Give and get support around quitting
Once you have stopped smoking, the biggest fight seems to be ignoring those behavioral triggers. I have spent a little time looking at this business of working past the triggers. It feels like the more time spent with the desire working at your willpower, the more the behavior is reinforced. What I mean is this:
The other thing that I have to do is write these little notes to myself. It reinforces the structure of my game plan. We all needed a game plan of one sort or another. I am a logical guy and this is mine.
pongaselo I was a serial quitter and I probably used every excuse known to man to light up. Once I decided to stop lying to myself, it made all of the difference in the world. I told myself that if smoking a cigarette would HONESTLY change something for me...take away my pain, stop me from feeling stressed out or angry, I would HONESTLY look what made me think I "needed" to smoke, what did I think smoking would do? Once I made that promise to myself to be honest, all of the power of the triggers was gone. I knew that my pain did not go away when I smoked...I knew that smoking just distracted me for a while and then I still had pain. I knew that it certainly did not work for anger because I would sit and smoke so furiously while I contemplated crushing someone or something that it FED the anger. It didn't help with stress because the stress was still there when I finished the cigarette. None of my triggers lasted very long once I was honest with myself, none of them had any hold on me any more. I will not say that I don't still feel that pull sometimes, particularly when I am really unhappy but I know what it did to me and continues to do to me even though I quit.
I don't WANT to be a smoker and it is about time that I do something that I DO want...I might be a little late in my growing up but I guess that as long as I am alive, I can keep learning new things about myself and new ways of dealing with life.
Ellen
My daughters have given up on me ever growing up. When I visit my oldest, she sends me to play with my grandson who carefully explains everything that I need to know in appropriate detail. My grandson is 3 1/2 and likely smarter than me. I really hope that he is smarter than me.
Hence, the simple dismissal so many espouse here, "I don't do that anymore." Dismiss the thought and move on ... no dwelling, pitying, bemoaning, longing. The less you dwell on the thought, however triggered, the less power you give it.
Exactly, we give the monster too much of our valuable time. Its time to move on.
You can always build yourself a mind raft, dump all of your trigger garbage on it and watch it float down the river into oblivion!
If I had the raft, I would hop on it and leave the trigger garbage to rot in a trash can on the dock with the dead fish carcasses.
I would shake my head very hard until the thought of nicotine flew out. Make sure to stomp on it after, though. You don't want that though to be picked up by some unsuspecting person.
Not sure that I could afford the chiropractor but the I like the image.
Reading through the replies is as useful as reading the original post. Its almost like an easter egg hunt. How many ways can we say the same thing but somehow, we still manage to disagree. If you are a sane, compassionate, self respecting human being, you would think that putting up barriers is pointless. Communication barriers are the basis for politics, war and why we find ways not to quit. Remember the basic caveats: Sane, Compassionate, Self Respecting. How quickly we attribute these adjectives to ourselves, right?
So what part of smoking indicates sanity. Maybe 150yrs ago in a TeePee on the prairie it made sense as a catalyst for communication. Not today though, too much information to ignore.
If compassion consists of wasting money that might be better used for ANYTHING else or exposing others to poisonous gases, then smokers are compassionate.
Self respect. What is that. If I had that, I wouldn't have ever smoked most likely. I'm not saying that smokers lack these personality traits. That would be a destructive and inaccurate oversimplification of how we think and behave, Really inaccurate and destructive and mean too.
If you think about it though, these are 3 great kick it to the side of the road concepts for dismissing a trigger long enough to forget it. Of course you could argue that my characterizations of these personality traits is flawed. That is a great rationalization and an open invitation to one behavioral trigger or another so have at it.