Quitting Smoking

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Author:
Jonty Smith

For this article, I shall use my own experiences with smoking as an example of how the habit affects our daily lives. All too often we hear scientific and medical terms regarding the negative effects of smoking, but a smoker is more likely to connect with real, pragmatic differences the habit inflicts upon our lives.

When I started smoking at 18 years of age, I was the picture of health. I kept myself in shape doing pull-ups, push-ups, dips and regularly jogging five miles in the open country air. I was a keen sportsman at school and had kept up my training. It was only after attending university that I decided to take up cigarettes in search of an identity.

The first negative effect of smoking I noticed was a devastating impact on my fitness levels. At first, I continued to keep myself training while I smoked. But as time wore on, my smoking increased and my training decreased until eventually I stopped it altogether. The reason was quite simple - I would get out of breath simply walking up a flight of stairs. I couldn’t do a single push-up without my heart feeling like it was about to burst out of my chest. Smoking had ravaged my cardiovascular capabilities.

This had two knock-on effects. The first was that I found myself putting on a lot of weight because I was no longer burning off calories through exercise, and the second was that I became a chronic procrastinator because of my lack of energy. As I became fatter, I lost most of my confidence and self-esteem, becoming a shadow of the man I was. And as I lost my efficiency to be productive, my peers began to surpass me in almost every area.

The negative effects of smoking cannot be underestimated. They infiltrate every level of our lives. When I first started smoking, it was socially acceptable. By the time I finally quit, I was sheepish and embarrassed to light up, even in a bar. I was worried that dates wouldn’t wish to pursue their interest in me because of my habit. And I was sick of having to go outside into the garden every time I wanted to light up at risk of offending flatmates.

But it doesn’t even stop here. Smoking turned me into a slave instilled with anxiety. I often found myself driving out to the all-night store after midnight in order to get new supplies of cigarettes, purely out of the fear that I wouldn’t have any smokes to hand when I woke up in the morning. Or I would purchase two additional packets when I went out on the town at night, just in case I was sitting at a bar and I ran out.

It was when I finally assessed the massive negative effects of smoking and how they had hammered my life that I made the decision to quit. Perversely, I managed to pack in the cigarette habit easily and quickly (within four hours) of using a particular technique. It seemed quite an anti-climax compared to the damage I had done myself. I’m not going to lecture smokers on how they should live their lives, but I would implore a smoker to take a closer look at the impact smoking has on their life.

Jonty Smith is a former smoker based in the U.K.

After 10 years of smoking two packs a day, Jonty finally managed to quit in 2006. His story of how he managed to beat the habit is available for free reading at (http://www.How-I-Stopped-Smoking.com)

A Quick Note From The Publisher... If you like the article above, you may be interested in the following article which is also related to Smoking... Debunking the Glamour of Smoking The anti-smoking lobby often make a crucial mistake in their campaigning.: they lose sight of their target audience - children - and go after established smokers instead. Let me tell you right now that attempting to turn the screw on a smoker is the most counter-productive attitude you can adopt. As a former smoker, I can fully empathise with the average smoker’s feeling towards their habit, and I can assure you that an aggressive, scare mongering, lecturing tone is entirely redundant. The smoker needs to be understood, to be accepted and to be humanised. I’ve always found it very curious that individuals, who have never smoked in their life, see themselves fit to take smokers to task on the habit. It’s exactly the same problem we face when it comes to tackling obesity in the population, namely that we are better off empathising and understanding where the obesity problem stems from, rather than just telling an individual to get off their butt and exercise. The smoker has spent years developing a habit that extends far beyond a physical addiction - it is a powerful emotional and psychological addiction too. Yet despite this fact, the anti-smoking lobby only seem to focus from the non-smoker’s viewpoint (e.g. “They have no willpower”, “Don’t you know what it’s doing to your health?”, “It’s not cool”) Understand this - smokers started the habit for a reason. Some smokers wanted to look cool, to look edgy, to develop an attitude. Other smokers simply wanted to experiment. Others may just have had a fearless and carefree attitude towards life. Over time, the smoker glamorises the habit, and these strong neurological bonds will remain in place for years to come. When I smoked, I associated many wonderful times in my life with smoking: socialising on foreign holiday...