The First Day of My New Life

Today was my first day without smoking cigarettes. It has been hard, but not nearly as hard as I feared. The first two hours were really hard and seemed to last forever. It felt almost like torture. I was thinking about smoking almost all the time. However, I did not want to let myself down. It would have been a huge disappointment for me, if I would have given up so easily. Instead, I ended up chewing a lot of gum and drinking a lot of water.

After time passed by, I started feeling better and better. My urge to smoke was still there, but it was not constantly on my mind anymore. I also noticed that the urge did not actually last more than a few minutes. As long as I could resists it for few minutes, my urge to smoke disappeared. This was an important realization, because those moments seemed to last forever. Knowing that this is not the case was very relieving and gave me a lot of confidence. It really seems that I can do this!

The first two hours made me really question my ability to stop smoking by going cold turkey. Afterward it seems obvious that my internal nicotine addict was trying to convince me to get him his dose of nicotine. I know my internal nicotine addict very well. It has got qualities, which are common with all types of addicts. The most dominating quality is that it does not really care about anything else than fulfilling its addiction. This is a classic example of a short term thinking. Since quitting smoking is a long term goal, it is useful to identify thoughts, which are a sign of short term thinking, and simply ignore them. Don’t fall back to the trap of your old habits.

I am currently waiting for the next night. Because I am going cold turkey, I might find it difficult to get some sleep. In my opinion, this is the only bad side effect of going cold turkey. The ironic thing is that right now is the worst possible time for me to suffer from sleep deprivation. However, since there is nothing I can do about it, I guess there is no reason to worry about it. I will keep you posted on my progress.