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Share your quitting journey

I laughed

JonesCarpeDiem
Member
7 2 92
‎12-28-2023 12:57 PM

The first week of my quit, I was going through what has been described by other new quitters thousands upon thousands of times on this site and every other. I spent my first two weeks playing guitar to  any music my friend could put in his player for 10 hours a day.

About my third day, I was at my friends and walked down a few steps to his patio.

At the same moment, my friends brother walked out of the workshop and into the patio smoking a cigarette.

The urge to smoke hit me from 40 years of memory conditioning.

In that moment, I realized that smoking was a choice. He had decided to smoke and I hadn't.

The simplicity of that realization made me laugh. It was my first gotcha moment.

Laughing is a mind changer. If it's sincere it puts you in a better mood. If it's fake, it's a reminder of what you are doing and what your goals are. 

Either way, hearing yourself laugh will change the course of your quit.

Try it and see!

 

2 Comments
About the Author
Hello, My name is Dale. I was quit 18 months before joining this site and had participated on another site during that time. I learned a lot there and brought it with me. I joined this site the first week of August 2008. I didn't pressure myself to quit. HOW I QUIT I didn't count, I didn't deny myself to get started. When I considered quitting (at a friends request to influence his brother to quit), I simply told myself to wait a little longer. No denial, nothing painful. After 4 weeks I was down to 5 cigarettes from a pack a day. The strength came from proving to myself, I didn't need to smoke because I normally would have smoked. Simple yes? I bought the patch. I forgot to put one on on the 4th day. I needed it the next day but the following week I forgot two days in a row I put one in my wallet with a promise to myself that I would slap it on and wait an hour rather than smoke. It rode in my wallet my first year.There's nothing keeping any of you from doing this. It doesn't cost a dime. This is about unlearning something you've done for a long time. The nicotine isn't the hard part. Disconnecting from the psychological pull, the memories and connected emotions is. :-) Time is the healer.