It’s now three weeks ago that I smoked my last cigarette. I went from around 50 cigarettes a day to ZERO cigarettes a day. It’s no rocket science to stop and the achievement doesn’t make me a hero. Especially not if you consider that I stopped for the fifth time in total and I destroyed all my efforts again and again with the same stupid mistake.
I point some things out in the following video:
If you don’t have the possibility to watch this 7 minutes video right now I want to describe briefly my first experience with quitting smoking (the video content is a little different):
It was back in 1993. I already tried a couple of times to quit smoking without any success. When I saw that a college at work had success quitting with nicotine patches I wanted to give this a try by myself as well. I worked in Germany at that time and I had my health insurance in Germany, so this wouldn’t be a problem I thought. You see, back than you couldn’t just walk into a drug store and buy some of these patches. Far from that. You had to see a doctor and he had to give you a prescription for it.
The doctor I saw wouldn’t give me any of these patches without talking for hours and hours and making one appointment after the other. This was at least what he told me. So I declined as I was not willing to waste my time in exchange of smoking. I wanted to quit smoking, not a psycho therapy about why I started when I was younger and all this bullshit. I already knew why I started smoking at the age of 15. It was cool and so was I, duh.
I remember that I was really pissed off about the situation and I’m not sure but I think that it was this very evening when I decided that I wouldn’t let it depend on patches or on a doctor who wanted to talk too much if I could save my health and my wallet for the nicotine and tar invasion.
Patches were for losers I decided smirking and I also decided to get rid of it on my own. My willpower had to be strong enough for this. It wasn’t easy in the first place but I was kind of proud that I made this in my opinion brave decision. I also knew that it was completely my own responsibility and nobody else’s. I wouldn’t point at anybody and say that it’s her fault that I’m still smoking if I wouldn’t succeed.
My Life, my lungs, my health, my responsibility.
After a couple of days the cravings of wanting to inhale toxic smoke disappeared. I was amazed how fast this went. I didn’t threw away all my tobacco or cigarettes. It lay on the table and so now and then I would smell on it. Always keeping in my mind this one thought: “I don’t smoke today!”
This was important. Because I knew that the word combination “no more” would do more harm to the result. Because if I said to myself I don’t smoke anymore. I won’t smoke ever again and all this kind of stuff, then I would have missed it immediately and the craving would have been worse.
I was glad that I did not threw away the tobacco because I could have smoked if I wanted it, but I didn’t wanted it. My goal was not to want it. Just postponing the next cigarette to the next day and doing this every day, brought me in the end to the result I wanted. I stopped smoking for 2 years.
This is a little pity because I felt much healthier when I didn’t smoke and it was just one cigarette that destroyed all my efforts in the summer of 1995. I smoked this one cigarette once a week. After two weeks, you already guessed it right, I decided that I could smoke on two days in the week and so on.
Before I was really aware of it I was a chain smoker again.
Back then I learned one important thing: you always stay an ex-smoker. There is always the danger of falling back into your old habit. I was such an idiot, and it didn’t end here.
To be continued…
Related article:
Quit Smoking Experiences (Part 2)
Quit Smoking Experiences (Part 3)
Quit Smoking Experiences (Part 4)
