I started smoking at 19. On an increasingly growing list of life mistakes, this is still near the top. I can handle the mess I've made of my credit history. I'm not thrilled about the weight I've gained over the past decade. I can even live with buying a "fixer-upper" of a house but not being handy enough to actually FIX things, but nothing has been more destructive to my life than being a heavy smoker.
I'll be 32 in a few weeks, and I estimate that I will have spent, conservatively, $32,000 on cigarettes. If I had $32,000 right now, I could pay off any credit cards, completely finish renovations on our house, and have enough left over to take a pretty nice vacation. And that's just the financial impact.
I'm winded when I take the stairs. I spend each morning nearly dry heaving all of the tar and junk that's accumulated in my lungs from the previous day's debaucheries. I smell like an ash tray. And, since the smoking ban that is enforced in nearly every city, I have to spend chunks of my day outside, shivering and puffing in the gorgeous Pittsburgh winter weather.
I'd be lying if I said I've ever made a serious attempt at quitting. The only time I went more than a few days without a cigarette was when I was hospitalized with a very, very serious strain of influenza. It was so serious the doctors initially thought I had contracted meningitis, but an extremely painful spinal tap proved them wrong. I was quarantined in my room for four days (or that's what the medical assistant told me when she was arranging my discharge paperwork...time was a bit of a blur). I told them I was a smoker and they gave me a patch, as well as a prescription for more patches after I was released. I'd say I made it 10 days, before I woke up and just felt like having a cigarette.
Lighting up that first cigarette after nearly two weeks...that's definitely in my top 10 list.
I have all the reason in the world to quit: as a family we could use the extra money, as the father to a 5 year old I'd definitely want to raise her into adulthood without dealing with lung cancer or emphysema.
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When I think of an "addict", I think of a person that is so chemically attached to a drug that he would do anything to get more of it into his system. I don't know if smokers completely fit that description, which is also why I believe that cigarette addiction is 20% chemical and 80% psychological.
How often do smokers smoke in their sleep?
Or on airplanes?
Or in an office?
Or at a movie?
We are capable of going hours without a cigarette. And yet, the first thing I do after grabbing my luggage off of the conveyor belt is step outside and light up.
Nicotine replacement has always sort of bothered me. I'm trying to quit smoking, so I'm replacing smoking with a product that has just the addictive ingredient in smoking. Sure, I'll be inhaling much less tar and carbon monoxide, but I'll still be a nicotine addict. Studies suggest that complete nicotine withdrawal takes about two weeks, from a physiological perspective. So after 14 days of no cigarettes you can safely assume that any withdrawal symptoms are 100% mental.
What I need is a reward. A tangible prize for going one day without a cigarette, then two days, then five years. I think part of the reason cessation fails is because people forget why they quit, and they want the instant gratification that only a cigarette can provide. I'm not a capitalist by nature, but I think my plan would work:
On the first day I stop smoking, I will go to the bank and take out $150. Each day I go without a cigarette I will put $5.00 into a piggy bank (or the masculine, grown-up equivalent of a piggy bank). That $5.00 is how much I'm saving by not picking up a single cigarette that day. It's how much I wasted on slowly killing myself.
That way, any time I feel a craving, any time I had a rough day, any time I'm bored, or I'm stressed out, I can look at that pile of cash and think "I'm sure there's a less harmful way of dealing with whatever issues I have today." And I know that there is. There's billions of non-smokers out there that have never considered a cigarette to be an answer, and I want to be one of them.
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