Quote:
Originally Posted by Cassie  hi guys,
when i'm feeling really sad, i tend to smoke alot. i usually smoke 3-5 cigarettes a day, and its a disgusting habit i really want to kick. stress and depression seem to be my main triggers.
for the coming year, i want to work on being a successful non-smoker and start on a new running regime to get my heart and lungs gradually back up to capacity. I'm posting this here so I can hold myself accountable to this. Who here is currently kicking the habit, or has kicked the habit and now lives happily smoke-free? |
Me! I'm ashamed to admit it now, but I'll gladly do it to help someone... I smoked quite a bit daily for a while mostly during my sophomore year (college). I'm a junior now and totally smoke free, and it feels great, I can't even BELIEVE I used to be a smoker
, yuck.
Yeah, I agree, it was a very stressful and sad/depressing time I was going through, and cigarettes were a tough, sneaky, rebellious way to cope (admit it, there is a kind of dirty, rebellious feeling to doing it
).
However, here is something key you may not have thought about... it's easy to
say that "stress and depression" are the triggers for wanting to smoke,
but that stress and depression have to be triggered by something as well... they do not just come from nowhere.
That's what we have to address, the underlying stress. If it was just about kicking a habit, anyone capable of pulling a cigarette out of a box and putting it in their mouth could easily choose to pluck that cigarette out and put in a garbage can, and, boom, no more smoking.
For me, there were many depressors at the time when I was smoking -- for instance: I was hanging around REALLY dark and negative people (who smoked cigs + did drugs), I was living alone in a cold dark apartment, I wasn't getting a very balanced nutrition, I was signed up for many classes I hated and didn't have the energy for, etc, etc. All these things are basically BIG (hidden) PROBLEMS -- i.e. things that violate your personal values -- and when you don't identify them and deal with them they really haunt the shadows of your mind and cause havoc in your life. Your mind literally feels in one place while you are trying to focus on something else. Smoking was, for me, a way to sort of ground myself and bring my mind back into the present moment, something like that.
In conclusion, I would recommend that you summarize everything that you KNOW needs to change in your life, and get going... be on your way, do what you have to do, take the first steps on that right path to the person you want to become (such as, a person who DOESN'T smoke, among other things I'm sure). This is but my experience, but once I decided I had an image of who I wanted to BE in the immediate future, I KNEW what I had to begin to do and what had to change around me... I moved back with my loving family for a while, ate a lot of good food, looked for sweet and positive people to be my friends, signed up for classes that I actually LIKED, started exercising and meditating, etc, etc. and guess what... smoking just DIDN'T FIT into that new image of who I was. Not only that, once I changed the underlying stressors, I simply didn't need to cope using cigarettes anymore, obviously.
A month or so ago I bummed a cigarette from some guy and smoked it from my new standpoint. I didn't feel much pleasure, and had NO desire to smoke more. I had a bad smell in my mouth for the rest of the day, and a reminder of a time when I had to learn the lesson of courage, cause it does take courage to start taking the steps you know you have to take.
Take care, I hope that helps you... just think about it. Also I think I read somewhere that if you quit before you are 30, your lungs return to normal in about a year. How's that for a good incentive to quit now!