Consider what you truly believe you’ve earned apart from the cigarette. Perhaps it’s the alone time that smoking provides the excuse to have. Or maybe it’s the feeling of connectedness to the other people you smoke with. Eventually, Reese realized she had mistaken cigarettes for what she really wanted from life: the freedom to make her own choices. “I wanted to be in control of my body and my thoughts,” she says. Reese left her husband, remarried, quit smoking, and became a runner. She found that what she “deserved” was not an hourly dose of toxins but good stamina, fresh breath, and the ability to enjoy a nonsmoking restaurant without having to excuse herself for a cigarette.
You’ve spent a lot of time learning to perceive smoking as a reward. It may take practice to change your thinking, but if you look, you will find abundant ways to reward yourself that are good for you.
“But smoking helps me cope with stress.” This is the little devil’s go-to argument! Nearly all smokers believe they can’t handle stress without a cigarette. Humorist David Sedaris, author of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, writes that at the peak of his addiction, he had 34 cartons of cigarettes — his “inventory” — stockpiled in three different locations. “The only thing standing between me and a complete nervous breakdown,” Sedaris writes, “was my inventory.” Surprising himself, he didn’t have a nervous breakdown after he quit smoking.
It is simply untrue that smoking relieves stress. Quite the opposite: As an expensive, all-consuming addiction to a stimulant (nicotine), smoking increases stress tremendously (as explained in Chapter 2). Chapter 11, Coping with Stress, offers healthy strategies for relieving anxiety.
“But smoking makes me smarter and more creative.” Jack Johnston considered smoking integral to his vision as an artist and writer. “I’d write something really witty and then light a cigarette,” says Johnston, who smoked a pack a day for 30 years. “If I was working on a drawing, I’d step back and smoke. That pause, that swirl of smoke, was part of my creative process.”
If you’re convinced you do your best work with a cigarette in hand, you’re giving the cigarette more credit than it deserves. Though smoking may feel like a natural part of your creative process, it’s actually a break in the process. Besides, a cigarette won’t place ideas in your brain that weren’t already there. When you quit, you may experience a transitional period where you feel a bit “off” because you’ve given up a routine you were used to while creating. However, the cigarette was not the source of your ingenuity. You were!
Much to Johnston’s surprise, his output as an artist increased when he gave up cigarettes. Now, if he’s on a roll, he can carry ideas through without interruption. “Before, I’d be satisfied if I had one good sentence or one clever piece, but I’d get distracted by smoking and not follow through on themes. Now, my ideas are sharper, and they don’t have to come between nicotine urges. I actually have a portfolio, rather than just wishing I had one.”
“But the dangers of smoking are overhyped.” If you’re feeling healthy and don’t know anyone who has suffered from a smoking-related illness, your little devil may cling to this notion. After all, you rarely see ill smokers around town. There’s a good reason: It’s not especially convenient to drag an oxygen tank to the sushi bar or the grocery store. Not to mention that folks on oxygen don’t have the stamina to be out and about.
In truth, the odds are stacked against smokers maintaining long-term health, and in the short term, smokers are more susceptible to respiratory diseases and infections. If you are blind to the damage that smoking is doing, it just means you’ve gone out of your way to avoid looking.
“If someone handed you a glass of poison and said, drink it, you’d say, ‘Are you crazy?’ But cumulatively, that’s what cigarettes are — a glass of poison, drop by drop by drop,” says Kruh, the I Love Lucy fan. “As a smoker, you have a whole raft of positive cues to minimize the effect of the poison you’re ingesting: I just made deadline; I’m going to reward myself. I’m so stressed out; I need this. You just don’t reflect on the long-term, cumulative effects. Your best interest loses out miserably.”
Yes, some smokers puff away for 50 years and avoid chronic, life-threatening disease. But far more smokers lose ten or twenty years of life to tobacco. Do you really want to gamble with which category you’ll land in?
“But everyone’s got to die of something, so I might as well live it up.” You hear of marathon runners who drop dead at 40. You read about how the environment is killing us all, slowly. Yes, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow!
Malcolm Montgomery of Palouse, Washington, sold himself on these arguments, despite watching relatives suffer and die of lung disease and emphysema. What he didn’t consider was how smoking affects life, rather than death. “I thought about the unpleasant end,” Montgomery says, “but not the time in between.”
These days, Montgomery, the office coordinator, is spending that time in between managing the effects of 41 years of smoking. He quit at age 57 but was later diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Today, at 63, he uses three inhalers daily and takes a half-dozen medications; if he travels to elevations higher than 4,000 feet, his breathing is labored — “like a fish out of water,” he says. Hot, steamy showers are out; so are saunas and hot tubs, and places that are hot and dry or cold and dry. “Waking up every day knowing that you screwed yourself is not a good way to start a day,” Montgomery says.
Yet he remains grateful he quit smoking. “I’m certain that if I were still smoking, my COPD would have progressed much faster,” he says. “I might even be on oxygen 24/7 by now. I can’t even imagine what that would be like.”
Assessing Your Top Reasons for Smoking
Think about your own top three reasons for continuing to smoke — what your little devil has been whispering in your ear. Now write them down.
How compelling do you find these statements? In the space below, respond to each of your reasons with a persuasive counter-argument. For example, This is just rationalization or I’m sure I can find other ways to cope with stress or take a break.
Quitting for Yourself, Not for Your Family or Doctor
The first time Burke quit smoking, she did it to appease her daughter, Ellen, who was ten at the time. “For five years she was relentless, telling me, ‘I don’t want to be an orphan because you smoke cigarettes.’ But the guilt trip infuriated me,” says Burke, a single mom. “I felt like, So, you’re not going to pay attention to all the good I do? I’m a good person. I’m a good mom. Nagging just makes a smoker mad.”
Burke’s first quit lasted three days. “I felt so guilty when I went back to smoking, and guilt is toxic. It makes you feel so bad that you just smoke more.” In retrospect, Burke says, she failed because she hadn’t found reasons to quit that genuinely resonated with her. It wasn’t until the airport incident, nearly two years later, that Burke found her own motives for quitting. “That experience challenged me in a way that no human being could,” recalls Burke. “I felt embarrassed that I couldn’t even obey the law.”
Burke had reached the all-important tipping point: the moment when you want to quit smoking more than you want to continue. A couple months later, after more reflection and some preparation, she smoked for the last time, on a morning break at work. “When I crushed out that cigarette, I said to myself, This is going to be my last one. I felt so great.”
Chances