I quit smoking last july and am still going strong!
It's not as big a deal as you fear. Not to make light or diminish the effort you will put in or the apprehension you feel, but you'll see once you really do it that you will still live without ciggies.
Before I quit (even up to a week beforehand) I did not want to stop. I "liked it" too much and honestly thought I enjoyed doing it. I then read this book and it really helped me. My boss read it, stopped smoking and recommended it to me about a month earlier but I had no real interest until I saw it in a second hand book store and bought it thinking, what the hell...If it works, then good. If not, no harm done, eh? *shrug*
i read it and decided to quit. I was still scared though. My main fear was that I simply wouldn't enjoy my life as much without cigarettes. Like i'd be constantly bored or restless and just like a big thing would be missing, leaving a hole in me somewhere.
And that did happen, I did feel that way but only for about 2 weeks or so. The actual physical cravings weren't really a problem. I thought at one stage (between days 1-4) a sort of skin crawling sensation but i'm not sure if that was in my mind or not. Sounds more like drugs than cigarette withdrawal to me, but who knows.
Anyway...When, in the following days and weeks, I felt I wanted to smoke, I just told myself no. There is no point. You would get nothing from it now as the nicotine is out of your system after 3-7 days, so you'd just feel sick. Any emotional gain you'd get from it would be fake. Like, you make yourself addicted to something so you can then use it later to ease boredom or stress or enhance relaxation, but it's not real. How can inhaling smoke from a stick of paper and chemicals really make you feel any of this?
It's just that your physical addiction which produces the physical feelings when you smoke (which results from the relief from cravings & withdrawal symptoms. This is why we smoke every few hours or so...The nicotine is draining from our bodies and we have mild cravings so we light up again...So all the pleasant feeling is when you smoke is because you've now relieved the craving from the previous cigarette you had) you associate these physical feelings with a pleasant emotional feeling.
I mean, for me. I still miss sitting out on my balcony having a smoke during my favourite tv show. This is the only time I really miss it, and I just can't understand why because I mean, I can still sit out there, can't i? How could holding a cigarette make it any different? And the answer is that it's the physical feelings combined with the relaxation and also now a so-called fond memory that makes me pine for this sort of cigarette. Nothing else. So I know that actually having one won't help me lose that feeling. It'll just make me feel sick.
So yeah, anyway (sorry to blab on so much!) whenever i'd want a ciggie in the early days, i'd say to myself no, there's no point. Even if you had one (which I refused to do), what's it going to accomplish? You will (a) feel nauseated, (b) feel guilty, (c) feel exactly the same except for those 2 negative feelings, (d) be right back where you were to begin with - wanting to quit and going great until you screwed up and had a ciggie for no reason (as per the above), so all you'd have to be doing is going right back to where you were before and not having one.
Like, the only way to ever get the feeling back is if you are addicted again. And you don't want that. If you did, you'd never feel that back of your mind constant vague nagging and guilty and stressed and scared feeling that you should really quit one day...
Anyway...That is all. Good luck!
