Never Quit Quitting

[Court09]

I don’t even know which quit attempt I am on now. I think my first serious attempt was in 2014. I quit cold turkey because I kept saying I could never do it. Ironically, I discovered that cold turkey sucks, but it’s my preferred method. After my first or second try, I realized that quitting was 99% mental, and my attempts since then have been a personal experiment to figure out how my brain works and try to outsmart it.

I have been trying to understand the psychology, and I get it now, but I’m still missing something and I’m not sure what it is. One of my biggest problems is the screaming two year old in my head, playing reverse psychology. Joel calls it fixating on a cigarette. Allan says to quit and don’t mope about it. So I’m guessing the secret there is that all the cold turkey quitters that I always had some snarky thought about because it was just so easy for them...The reason it was easy for them is because they simply decided to quit, and didn’t give it another thought. They KNEW they were done smoking, and got on with their lives. They didn’t sit around and think about the cigarettes they were not smoking. Smoking was not an option.

Tomorrow is my official quit day. Today I smoked very little, and I practiced letting my emotions play out without lighting up. It’s very empowering to resist a cigarette when the anger/crave rolls in. I know that I can do it. I think I’ve almost broken the brainwashing, and it’s left me in a peculiar spot.