I quit smoking 35 years ago, going cold turkey... Sort of. Looking now at my friends of yore who kept smoking, I'm full of gratitude, because the health difference between them and the non-smokers I know is dramatic.
One thing I noticed with the vast majority of my friends and acquaintances who are serial "quitters" - or serial "restarters", whatever applies - is that the moment their lips touch a cigarette, the hand of doom falls on them. Their shoulders hunch, their faces become gloomy, and they basically say "I failed, I can't win that one" - and they're back to their usual pack-a-day.
To anyone who is quitting, or will soon be, or knows he wants to: Don't make that mistake. Not the mistake of touching again a cigarette after officially throwing away the last one; we are all humans and probabilities are very high that anyone quitting will, at a time or another, cave in and take a puff or a whole cigarette. No, the mistake is to think "I couldn't make it, I'm a failure, I'm done with quitting, the cigarette wins and always will".
The thing is, just look at it the other way around: you smoked for years, cigarette after cigarette, coughing your lungs off every morning, craving the thing every hour or every five minutes, and now you managed to stay smoke-free for an entire month, or six, or a week. Wow! That's an achievement!
You took one more? No problem, you still won for weeks or months, and now you just get back to work and show that cigarette who is the boss... And this time you'll beat your record, and stay free for a month more, or a year more than the last time. And if it happens again, no problem again... Till you kick it for good.
