“selective color photography of person holding orange gas smoke standing on snow” by Hugo Jehanne on Unsplash

How I Finally Quit Smoking and How to Change Any Behavior

I was at university and I had been smoking cigarettes for years. I was exercising most days and I had begun to notice that my level of fitness seemed to be capped by the smoking. My body and everything I owned smelled of cigarette smoke.

I detested smoking but I didn’t seem to be able to stop doing it. I began to notice that smoking was the number one thing I thought about. I was always planning when I would smoke my next cigarette and when I would smoke the one after that.

I remember one time lighting a cigarette while thinking about when I would smoke the cigarette after the next one. Then I placed the cigarette that I had just lit into an ashtray only to find another cigarette already burning there. This shocked me. I was so completely engrossed in my addiction that I was paying almost no attention to what was happening in my surroundings.

At the time, I was smoking about forty cigarettes per day, that’s two normal (large) packs, and the term “chain smoker” didn’t quite capture the level of my addiction. I had become a parallel smoker.

I had tried to quit many times and it had always been an enormous struggle. I had planned to cut down, to limit, and to gradually stop. It’s been said that the withdrawal experience of a nicotine addict is more challenging than that of…