|
I quit 6 months ago, I smoked for 18 years and spent 16 of them trying to quit. It is very difficult. I had really rough go of it quitting. You are lucky that you have only smoked for a year, that is a positive. Quit now and you can legitimately overcome whatever ailments you feel you may be most at risk for. Hopefully you or someone else finds this useful.
Here is my 2 cents on quitting smoking fwiw.
Its ends up being quite complex to successfully quit for good. The following two items are helpful in the short term, but relatively critical to long term success.
It helps to establish some type of exercise routine that you can do often. Perhaps at least 3 times per week at least? Exercising has a natural way of making you WANT to do things like eat healthier and treat your body right. The most difficult thing for me over the years regarding finding success with this transition, was that I always tried to immediately set huge workout goals and expectations for this and want to go rebuild the world in a day with the new non smoker me, and then experience a low and go right back to smoking. The key to the whole thing is consistency. Each day you don't smoke is a victory and victories stacked up on top of each other make for a successful campaign! The exercise can be as simple as walking a few blocks. The key is that it is something of a greater output than what you are currently doing, because every time you do it you will be reminded that smoking sucks and how glad you are that you don't smoke anymore.
Dealing with stress... The fact of the matter if you are truly being honest with yourself, is that there are things that you DO get out of this. Otherwise, its unlikely you would have gotten to the point where you felt you couldn't quit. For me I used it as stress relief, taking a mental vacation from all of the shit I had to get done next, or today, or whatever... The thing about this that is interesting is that everyone does things to take a mental vacation and do things for entertainment/distraction (this message board being a great example of this haha!), but when you are a smoker it is hard to imagine what else you would do to fill that void. You must come up with something to help fill the void and a new outlet for the stress that you will be experiencing. Projects that require attention to detail can be helpful, puzzles etc etc. sometimes when I am stressing out It helps to go sit on the porch for a few min like I used to, I just don't smoke.
With those points in mind for the long term, it is obviously critical to figure out how to navigate the short term successfully since it is the most likely time you will fail, and also by far the most difficult part of the process. I cried several times throughout the process, it was really ****ing hard.
3 days until the chemicals are out of your system. Every minute it seems to get tougher and you become more frazzled the further away you get from your last smoke. Keep it in your mind that after 3 days the physical withdrawals will experience a dramatic decrease. Just focus focus focus, "if I can just make it 3 days it will get easier".
After that
3 weeks to get over the mental cravings. It will be 3-4 weeks to experience the amazing feeling where you realized that you forgot for just even one mini second that you used to smoke. Leading up to that you will probably be extremely anxiety and stress ridden. It gets worse every day. You feel like there is a damn war going on in your brain and your head is going to explode and everyone around you doesn't have a clue really how you feel. You look the same to them as you did last week and the week before, it is your own private 3 week miserable hell. Focus on the exercise, focus on the fact that you just need to make it 3 weeks.
The thing that was the real x factor for me was getting massages crazily enough. I have a lot of back pain that I have dealt with for years, and I decided I was going to chunk out the money and get weekly massages to see if it made a difference. To be honest I wasn't planning on quitting smoking until I got up to leave my first massage.
If you have ever had a massage you can probably recall sometime after having really cloudy or dark urine, it is a great way to "wring out" the toxins in your body. Meanwhile it is super relaxing and stress relieving!!!! I realize having done it how much of a financial commitment it was to get massages every week, but the longterm savings and your health are worth the world. Speed up the process of ridding your body of chemicals and chemical dependance, and reduce your stress at the same time!!! I find it funny that I stumbled onto it so randomly after trying every quit smoking method out there.
Drink lots of water.
|