Okay there, I said it. Quitting smoking is hard. Really hard. My "master plan" to cut down one cigarette each week seemed easy enough. But this week my ration is 12 per day, and I'm finding it really difficult to stick to. The worst part is that being my own worse critic (as we all are) I am beating myself up over each failure, which then feeds into a whole gamut of thinking. The thinking goes something like this: Well, I've failed, so I might as well just give in, I see no solution, no hope.
Crazy huh??
Certainly is.
Maybe I'm looking at this all wrong. Smokers; whether we want to admit it or not, are addicted to our habit. So maybe I need to look at this as an addict. So now I google: "how to stop the addiction to cigarettes". Click!! And here's what I find:
I'm not going to reiterate everything from this site, you can read it for yourself. I actually found the the information here fascinating, especially the first section explaining how dopamine "the brain's primary motivation neurotransmitter" plays a major role in addiction.
Towards the bottom of the page, there is hope, "no crave episode will last longer than 3 minutes". Really?? Wow, that's doable. I just need a distraction during those three minutes............
The bottom line on this site is that they feel that quitting cold turkey is the best and most successful method. Weaning off the nicotine is not an effective method to quit. They say that your body and mind become nicotine free after 72 hours of non-use.
So maybe I'm going at this all wrong???
What to do, what to do..............................
If you have experience with quitting smoking, or are trying to quit I'd love to hear from you.
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