How I Quit Smoking For Good

I smoked for years and thought that I would never be able to break the habit. I loved it, I had no lung problems or difficulty breathing and most of my friends smoked, so I did not really see the problem. After years of smoking, my wife finally convinced me to quit, but it was not as easy as I thought it would be. It really gets a hold on you and it is hard habit to break. I did quit smoking for good eventually, but it took some hard work and will to do so.

I tried every solution under the sun to quit smoking for good, and almost everything I tried failed. I was told that a person is no longer physically addicted to nicotine within 36 hours of smoking their last cigarette or cigar. I thought to myself, all right, if I can just make it for a day and a half without smoking, I will be home free. Now, I am not saying that the person who told me that was lying, and perhaps it was more out of habit than anything else, but I still badly wanted a cigar after that 36 hours, and I smoked one.

I then decided I was going to use the patch to quit smoking for good. For whatever reason, I could not seem to get enough nicotine out of my patch, and I was still craving a smoke. I then placed a few more patches on various parts of my body, and then I started to get tingly feeling and knew that something was wrong. I took them all off and had to wait for about a day before I felt completely normal again. Needless to say, I quickly abandoned that approach, which was disappointing, because I knew other people who had quit smoking by using the patch.

I then decided that I would try to ween myself from smoking a little at time. I figured that it would be hard to stop smoking all at once, so why not make it a gradual effort to quit smoking for good and give myself a little bit of a break. That worked for a while, but it was not long before I started to go right back to my old habits and smoke like a chimney again. I knew that I had a serious addiction at that point, and started to wonder whether I could ever quit smoking.

I was in my library one night reading a biography on Sigmund Freud. He was one of my heroes as a psychology major, and I found his theories to be very useful. I read about how he used to smoke 20 cigars a day, and I felt proud that I also smoked cigars. Then I read about how he developed mouth and throat cancer, and how part of his jaw had to be removed. I'd found my reason to quit smoking for good. The book was so vivid in its description that I put out the cigar I was smoking at the time and never had another.