Five Years Without a Cigarette
Five Years Without a Cigarette
(And over seven without alcohol!)
Reaching a Milestone
I quit smoking on September 19, 2019, which makes September 19, 2024, exactly five years without a cigarette. I’m writing this newsletter a little in advance, so I haven’t quite hit the milestone yet, but by the time you read it, I’ll already be past it.
It’s hard for me to believe that so much time has passed since I quit. I’ve double- and triple-checked the dates because it truly doesn’t feel real.
I smoked occasionally in high school, but my nicotine addiction fully took hold when I was twenty. I began with an occasional cigar, which quickly became a daily cigar. Soon I was craving nicotine all day long, and I turned to cigarettes to feed the addiction.
By the time I graduated college, I had left cigars behind and was smoking a pack of cigarettes every day.
I remember already trying to quit smoking when I was as young as 22, but it wasn’t until I was 32 that I finally managed to stop for good.
Quitting cigarettes was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It was even harder than getting sober.
I tried every smoking cessation method you can imagine, from nicotine patches to hypnosis. Unfortunately, none of these methods worked for me. In the end, I quit cold turkey.
At first, life without cigarettes felt like sheer agony. The days were impossibly long. I couldn’t think straight and my emotions were out of control. The only thought running through my head all day long was how badly I wanted a cigarette.
How Sobriety Helped Me Quit Smoking
I had already gotten sober at that point, and I tried hard to apply the lessons that I had learned from quitting that first addiction. The one that I found most helpful was the visualization tactic of “playing the tape through.”
I’ve mentioned this technique frequently in this newsletter, and yet, I still probably haven’t written about it enough. It’s truly the single most powerful tip that I ever learned for overcoming an addiction.
In case any readers haven’t heard of this before, I’ll quickly summarize it:
When you get a craving, whether it’s for alcohol, cigarettes, or any other substance, you force yourself to imagine what would happen if you gave in. It’s as if you had an imaginary VHS tape of your future, and you’re watching the scene play out in your mind.
I’d often tell myself that I needed just one drink, or just one cigarette, to help ease the transition away from my addiction. I was lying to myself, trying to find an excuse for a relapse.
By playing the tape through in my mind, I could catch myself in the lie. I’d visualize myself going to the gas station, buying a pack of cigarettes, and smoking “just one.” I’d keep playing the tape forward, and imagine how I’d then convince myself that I needed a second cigarette and a third. I’d picture how those three cigarettes would become an excuse to keep smoking for the rest of the night, and how I would tell myself that I’d try again the next morning.
Sometimes, I’d play the tape in further, and imagine continuing to live years of my life as a smoker. How much longer would I go back and forth between trying to quit and resigning myself to smoking? When would I eventually start to develop health problems? Would smoking kill me in the end?
The more clearly and vividly you can imagine these events, the better the visualization technique works. Without it, I don’t think I would have quit drinking, and I know I wouldn’t have quit smoking.
It Really Does Get Easier
The other way that sobriety helped me to quit smoking is that I had already proven to myself once that I was able to overcome an addiction.
I remembered how hard the early days of sobriety had been, and I had experienced first-hand how much easier it got over time. I was able to trust that even though staying cigarette-free felt impossible, it wouldn’t always be so hard.
I think that this is an incredibly important lesson no matter what kind of addiction you’re fighting: It really does get easier.
When I first got sober, and when I first quit drinking, every single day was a battle. The hours were long and painful. The idea of staying quit for years sounded like miserable torture.
However, the longer I’ve stayed quit, the easier it’s become. Instead of fighting day by day, now I have entire years going by without much trouble at all.
For anyone who is currently in the early days of breaking an addiction—whether it’s alcohol, cigarettes, or anything else—I hope you’ll stick with it. The difficulty of those first days and months is worth it, and eventually, it truly can become easy.