The story of how I quit smoking
Page 6
All I had to do was cut out that one cigarette and I wouldn’t be smoking at all before going to work. I wouldn’t actually have my first cigarette of the day until around 4.20 pm.
I can tell you now, that one cigarette was probably the hardest one to quit smoking, until I was told how to do it, then it became the easiest. I must have tried, and failed, to cut out that cigarette two dozen times. I would not smoke it for a day or two, even three, then give up and smoke it again and have to start all over again.
Looking back, I think I know why that one cigarette was so difficult to give up. It was because I was going from a place where I could smoke, to one where I couldn’t smoke. I knew I couldn’t, wouldn’t, allow myself to smoke after I left for work, so the old “have a smoke before you go somewhere you can’t smoke” conditioning was kicking in. The very reason I had decided to quit smoking, was now preventing me from doing it.
I tried telling myself that I didn’t want to smoke that cigarette, I tried thinking of other things to take my mind off it, I even tried putting the TV on and watching breakfast TV. Nothing worked, I could give it up for two or three days but always went back to smoking it again. I guess that little nicotine demon in the back of my head was telling me “this is the last chance to have a smoke for 9 hours and 20 minutes, don’t pass it up”.
Then a colleague asked me how my quitting smoking was going. I told him how far I had come and he praised me, then I told him about the problem cutting out the cigarette before setting off for work. He said “you know what you should do, don’t you” and I said “No, I wish I did” and he said “Set your alarm clock to go off ten minutes later, that way you won’t have time for a smoke”.
He laughed when he said it, thinking he had just made a witty remark, but he had hit on the perfect solution.
When I got home I immediately went to set the alarm for ten minutes later, but set it fifteen minutes later just to be sure. And it worked, the next morning I didn’t have time to smoke that cigarette. In fact I didn’t even think about it until I was at the bus stop waiting for the bus.
From then on I quit smoking that cigarette without even trying. Although I did have one lapse about a week and a half later. I woke up one morning, jumped out of bed and went for a pee (I was bursting). Then got dressed, put the kettle on etc. and had just about finished my mug of tea when I heard the alarm go off. I must have woken up, about ten or fifteen minutes before the alarm goes off, to go to the toilet and thought it was time to get up.
When I was all ready to go for the bus it wasn’t even ten to seven, so I had more than ten minutes to wait. So what did I do? I thought “goody, I’ve got time for a smoke” and lit one up. I’d smoked half of it before I realised I shouldn’t have been smoking it, but finished it anyway. Then vowed never to make that mistake again, and I didn’t.
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