Quit Smoking The Right Way

After smoking for more than 19 years, I finally quit smoking in late April, 2006.

Many people asked how I did it, or what was the right way to quit smoking. All I can say is If it wasn’t because my wife was pregnant with our first child, I would still be smoking today. I loved smoking, and quitting hadn’t really crossed my mind then. But reality struck me like a bolt of lightning when we visited the gynecologist for the first time. Boy, did he give me a good lecture on the harmful effects of second hand smoke on the unborn baby! I cringed at the thought that my child would be born with any kind of birth defects as a result of my smoking. That was enough motivation for me to quit, really.

I didn’t go cold turkey right away. I tried that a few times on previous occasions, but ended up smoking more! I decided that the best way for me was not to repeat the same mistake, but to try new methods, and that was to cut down on my cigarettes daily. I planned on stopping smoking completely in 2 months. As I was on 20 sticks a day, my plan was:

Day 1-10: 15 sticks
Day 10-30: 10 sticks
Day 31-40: 8 sticks
Day 41-50: 5 sticks
Day 51-60: 3 sticks
Day 61 on: No more cigarettes

I had hoped that this “cutting down” technique could minimize the withdrawals that I had experienced the last time I tried to quit. And indeed it had. As a matter of fact, by around day 53, I had already stopped smoking. I was always ahead of schedule along the way. The trick is to set yourself a realistic target. I feel this is the right way to quit smoking for people who are worried about withdrawals. It is so much easier to completely stop smoking if you’re on 3 sticks a day than if you’ve been smoking a pack a day.

Of course, it wouldn’t be easy to quit without the support and encouragement of my wife. I guess you could say the anxiety of being a first-time parent helped overcome the nicotine addiction as well.

It had been a long time since I've had a cigarette. In the course of it all, I still had to fight withdrawals, but the discomfort passes, believe me. It took about 5 months for me to completely forget about smoking, about the same time as the birth of my son. Talk about perfect timing!