Learn How to Quit Smoking for Good

I started smoking as a teenager in the early 1970's. An older sister of mine said how hard it was to quit after years of doing so and she deeply regretted starting. I took her words to heart and quit. I figured then that I knew the secret on how to quit smoking. It was will power. I didn't pick up a cigarette again until I was in my thirties. It had been so easy to quit the last time so I started using cigarettes again. After all I already knew how to quit smoking.

Like an alcoholic who quits drinking and thinks she is cured, I turned out to be wrong. I may have known how to quite smoking in my early twenties but now I desired cigarettes more than I ever had before. It would take me a couple of years and a great deal of soul searching to learn again how to quit smoking.

I wouldn't have any cigarettes in the apartment but then I'd find myself going to a 24 hour gas station in the middle of the night. I wouldn't, however, buy more than a pack at a time. I would then run out and make myself wait before buying more. For awhile I still smoked the cigarette brand I had used in my twenties but then started using light versions of that brand. I couldn't believe that I had thought it would be easy to quit again. I was wrong. I no longer knew how to quit smoking.

I switched to another brand that had less tar and nicotine. I didn't like the way it tasted at all. Now I have always been an outdoor person. I love to hike and swim. It soon became apparent that cigarettes were interfering with that. I couldn't hold my breath as long underwater. Trails that I had hiked on before now became harder to do. I was huffing and puffing on them. I can even remember taking a cigarette with me on a hike and wondering what I was doing. That did not seem to be a good way to learn how to quit smoking.

Being in my thirties I realized that I could spend the next thirty or forty years of my life doing outdoor activities if I didn't smoke. It started to become more important to me to actually quit since I saw it was interfering with my life. I still didn't know how to quit smoking, however.