A week is very good because now you know that you can tell yourself NO and you will obey. Thats a stupid way to put it but a very real part of making a real quit out of a couple days of abstinence. This amount of time should give you some real encouragement. I'm on week four and I have stumbled which is why I am here right now. I have been making some sort of comment on other folks letters and questions every day for the last 24 or 5 days. Today I stopped writing. This evening, I had an argument with myself that I didn't feel like winning enough to suit me. The energy was not there and I know that for a while at least the energy has to be more powerful that it was this afternoon. I didn't hop in the car and roll over to the gas station for a pack of smokes but my arguments were weak and I felt like, The hell with it, this is a pain in the ass. This is all true of course. It is a pain but after managing my triggers, energy levels, emotions and some cravings at first, I have succeeded so far. It would really suck to do all that and then get in line to throw away money, wreck my clothes, force my daughter to not visit with my grandson, and every other shitty thing that goes along with the absolute worst habit that a person can have.
This is the thing, I don't personally believe that physical cravings make us come back to smoking. I think its the learned behaviors and psychological triggers. For me, I have to learn to recognize the triggers and manage them correctly. Correctly for me is a very short 3 steps or series of events and reactions relying on the single most useful rule of human nature. I call it the 10 minute rule. I heard some where that even the brightest people have about a 10 minute attention span. I have decided that this is a true fact and really may very well be true. For me it is. So here goes the 3 steps:
- Something will happen that reminds me that I want to smoke. It might be a movie, boredom, having a cup of coffee. Not important what the trigger was at All.
- Without getting into some ridiculous time wasting intellectual debate in my head, I dismiss it as quickly as possible
- I briefly promise myself that I can get back to a serious consideration of the importance of trashing my life in 10 minutes.
I never ever return to the specific conversation after 10 minutes. Ever. Not saying a trigger doesn't hit me more than once. They do. Just remembering that this stupid crap was what made me such a jackass for so long is about all the argument necessary most of the time. The 10 takes care of the rest. Wow, I really needed that.
