I’m a smoker. I’ve been smoking since I was a teenager. I’m unlikely to go “cold turkey” and give up smoking overnight. However since I moved into the new house I haven’t smoked in it. Not once. Nor have I let anyone visiting smoke in it either.
The house is now a smoke free zone. You can smoke outside in the back garden if you want to, but I don’t allow anyone, including myself to smoke indoors.
Why?
I’m not 100% sure what triggered this. I suspect it was a combination of things. I was in the US from just before Christmas until the second week of January. While I was there I spent a lot of my time in hotels or other places where I couldn’t smoke. Any friends I visited were non-smokers. So over a 2 – 3 week period I ended up smoking way less than normal. And it didn’t bother me. Sure, I was still smoking, but my overall consumption had dropped quite a bit.
I’ve been back in Ireland since the 2nd week of January and things haven’t changed that much. When I was in the old house I still smoked indoors, as it was “allowed”. But I simply decided not to smoke in the new house.
So I haven’t.
And it’s odd, because it’s not driving me nuts and I don’t feel an overwhelming urge to run outside the back door every 10 minutes to have a puff. I get home from the office around 6pm and go to bed after midnight. Over the course of the evening I might smoke 4 or 5 cigarettes, which if I’m at home over the weekend will go up, but I’m not smoking anything close to the number I used to smoke. Before it was almost too easy. I’d light a cigarette and puff away at it, but ultimately a lot of it would just burn by itself in the ashtray. Of course I smoked in almost every single room of the house except for my bedroom.
I used to smoke 20 or more cigarettes per day, with that number going up quite a bit if I went out for the evening ie. to pubs etc., Since Christmas I’m down to around 10 cigarettes a day. I’ll be on the road quite a bit over the coming month which means more time in bars and late nights etc., which is when I tend to smoke more. I’m not consciously trying to give up, but reducing my consumption isn’t a bad thing.
Should I give up entirely? If I was being 100% logical and rational then obviously, yes. But I need to be honest with myself. I quite enjoy smoking, so I need to switch to vaping to replace it. Yes, I know that vaping contains nicotine, unless you switch to one of those nicotine free hookah type things, but it’s still a move in the right direction.
You quit smoking when you emotionally want to quit. As you note, rationally it’s easy.
For me it was a single event that made me feel that smoking was controlling me and that conflicted with my independence streak. Again, a thing I might have known intellectually, but that particular night is was brought home in a way that connected to the less-rational part of me.
After that, quitting was simple. Woke up the next day knowing I’d never smoke again.
From what I’ve read of stop smoking tricks all of the good ones are designed to push you there. A no-smoking house is one since it makes smoking less convenient.
Good luck and hope you can kick the habit eventually!
@Kevin – how long have you been off them?
Michele
I just came here from a link of another blog (headrambles.com) and thought you might like to know that your site was blocked by the “bluhell” firewall firefox extension !
Strangely enough, if you ask most smokers, you’ll find every one of them has two ‘Uncles’. There will be Uncle Bob who smoked 60 a day and lived to 120 without so much as a cough and then there will be Uncle John who was a 60 a day man and then one morning awoke up and decided he didn’t feel like a cigarette and never smoked again. Unfortunately Uncle John then tends to die of something nasty a few years down the line.
Your recent experiences about unconsciously cutting down do give the lie to the whole ‘Tobacco is more addictive than HEROIN’ idiotic mouthings of the Health Nazis.
I have been a 60 a day man for the last free decades but since marrying a frothy mouthed evangelical Xian Anti-Smoker of the ‘smoking lets demons into your soul’ variety I have always not smoked in the house. So declaring the house a ‘Non Smoking Zone’ wouldn’t encourage me to ‘give up’ -if I was ever likely to try, which I’m not, I enjoy it too much.
My dad smoked ciggies from his teens or earlier (he never said born in 1932) till my mam fell pregnant with me (early 1960) when he stopped overnight on economy grounds. It was either the cost of ciggies or the cost of me.
Mam reduced her ciggies over the pregnancy but never stopped completely.
By the time number two son was on the way life had delivered them greater income so he carried on smoking (never told me when he restarted smoking) but instead if ciggies was on Hamlets and other cigars. Again mam reduced while pregnant but never stopped.
I lived in that smoky house heated by a open coal fire for twenty-seven years and brother was there for twenty four. All mam and dads friends smoked and most of the adults that visited us as kids smoked. We spent most weekends in the car going hither and thither with two smoking parents and often three or four smoking adults as we went to the local rugby teams away games where we invariably stopped en route for dinner in a smoky pub.
Neither my brother nor I took up smoking and we are both still here in rude health where according to the nazis we should both be long dead due to the effects of long time second ghand smoke or at best being a burden on the nhs with a smoking related disease.
Dad gave up again as instantly as he did when I was on the way when he went into hospital to get a deep rooted kidney infection identified and sorted by removing the malfunctioning kidney, a surgeon removed it not my dad and henever went back to smoking for his remaining three or four years as he no longer felt the urge or need to smoke. So much for the addictiveness of nicotine. Total bollocks according to my dad.
He died in 2008 of myocardial infarction according to the quack aka natural causes as did my mam who died in 2010 (born 1933) smoking her way through life.