I am a pack-a-day smoker, and I have been since I was 17. (I'm 26 now) I quit once for three months, but that was a forced quit when I joined the US Army, and as soon as I was able to, I started back up again. Since then, I have wanted to quit, but I have only made serious efforts about once every six months. The longest that I've quit on my own was one week. Since finding Steve's site six months ago, I have tried to quit about once each month, though I have made it past 24 hours only twice.
Now, I'm starting to ramp up for another attempt at quitting, and I want to make this stick. I do have a couple of things going against me, though. First, my wife also smokes, and is not ready to quit. She will be supportive of me when I do quit, and won't smoke around me, but I will have easy access to cigarettes and lighters. Second, I have way too much time at work, and easy access to cigarettes there as well. (I teach and tutor at the technical college where I'm also a student, so I know *everybody* in the computer science program, I know every staff member, and I know about 75% of the students who are in other programs... I can ask any smoker, and many of them would go out of their way to help me.) I'm also addicted to caffeine, which has a nasty side effect of increasing the intensity of any cravings.
Now that I have listed all of the reasons why I can't quit, I can manage them and hopefully work on the reasons why I can quit.
I would like to learn how others have quit, and use them myself. Please list the methods that you have used, because I want to model my success off of the success of other people. (I don't remember the term that Steve used in his blog, but it seems to be of little use for me to get recommendations from people who are currently smoking.
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I intend to quit smoking on Thursday after work (I'm off on Fridays, so I have three solid days where I can control my environment), and I will quit cold turkey. My father smoked for 20 years, has used various gums and patches, as well as other programs, and finally quit after a group hypnosis. He recommends that I use anger against the habit, which matches very well with the levels of consciousness model.
If anyone has feedback, please help me. I'll keep everyone posted on how I'm doing, and if I'm successful, there should be a nice long post here and in my blog on how I did it. I would like to use overwhelming force against this habit, so any recommendations will be used.