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Share your quitting journey

Can you make this change?

JonesCarpeDiem
0 11 22
  
   
    
     
      
       Of Course You Can     
      
       Here's a tip or two:     
When you say "this is going to be really hard" or, I really need a smoke" you reinforce those thoughts and take yourself further away from your decision to stay quit..When you tell yourself  "I can't do it", you've given up.    
     

So don't say those things.

    
No one is saying quitting smoking is a fantasy world of unbridled happiness.  
  
If you talk yourself out of your quit over and over with this kind of negative reinforcement and once again choose to smoke, what do you gain?

You've only stressed yourself out once again and talked yourself into smoking.

You have the power to decide to not smoke and honor that decision.

It's yours to do with what you choose. It's yours to make it whatever you want.

Negative thinking brings negative results.

When you get the urge to smoke say, "I don't do that anymore" and, say it out loud so it supercedes your inner thoughts of smoking. It will retrain your brain by creating new memories and patterns of behavior and that's what this is all about.

11 Comments
About the Author
Hello, My name is Dale. I was quit 18 months before joining this site and had participated on another site during that time. I learned a lot there and brought it with me. I joined this site the first week of August 2008. I didn't pressure myself to quit. HOW I QUIT I didn't count, I didn't deny myself to get started. When I considered quitting (at a friends request to influence his brother to quit), I simply told myself to wait a little longer. No denial, nothing painful. After 4 weeks I was down to 5 cigarettes from a pack a day. The strength came from proving to myself, I didn't need to smoke because I normally would have smoked. Simple yes? I bought the patch. I forgot to put one on on the 4th day. I needed it the next day but the following week I forgot two days in a row I put one in my wallet with a promise to myself that I would slap it on and wait an hour rather than smoke. It rode in my wallet my first year.There's nothing keeping any of you from doing this. It doesn't cost a dime. This is about unlearning something you've done for a long time. The nicotine isn't the hard part. Disconnecting from the psychological pull, the memories and connected emotions is. :-) Time is the healer.