| I am ex-smoker for more than 12 years after smoking between half a pack and a pack a day for 15 years, and I went through the process which may be similar to what you describe. So I thought to write here some of my self-observations - maybe they could be useful for you or anyone else reading this. Cigarettes for me combined many aspects that are psychological and social rather than physical: - the sucking reflex. Same calming mechanism as the babies with the pacifier - the comfort of routine, where they support the familiar (the first cig with a coffee, a morning or evening cigarette) - the social interactions (smokers areas are a great place for a conversation and there is no hierarchy) - last but not least - physical effect of calming - the very strong associative effect caused by movies with smoking scenes - the nice feeling of appetite reduction caused by cigarettes/nicotine What helped me was: 0) for the routines - replacing with a different ones that do not need cigarettes. 1) to not set the goal to quit outright, but rather to reduce, and then when it went to zero it was “temporarily stop, I can always restart if I consciously find it worth it”. 2) make every cigarette subject of a conscious decision after a discussion with yourself. Do not prohibit it outright - it only heats up the impatience for it. Make it a conscious decision. 3) Look at adjacent habits, like alcohol. My last infrequent routine, which persisted irregularly for some years after I stopped, was to have a cigarette sometimes socially when I had a drink. After I reduced the drinking to almost zero, I once had tried social smoking and didn’t like how it tasted at all, and had a headache the next day. Which was remarkable as I never had this before. No social impulse felt anymore. 4) take up some sport for half an hour a day, preferably aerobic (I do cycling on a stationary bike). If you manage to go for a streak without cigarettes/alcohol, the difference in performance and feeling will be very apparent which will help at (2). 5) watch out for potential weight gain after stopping smoking. Was hard for me (I gained more than 20 kilos), eventually I lost weight because I moved for half a year to another city where I led a much more active lifestyle. 6) the company of smokers at work. This may be hard but super important if you can tackle it. Eventually I started going for the “breath breaks” but just having a chat rather than smoke, but since this strongly triggers the “routine” programming, this is something I could do only 2 years into stopping. It is a different journey for everyone, but hopefully some of the above may ring true for you and be useful in your journey. Good luck! |