• How I Quit Smoking In Less Than One Minute And You Can Too! Part 1

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In the first part of this series we discussed how after 18 years of living nicotine free, a drunken encounter with the cancer stick led me down the desolate path of addiction to cigarettes. I say addiction to cigarettes because the addiction goes behind being hooked on a drug, it’s also a lifestyle, a social enhancer (and destroyer), and it’s something to do. It’s the last one that really gets you too. While waiting for a bus, walking down the street, taking a break from the cubicle, listening to someone talk, reading a book, and so on and on goes the list of activities made more bearable with a smoke in hand.

To those who’ve never smoked, it’s tough to explain why it’s so difficult (yet, easy) to stop. Before I started smoking I always thought that if I ever did smoke I could easily just quit whenever and be done with it. Once I started smoking I realized my previous thoughts weren’t quite 100% valid. There was some truth to the idea of just quitting, but when social factors such as friends, advertisements (the stop smoking ads would just remind me I hadn’t had a smoke lately), and other social situations are added into the mix it becomes tough to separate smoking from your daily, weekly and monthly activities.

The post-dinner smoke becomes a habit and eventually all activities are associated with how they relate to you having a smoke. Getting up in the morning means your first smoke of the day, showering means you can have a smoke while you wait to dry off, finishing your homework is a cause for a cancerous celebration, and look at that, the end of your cigarette is just a reason to light another one with its butt so you don’t waste lighter fluid. It’s not so much that quitting is difficult, it’s that returning to your regular life without a cig in your hand is awkward, foreign and overwhelming.

With that, as promised let’s get to the pros of smoking:

• It’s a social enhancer.

At a party or other social event, smokers automatically have something to discuss or use as an introduction.

• It’s legal.

I’m sure a lot of smokers would prefer a nice, fresh Cuban cigar to their cancer sticks, but alas the non-free market doesn’t work.

• Help Southern farmers.

Though many people in the Southern states have expanded to other crops, there still exist a lot of people who rely on tobacco for their livelihood. You might be killing yourself slowly, but at least you’re putting food on someone’s table!

• It’s a relatively cheap drug.

Compare to alcohol or coffee or any of the other legal drugs and the per smoke cost of cigarettes seems cheap.

• Get a nicotine high every now and then.

Most smokers stop getting a high from their cigarettes a few packs into the habit and pack a day smokers are lucky to get any kind of feeling off the first puff of the day, yet alone the countless other butts they consume.

• Save medical costs by dying early.

Grim but true.

• Or smoke so much your lungs are encased in a protective layer of tar.

Unrealistic but very rare cases do exist where people live into their 100′s and smoke a pack a day. I don’t recommend this strategy.

Now, for the cons of smoking:

• It’s a social crutch.

Opposite to what I said above, cigarettes can become a social crutch for some, where they run to the smoking area at parties and stay there for the night’s duration.

• Increase pollution locally and globally.

Butts everywhere, mass-production emits tons of carbon and other chemicals, transport spews more pollution and even consuming the cigs puts smoke into the air.

• Smelly clothes.

You might not notice it but non-smokers will be repulsed by your stinky aroma.

• Less disposable income.

Here in Massachussets cigarettes costs about $6 per pack. If you smoke a pack a day, that’s $42 a week, $168 a month and a whopping $8,736 $2,016 a year! That’s insane!

• Being reliant on a foreign substance.

One of the big reasons I quit smoking was my desire for independence and freedom (this desire also led me to ditch the car and buy a bike). While a conscious smoker your happiness will be tied to whether you’ve gotten your nicotine fix recently or not. Not only that but it determines your daily schedule and what you can and can’t do.

Now there’s of course plenty of other negative aspects of smoking but I’m quite sure the vast majority of visitors here will be aware of the dangerous and unhealthy aspects of cigarettes so I’ll spare everyone from reciting the evils of smoking.

In the next (and possibly final) post in this series, we’ll tackle what I did to quit smoking, how you can use my strategy and we’ll open up the discussion for any other strategies or ideas you have. My strategy really did work and it’s simple enough that anyone can use it and logical enough that I feel it could work for a significant amount of you.

Being relatively smoke-free for more than six months now I’m here to tell you about the immense benefits of not smoking and how to quit smoking in less than one minute. There’s simply too much material to cover in one post so we’ll have a 3-4 part series about cigarettes, their dangers and how to quit. Today let’s go through some of my personal history. Next we’ll talk about the pros and cons of smoking, focusing on health, economics, and time. Finally, we’ll discuss how to quit smoking in less than one minute. If you’re not subscribed to the RSS feed, now would be a good time to subscribe!

For the first 18 years of my life I never smoked a cigarette and was very adamant about the dangers of smoking and trying to get people around me to quit. When I was a little kid there was one or two incidents where I threw a cup of water at my step-father while he was smoking. Needless to say I quickly figured out this was not a very good strategy! I’d also see my mom smoking on very rare occasions and would take the cigarette from her and threaten that I’d start smoking it if she didn’t put it out. So, you can see I was certainly not a smoker, knew the dangers and publicly promoted not smoking.

Alas, a few months into my freshman semester at the University of Southern California, I got a little too drunk and ended up smoking a cigarette and enjoying it. Though I smoked on only very rare occasions for a few months, eventually I degraded to being a pack a day smoker. The low point came that summer, while working for my step-dad as a construction worker, I smoked nearly two packs a day!

The next school year, I incidentally transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, home of Tobacco Road. Though I didn’t repeat the mistakes of smoking two packs a day I still smoked way too much. Even as a poor college student, I could easily find ways to scrounge up the $2-$2.25 for a pack of smokes. Yup, they are dirt-cheap there as much of America’s tobacco is grown in the region.

So my drunken slip turned into a habit and six years later at the age of 24 I was still smoking nearly a pack a day. At this point though my desire to quit was growing exponentially every day. A few incidents pushed me past the tipping point. In January of this year I quit smoking cold turkey. I had one relapse, which I expected to happen, but it only served to further convince me that not smoking is clearly the right move. Seven months into my smoke-free existence and I’m wicked happy and healthy. Buying and riding a bicycle personally helped me remember to keep my lungs clear and over the course of this series we’ll discuss similar strategies for kicking the habit and staying clean. Remember to sign up for the RSS feed or e-mail updates to stay up to date.