4. PREPARE YOURSELF EMOTIONALLY
Whatever method you choose, you need to prepare yourself emotionally to quit. This section probably should have gone first, but we wanted to let you know your options before we steeled you for action.- Convince yourself that you want to quit
- Be prepared for the pain
- Pick the right time to quit
- Pamper yourself
Convince yourself that you want to quit
Write out a list of pros and cons which examines how smoking enhances your life and how it detracts from it. A realistic and comprehensive list of pros and cons will almost certainly show you that continuing to smoke is a really bad idea, and that a rational person would want to stop. That's obvious to most people, but if you think you might want to quit you should reflect on everything that is unpleasant and harmful about smoking until you decide you don't care or you develop a strong desire to quit. If don't have such a desire, you can have quit-smoking aids sticking out of every orifice, nicotine patches stuck all over you, and hypnotists following you around everywhere you go and you will still fail.
Be prepared for the pain
There are two components to nicotine addiction: the psychological component and the physical component. The psychological component is the habits and routine you have built around smoking, and it takes a long, long time to go away. For some people, it never really goes away, and there will always be times where they will feel a slight nagging like something is missing (or, more plainly, an urgent desire to have a goddamn cigarette). The physical component is the body's dependence on nicotine, and this takes much less time to go away but its effects are painful and difficult to withstand. Reports vary, with some saying that it takes three days for the body to rid itself of nicotine and dispense with the physical component, while others say it takes as much as a week. We think it takes five days. If that doesn't sound like a long time to you, just wait until you try it. Most people feel physically ill, anxious, restless, angry, and so tempted to smoke that they have to restrain themselves from lunging at passing smokers.
The initial five days of craziness is our general rule for just about any quit-smoking method, but the five days are particularly painful if you quit cold turkey. The psychological and physical components of the addiction work on you day and night, and it can be really difficult not to smoke. We're not trying to scare you off – you should definitely try to quit – we just want to prepare you for the fact that it is not going to be any fun at all.
Pick the right time to quit
For example, if you are a student and you are about to have final exams, you should probably wait until after you've walked out of your last exam and partied your brains out that night before you settle down and quit. Look at your calendar, think about what stressful events you have coming up, and pick a day which leaves you at least three weeks between major crises. You're going to have to deal with crises all your life, and this will not change after you quit smoking. However, it would be best to have a relatively smooth patch of three weeks or so to get over the really rough initial quitting period. You must NOT use this as an excuse to never begin -- we're talking MAJOR stress-filled events here -- quitting a job, final exams, planning a wedding, etc. Indeed, those three events were about all we could think of that would not make any time the "right time." If you find yourself "waiting for the right time" more than ONCE, or for more than a couple weeks, you're stalling. Don't stall. You're only screwing yourself. But you know that, and that's why you're reading this article.
Pamper yourself
In order to boost your resolve, we suggest that you treat yourself nicely in return for not smoking. Spend the money you would otherwise spend on cigarettes on some useless but pleasing crap that you've always wanted. Take yourself out to nice restaurants that don't allow smoking. Feel better about yourself, because you aren't a filthy, heathen smoker cowering out in front of your office building anymore. Now you just stand around wondering what the hell people do on breaks if they don't smoke.
It's also a good idea to begin exercising, because if you have a good exercise program going it makes you feel a lot better about yourself and it really starts to make smoking seem absurd. If you're getting up at 7:00 a.m. to drag your lazy ass to aerobics before you go to work, you're going to feel pretty stupid about counteracting your hard work by smoking later on in the day.
There are lots of other pieces of advice that might be helpful; ask successful quitters you know to share their experiences and tactics. Even if they don't have anything useful to say, they can be comforting when you're having a nic fit. We will simply close with a pithy little platitude: You're one cigarette away from a pack a day. Be strong.
