How I Quit Smoking

It's 12 years since I stopped smoking.

Actually, it's 12 years since I stopped buying cigarettes. I last smoked a cigarette about 11½ years ago.

I'd been talking about giving up smoking for a few years and had reduced the amount I smoked and changed the type of cigarette I smoked to a 'light' version. The astronomical rising cost certainly had a big effect on my desire to quit.

However, the decider was my promise to my (now) husband that I would stop smoking after our wedding in October 2002. I wanted to do it before but, being realistic, knew it would be far too stressful in the run up to our marriage for it to be a good time to attempt stopping then.

'How did you succeed?', I hear you ask?

Well, I didn't use nicotine patches or chewing gum. Neither did I try self-hypnosis or self-help books. I just decided that I wasn't actually giving up cigarettes, I was just going to stop buying them.  If I really felt the need to have a smoke, I could - but I would have to find someone to get a cigarette from to do so.

In the first few weeks after I stopped buying fags, I came to realise that I didn't actually like the taste of cigarette smoke and that I had always had either a mint or a drink to hand whenever I smoked. If only I had realised that 14 years earlier I could have saved myself a lot of money!

My cessation from smoking met with quite a negative response from older smokers within my family, who seemed to find my success a threat and also expected me to try and recruit them away from their nicotine fix. Eventually, after several years of gentle persuasion, I managed to convince them that my only real concern was that they desisted from smoking around my children. 

After all, when someone has been smoking for over 40 years and knows all the information about the damage that the products of a lit cigarette do to your body and still wish to partake, there is nothing much that can be said - they know it's bad for them, you know it's bad for them but a person backed into a corner by criticism is rarely likely to respond in a positive fashion.

So, in my case, telling myself I could smoke, but only if I could get cigarettes from other people for free, worked. Mainly because I discovered quite quickly that I loathed waking up with a mouth that tasted like an overflowing ashtray, which was a very helpful negative reinforcement of my desire to quit.