The Story of How I was Too Busy To Smoke
There comes a time when, in a smoker’s life, the decision to quit smoking is more and more prevalent. Every time you talk to a smoker acquaintance of yours after they quit, you can’t help but think about quitting yourself. In my experience, the thought of quitting stirs up two reactions in you. The first one is trying on for size the thought of quitting. Afterwards, either you decide it’s not something you want for yourself or you start to feel guilty about it. Both cases, you probably light up a cigarette afterwards.
My Smoking Years
For me, most of the time, quitting smoking was definitely not something I wanted for myself. In my 20s, it was an appetite suppressant as well as something to do with my hands when I was out. In my 30s, it was either a reward, a consolation prize or simply a buffer between hearing some (either good or bad) news and reacting to it.
How I Started Smoking
I was a smoker for roughly 11 years. Started smoking cigarettes in order to stop smoking other things. I was late to pick up smoking, as in my generation smoking in high school wasn’t cool anymore. I was 23 when I started smoking cigarettes regularly. By 25 I was over 1 pack a day. The moment I started opening the second pack during one 24 hour span, I switched to rolling tobacco to make it a little more difficult to light up. Regular smokers see this as a healthier option, which I’ve always found hilarious.
The Failed Attempt to Quit Smoking
The first time I tried to quit, I was 29 and, in 2018, Vape Nation was a thing. I smoked alternatives such as vapes and e-cigs. That lasted exactly four days before I went to the store and bought a pack of Dunhills.
After that experience, I decided quitting was not for me and being a smoker was perfectly fine. I had no medical issues, I exercised regularly, had a balanced diet, even went vegan. I was one of those special people not affected by smoking, I thought. Everyone in my family is a smoker and they’re perfectly fine.
A Good Reason to Quit Smoking
The year I turned 34, a friend came up to me during Easter dinner and told me I could start considering freezing my eggs. For those of you who don’t know, the quality of eggs decreases as women get older, the probability of getting pregnant drops. In order to fight the biological clock, women have the possibility of cryoconservation of ovocytes.
As I looked into this, I learned that I can do a blood test that reflects egg quality. This is the measurement of the AMH hormone. There are several other fertility tests, and I highly recommend you speak to your physician or a certified gynecologist about your possibilities. For this story, we’ll just use AMH levels.
Of course, going into the test, I was overly confident. You may remember, I am one of the chosen ones who stay healthy regardless of what they’re doing to their body. Then I received the test results via email, opened it and was very disappointed. At 34, my levels were typical for a 36-38 year old. There are many reasons why this can happen, but, deep down, I knew exactly why. It was because I was a chain smoker. I didn’t drink, I didn’t do drugs, I wasn’t under a lot of stress. The only unhealthy thing about my daily routine was that I smoked.
After receiving the results I remember giving up on the idea of cryoconservation. Then I read a little more about smoking related to AMH levels. I decided to do a little experiment with myself.
Quit smoking. But do it interdisciplinary.
Prior to this experience, I was on a self development journey. I am an architect with a small practice that recently started getting bigger. This growth demanded more and more leadership skills from me. Better time management, better communication and an overall mindfulness to deal with it all. I’ve read all the major books:
Atomic Habits, Think and Grow Rich, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, The 80/20 Principle and, of course, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
The general consensus of these best sellers was that, in order to achieve certain goals, you basically have to transform. You have to change your personality and become someone who attains those goals easily. This way, you’re kind of tricking your brain into adapting towards reaching said goal.
And so, one morning, I woke up and said to myself “Today I’m a non-smoker. I don’t know about tomorrow, but just for today, I am a non-smoker.” The first day ended pretty smoothly and so I did the same thing the next day. Then the day after that. I am currently four months a non-smoker.
I’ve read that the nicotine addiction is a very small part of the habit of smoking cigarettes. Nicotine withdrawal happens during the first 3-4 days after quitting and then it just stops. The rest of it is all habitual.
The struggle is not with the substance, but with managing yourself in front of certain triggers that caused you to smoke in the first place. These can be positive, reward based, correlating it to coffee or alcohol. They can also be negative, when receiving bad news or after having a bad experience or symbolizing a break during some intense work.
At least that’s what we tell ourselves.
When people generally tell you that it’s “bad for your health”, you don’t really have a horse in the race. It’s too general for you to care. As soon as you have a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that can be correlated with the effects of smoking, critical thinking truly kicks in. You realize that “rewarding yourself” with a cigarette is probably the dumbest thing you can do to your body. There’s absolutely no reward in it for you.
Critical thinking and a little bit of self reflection will help you determine why you were smoking in the first place. At first, I started noticing craving after moments of mild discomfort. An awkward conversation, some bad news, a little bit of stress. After two weeks, I figured out that I was smoking in order to not address something that was bothering me. I just didn’t want to deal with issues that were a little more serious, speak up for myself or express my needs. I mean this both at work and in my private life. Your smoker friends see this as irritability. I suggest you lean into it so they get used to you setting boundaries.
Did I gain weight after I quit smoking?
Actually, no. After the first week of quitting, you notice a spike in water retention. I sure did and started panicking. When I panic like that, I read a lot of scientific articles and try to figure out what the medical consensus is. I read that, during the first two weeks after quitting smoking, most of the nicotine leaves your body. This comes as a surprise to your circulatory system and begins flooding it with water and nutrients. After two weeks, water retention for my body was as usual, smoking or non-smoking.
What I kept panicking about was metabolism rate. I read that smoking accelerates your metabolism. Smokers can burn up to 400 extra calories in a day because of this. My solution was building muscle mass in order to accelerate my resting metabolism. I started going to the gym, doing weight training. Rarely cardio, mostly weight training. And the occasional swimming.
My work as an architect, my doctoral research, my walking, my weight training and my swimming all took up a lot of my time. This left me with virtually no time to even think about smoking. At most, if I really wanted a cigarette, I would just have some water instead. My body immediately changed its mind about smoking. It sounded disgusting.
You can do it too
In order to actually quit smoking, there are several things you have to deal with, physically and spiritually. Here are five steps I’ve identified for myself that made me quit smoking after 11 years.
1. Find a personal trigger
A true reason to persist in being a non-smoker is something very personal. Nobody is going to convince you. You need to find your own KPI, something meaningful to you. For me, it was having the option to eventually get pregnant, if I wanted to.
2. Shift your identity
Instead of quitting smoking, you become a non-smoker.You’re out with friends and someone offers you a cigarette. You don’t say “No thanks. I quit”. You say “No thanks. I’m a non-smoker.” This is also a good time to come to terms with the fact that a cigarette is one of the shitiest rewards you can give yourself.
3. Figure out why you were smoking in the first place
All of us have our own ways of dealing with stress. Smokers have a quick fix. Non-smokers have to be a little more mindful about it. If you’ve decided to quit, next time you crave a cigarette, you can try something new. You can try and just sit with that bad feeling and try to focus on it, see where exactly it’s coming from. Really sit with that feeling. At first, it will probably be a small, petty reason. After a couple of times, you’ll notice some commonalities between these petty reasons. Figure that out and I trust that, not only will you quit, but you’ll also be a better person because of it.
4. Focus on your entire body
Most of us identify ourselves as walking brains. Especially when, for many, online presence is more important than physical presence. Also, because of body standards, we tend to neglect parts of our body we don’t like. Weight training helped me pay more attention to my posture, the way I carry myself.I finally had a tool to work directly on certain areas of my body. Quitting smoking will give you more time and more energy to start a new workout habit. All you have to do is find the one you can do most easily and that correlates with your goals.
5. Stay humble
Finally, just take it one day at a time. The first couple of weeks, it’s enough to have the goal of being a non-smoker for just one day. Afterwards, I personally did not want to break my streak. There will be many times when it will be weird not to. When I was surrounded by smokers, in a high stress environment and obviously craved a cigarette, I stopped myself. I said to myself that I am probably not willful enough to only want one cigarette. So I stayed humble about it and just didn’t.
You can do it too.