Easy Routine to Stop Smoking
People smoke for a variety of reasons, so it is difficult to find a single “magic bullet” way to quit. I managed to quit, though, after smoking for five years, without any real trouble at all. Yes, I was fortunate to be able to do so, but looking back, I can isolate several factors that enabled me to make a clean break from cigarettes with relative ease, and can recommend them to anyone who is looking for ways to make quitting easier.
First, look for trans-formative moments in your life, and try to time quitting smoking so that it corresponds with one of them. One thing that made quitting easy for me was that I timed it with graduating from college. I was in new surroundings, I had changed everything else in my life, and giving up smoking was that much easier. If you’re moving, starting a new job, or making some other significant change, maybe the time is right to give up smoking, too. It’s not always possible, of course, to wait for your life to change to give up smoking.
Another way to make quitting easier that you can do at any time is to pick up a new hobby that satisfies that little obsessive habitual urge. Smoking becomes a ritual for most of us, and the addiction is often as much a matter of habit as it is a matter of chemicals. Find a new ritual. For me, it was exercise – working out gave me the combination of endorphins and stress relief that I had relied on cigarettes to do before. Try to pick up some new activity that you can feel good about, whether it’s knitting, playing a musical instrument, exercise, or what have you, and see if that new ritual can replace the old.
Finally, and this is probably the most controversial piece of advice I will offer, don’t let quitting become too gigantic a thing in your mind. If you take the word “never” out of the equation, it becomes much easier to quit because quitting doesn’t seem so overwhelming. Instead of saying “I can never, ever have a cigarette again,” focus on not smoking for a couple of days, or for a couple of weeks. As long as you don’t backslide too dramatically after reaching those goals, you can progress toward quitting gradually. I never told myself that I could never smoke again, so I never felt overwhelmed. Then, all of a sudden I woke up one morning and realized I hadn’t had a cigarette for months. Now, I’m going on twelve years cigarette-free, and very rarely do I miss smoking at all. Try these techniques – hopefully, they’ll make quitting as easy for you as it was for me.