’s so dangerous to give children tobacco products, but the social services and such groups can’t really do anything because the problem is so widespread. If they arrested my cousins parents or took him away from the household, they would have to do the same thing with the hundreds (or mabey thousands?) of other kids who are allowed to chew tobacco, dip snuff, smoke, drink alcohol, etc. They just don’t have the resources to do it.
Nearly every adult in my family smokes cigarettes, and none of them have ever had lung cancer, but plenty of them have heart disease and diabetes, so I think if there’s a gene there that protects against lung cancer, it doesn’t work against other diseases that can be affected by smoking.
I’m hoping tai chi will cut down my desire to drink and smoke. Just signed up last week and I’ve already noticed a major reduction in my smoking. Tai chi days (there are 3 a week) I don’t smoke at all and non-tai chi days I don’t start smoking until after work, and then it’s usually just a couple.
Having quit several times before and learned what type of person I am, I really have to not feel like it in order to not do it. I have no willpower whatsoever.
I don’t think anything can surpass a life-threatening scare for giving you the incentive to quit a bad habit. For me, an extremely heavy drinker, it took a frightening experience with my toddler daughter to shock me into the realization that my actions affect other people and NOT quitting was no longer an option. Did it cold turkey.
Susan
I didn’t find tai chi to help at all with smoking, but it wiped out a very excessive drinking habit within a year. My metabolism increased to the point that half a beer lierally knocked me out. Nothing seems to phase my smoking addiction, which is why I am waiting for new treaments being developed to overcome nicotine with no self-will required.
djm
I am trying to give up coffee. I teach, and a new school year is starting, and I want to break the dependency because it impacts my moods at different points in the day.
I never did really buy the whole “all it takes is willpower” argument when it came to quitting smoking. Until I really understood what it meant, to me at least.
Quitting smoking for me didn’t come down to “just toughing it out”… Every time I’d tried in the past, I failed. if I put myself in a situation where I normally smoked, I’d end up lighting right back up again.
But rather, I discovered that, for me least, it meant having the willpower not to put myself in those situations…rather than going to bars, etc, where I normally liked to smoke, I just removed myself from those kinds of activities for a while. It helped a lot.
I have to agree with that. I tried to quit smoking many times (and each time had to go on anti-depressants because I became suicidal…think of that, please, people, if you’re ever tempted to get on someone else’s case for not just “kicking the habit”). What finally worked was developing a life-threatening respiratory illness while on vacation with my family. Not being able to breath was so terrifying, I realized I didn’t want to die that way. It was still living hell, but with nicotine losenges and doing things MY way (not the way the “experts” tell you to do it), I’ve managed to be smoke-free for two years now.
The most important thing to remember, as I see it, is there is no “one, true way” to fight an addiction. In my case, I found it best to do just about EVERYTHING they tell you not to do. Heck, I carried a pack of cigarettes in my purse, and kept telling myself “just get through another hour, and if it gets too bad, you can have one.” When that hour had passed, I’d do the same thing. On a couple of occasions I actually allowed myself one hit…one only, before I remembered how terrifying it was not to be able to breathe and put it out. I finally threw out that pack earlier this year…with only one cigarette smoked. “They” tell you to avoid people who smoke and places where people smoke, but, to tell you the truth, I find those places and those people a lot less stressful than non-smokers (and especially evangelical ex-smokers), so it was easier for me to be among “my own kind,” so to speak…people who really understood just how hard it is to quit, and who didn’t try to cheer me up with a lot of fakey-fake “good for you!” BS. I avoided support groups because I’m an intensely private person, and I find support groups unpleasant, annoying and threatening…they just don’t work for me. I didn’t even tell people I was quitting (other than my husband and daughter, who kind of had to know)…in order to succeed, I needed to have “permission” to fail, and other people won’t give you that. I used nicotine replacements for 6 months, when “common wisdom” seems to be “go cold turkey”…AND I took anti-depressants. In short, I did everything “wrong”… but it worked for me.
You have to know yourself, really…what you can tolerate emotionally and what will just send you screaming back to the addictive substance. Sometimes that means trying (and “failing”…though I don’t really look at it as “failure” so much as a learning experience) several times before you know how you can approach this in a way that works for you.
Redwolf