How To Quit Smoking In 2 Weeks

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I am addicted to cigarettes. I have two weeks to quit smoking completely. I’m 25 now and I’ve smoked cigarettes off and on since I was 18 years old; even so, I can’t say I became truly addicted until about 6 months ago. When I was 18 I smoked regularly for 3 or 4 months and then quit, cold turkey, for a couple years. I started smoking off and on again in college; I was a social smoker, only smoking at bars or while I was drinking. That continued until the middle of last year, when cigarettes really became a part of my routine; until then, I didn’t really consider myself a smoker per say, just someone who enjoyed a cigarette with his beer.

When I got into the mortgage industry I was suddenly faced with the stress of being completely independent with regard to income; I was on 100% commission, if I didn’t produce, I didn’t eat. The stress that went along with that cause me to turn to cigarettes as an escape more and more. Even when my smoking reached its peak around 6 months ago, I always had it in my head that it was temporary, just something to help me get through the stress of my job until things got easier for me.

The problem with that mindset is that it set me into a state of perpetual procrastination when it came to quiting smoking. I would cut back, thinking I was going to ween myself off cigarettes for good, only to start up again, full force, when I encountered stress in my life. I recognized that this cycle would never end; there would always be stress in my life and, considering the career path I had chosen, the stress was unlikely to let up anytime in the near future. I started thinking about it and realized that I was just making excuses; if I thought smoking was bad, I was going to have to stop making excuses and just quit, regardless of what was going on in my life, regardless of my stress level. Additionally, I was justifying smoking based on the fact that it relieved stress and helped me get through my day. I saw those 15 minute breaks as something to look forward to every day, a time to step away from everything that was going on and just focus on that little white stick. Smoking became a security blanket, something that was there to support me, something I could turn to no matter how tough things got. For you non-smokers out there, this probably sounds nuts, but that’s what smoking becomes in the minds of those addicted to it.

The Problem With My Logic

I consider myself a pretty reasonable, logical, analytical type of person, but in spite of that, my rationale for smoking, and it seems to be the same for other smokers I’ve spoken with, was a bit off the wall. As I mentioned, my main justification was that smoking was a stress reliever; unfortunately that doesn’t make any sense.

First of all, while a cigarette certainly calms the nerves, it only does so for a very short period of time, maybe 15 minutes max. So, unless you plan on chain smoking, it’s not the greatest of stress relievers; and if you’re smoking cigarette after cigarette you don’t exactly have any time to do anything else.

Secondly, over time, smoking actually caused me greater stress for several reasons. The main one being that I knew my chosen stress relief kills a lot of people every day; it’s hard to relax when a tiny little part of you regrets every cigarette you have. The other reason is a bit less direct; my frequency of smoking and my frequency of working out are inversely related. In other words, the more I smoke the less I work out. Why? It’s pretty simple; workouts are miserable for smokers. The pain can be excruciating, especially if you try working out like you did back when you were in marathon shape; the more you smoke, the worse the pain, and naturally, the worse the pain, the less likely you are to voluntarily experience it. The result: workouts ended entirely. In case you didn’t know, workouts release endorphins, endorphins increase happiness and reduce stress. Ending my workouts put the brakes on a major source of my stress relief, one that was far more effective and long-lasting than smoking. In the end, my stress actually increased.

And lastly, smoking simply takes up too much valuable time, especially at work. If you’ve ever been a smoker, you’ve probably experienced the smokers’ camaraderie at work. Similar to women using the restroom, smokers like to smoke in herds. If you have a lot of smokers in your workplace, that equates to a smoking proposition roughly every 10 minutes. When you’re addicted to cigarettes, you may not smoke every 10 minutes, but it happens a lot more often when you’re constantly being asked to join a co-worker for a smoke break. The amount of time wasted and trains of thought lost simply because I joined a co-worker for a smoke that I didn’t even really want in the first place is larger than I’d like to recognize.

How To Quit

Now that I recognize the problem, I need to act on it. The question is, how? Well, if you’ve been here before you probably know how big I am on meditation. So that’ll be Weapon #1. As much as I hate to admit it, I am going to use a crutch: the nicotine patch. I thought about quitting several times and I’ve always told myself it would be easy if I just put my mind to it and the patch was just a crutch, but I went a day and a half without smoking last week and every cell in my body was screaming for nicotine, so I’ll swallow my pride and use the patch, which will be Weapon #2. Weapon #3 will be other people; I’m going to tell every single person that has ever asked me to join them for a smoke that I’m quitting and it’s really important they no longer ask me to smoke with them. The only flaw in Weapon #3 is that other people will forget, in fact, I’d be surprised if a single one out of my 15 or so personal friends who smoke would remember the first time. So, the effective deployment of Weapon #3 will depend upon me reminding my fellow smokers, every time I see them, to please refrain from asking me to join them for a cigarette. I don’t doubt most of them will get annoyed after only a few days of this, but in the long run, I think they’ll understand.

Meditation

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, in order for meditation to work you have to manifest feelings, because feeling is the language your subconscious speaks. If you don’t speak in a language it can understand, it won’t get the message. My plan is to do some variation of the following…

Meditate for 10 minutes every morning; in addition to the 15 minutes I’ll be spending on eliminating procrastination. I’ll sit in a chair, arms on the armrest, close my eyes, slow my breathing, and clear my mind by focusing on completely relaxing one body part at a time. And I mean deep relaxation, you know the type of relaxation when you can feel a slight tingling sensation in your muscles? That’s what I’m going for here. With practice you can get there in 2 or 3 minutes. Once settled, I’ll split my time between imagining good things coming as a result of not smoking and bad things coming as a result of continuing to smoke.

On the bad side I’ll imagine that my body has wasted away as a result of smoking for years. I’ll imagine myself only 30 years old, but I feel exhausted just walking up a flight of stairs. I always feel a bit out of breath and I can’t remember the last time I could smell the freshness of the air. I haven’t worked out in years, I’ve grown a bit of a gut and I no longer have any muscle definition. Now I’m at the beach and I’m embarrassed to take off my shirt. I feel like I’ve lost something; I don’t have confidence anymore. I see my sister and she’s grown up to be a smoker, she’s just as miserable a sight as me, and it’s all because she saw me smoking years ago. I feel disgusted with myself that I didn’t set a better example for her.

On the good side I’ll imagine running a marathon and the incredible feeling I used to feel in my lungs when I was running on a regular basis. I’ll imagine the smell of the spring air and the feeling I got when I’d walk outside and take in a big breath of morning air. That feeling was a fresh, clean feeling; it’s a feeling I haven’t had in quite a while. It’s a feeling a only got when I was working out and not smoking.

Some of you may think I’ve gone a little overboard here, with my sister and I becoming some sort of out of shape beasts who can no longer function because of smoking; that’s ok, in fact, that’s what I’m going for. You see, my subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between what’s possible and what’s not; it only knows to avoid bad feelings and seek out good feelings. If I train my subconscious to link bad feelings with smoking and good feelings with not smoking, I will reverse the habit I’ve created over the past several years. Additionally, the more powerful the feelings I manifest, the greater the effect on my subconscious. So don’t worry about your subconscious calling your bluff, it’s incapable of rational thought.

The Patch

I don’t know exactly how much the patch costs, but I’ve been told it’s around $30 for a month’s supply. The only reason for the patch is that I’ve become physically addicted to cigarettes and, while I could certainly just increase the length of my meditation sessions and get the job done, I’m a busy guy and I need to take the most efficient route to my goal. A month should be plenty of time to break the physical addiction, and if not I’ll just buy another month’s supply; I’ll limit it to two months, however.

Other People

This is really important; it’s going to be a thousand times easier to quit if I don’t have people asking me to join them for a smoke every 10 minutes, and I have to make sure they all get the message, so I can’t worry about annoying people by telling them 5 times a day not to ask me to have a cigarette with them. By day 3, the message will really sink in and nobody will ask anymore.