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Give and get support around quitting

pongaselo
Member

How quickly can you dismiss a trigger?

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:

  1. Triggers or learned behaviors require reinforcement to persist. When we smoked, it was a combination of the nicotine and repetitive activity that strengthened the behaviors. 
  2. When you quit, you wean yourself off the nicotine in whichever manner works best for you. You are then confronted with the behavioral triggers and working your way through trigger events.
  3. The biggest hazard that I see is spending time with the triggers. 
  4. Long term success hinges on weakening and eventually pushing the behavioral triggers so far back in your consciousness that they are not part of what you deal with on a daily basis at all.  
  5. Engaging the yearning generated by a trigger is very dangerous to all my hard work so it is best to dismiss the the entire thought pattern as quickly as possible. 
  6. By abbreviating the thought pattern, it is weakened.  No chemical reinforcement and no mental reminders means more or less forgotten. 
  7. My favorite tool is the 10 minute rule. The ten minute rule goes like this; The average attention span of even a very bright person is only about 10 minutes. 
  8. What I do is dismiss the trigger as best I can promising myself that I will get back to the thought or yearning in 15 minutes or so if I really must. As long as you really do dismiss it somehow, this works very well. Trick is you have to work out the process of dismissing the trigger.  That's the key.  
  9. I think of how much it pisses me off that I allowed myself to fall into this disgusting habit and how much better I feel about myself now that I don't do it anymore. 
  10. That path gets me right out. Then the 10 minutes rule does the rest and I get on with my day.  IT works.

  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. 

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10 Replies
elvan
Member

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

pongaselo
Member

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.

pongaselo
Member

Exactly, we give the monster too much of our valuable time. Its time to move on.

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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!

pongaselo
Member

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. 

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gregp136
Member

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.

pongaselo
Member

Not sure that I could afford the chiropractor but the I like the image.

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pongaselo
Member

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. 

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