Ask Lemmy

I smoked a pack a day for about a decade.

I used a method that was, at the time, recent research. Idk if you remember the quit smoking ad that features a woman going out for a a smoke break at work. She goes to light up, but looks stressed and panicked. She then fucking carjacks someone, looks relieved, and then lights up. It ended with a voiceover "You smoke every time you drive, but you don't drive every time you smoke...? Think of a new way to quit." And then had their URL on screen.

I was a psych student at the time, in a research class. Perfect. I dig in, find out what this ad is all about. As mentioned, it's based on recent peer reviewed research. Awesome. I'm the test subject. Let's recreate.

The tldr: quit specific cigarettes. Don't quit cigarettes.

Do you smoke every time you drink your morning coffee? And then your next one after breakfast?

Okay, well, now the first cigarette of your day is the one after breakfast. Well quit that one a little later.

If you're a smoker, you know certain cigarettes will be harder to quit than others. Space these out. Don't quit your morning cig and then your after dinner cig. Jesus, man.

One by one, get them outta your life. The discomfort is brief, you know you'll smoke again soon.

That's pretty much it. Get it down to the last, most difficult to quit cigarette, and work hard at it, knowing g it'll be a little harder than all the rest. If you fail, you don't go back to smoking you go back to that cigarette.

If you drink alcohol, this will be the hard one. The drunk cigarette is tricky because drunk you doesn't care about progress and will justify chain smoking 'socially' while out drinking or something. My recommendation for the drunk cigarette is to do it last. First quit the "drink alone" cigs, then the "social" drunk cigs. Then limit social drunk cigs to like 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 a night.

The magic part is that you'll still have them... But you'll start hating them. You'll realize how much non-smokers smell smokers and how little you noticed. The taste will be overwhelming, you'll remember how strong it was when you started. I recommend getting hammered and smoking a couple. You'll puke like Bobby Hill and be more or less done with it.