What has surprised me is just how easy it was to give up smoking. I struggled a bit, and I mean a bit, for about three to five days, but after that I had little or no urge to get a nicotine fix. The only hint I now have, months later, that I haven't quite fully kicked the habit is when I leave the house I sometimes instinctively pat my pockets to check that my cigarettes are there before remembering I no longer need to do that.
I'm pretty much an expert on stopping smoking. Must have given up (ho ho ho) something like 10 times, even though sometimes there was a couple years of clean in between. I'm properly stopped now though, been many years and lifestyle changes back it up.
Because I also found it easy to stop, I always found it easy to start again. Particularly when going to the pub, because get a bit drunk and a pint and a fag go together. But also because I'd alway have this "wotever, I'll just stop again" thing in my head. And it
was easy to stop again. I think the very low volumes that I'd got down to by the end of it certainly helped. Basically just having one after each meal plus a couple more when approriate. Just enough to stop me from getting irritable.
People build it up in their heads that it's this terrible hard thing. Obviously of you do 15-20 a day that heavy mental habit reinforcement is going to be harder to break, but ultimately, on the physical addiction bit you feel a bit crappy and sort of go out of your mind for like 2-3 days then it levels out quite quick. Having a cold is much worse - the difference is you can kill an urge to smoke by just having one. A cold, you can't escape. The longer term habit hooks are also a problem but.. in those moments just don't put one in your mouth (sorry but that really is it)? Five minutes later you'll be thinking about something else and the urge will be forgotten until the next time. At which point you just do the same thing until the urges become so far spaced apart it's a non-issue. It really ain't hard.
The best driver really came from the first time I tried to give up after ~15 years of smoking. When I realised I was addicted and had a problem because I couldn't "just stop" (first attempt was dismal failure). But I learned to hate tobacco companies instantly because of what they'd done to me, and that helps a lot. You don't want to give them your money after that. If you think of smoking as a pleasure rather than a problem that you need to get rid of, you've got a much bigger hill to climb. The only reason smoking feels like a pleasure is because you have an addiction to satisfy. You feel good when you satisfy it. You deliberately give yourself an itch to scratch just so you can feel some sort of pleasure to scratch it. A nasty, harmful, supremely expensive itch.
I go on about this (oh look I've written a sermon) because my boy's mum, who I am not friends with, did a lot of damage to our relationship because of her smoking habit when we didn't have any spare disposable income. She was doing about 15 a day when it was costing £7.50 for 20 Mayfair (a long time ago now). Refused to stop and cited it as one of her "little pleasures" with no regard for anything else. That's over £200 a month when we were poor with a new baby in 2012. Didn't even have the decency to cut down and smoke roll-ups. She's still doing it now AFAIK, filter-tipped ciggies still. That's where my maintenance goes, not on my kid.
She also lied about giving up when she was pregant, smoked all the way through it, trying to hide it from me (was obvious). I caught her going out for a fag when she was on the labour ward being induced.
That's addiction for you.
