The secret advice that helped me quit smoking forever

by Darren

I want to impart some wisdom today that I learned the hard way. I hope it will be useful to those readers who are looking to quit cigarette smoking forever. I was a very heavy smoker for many years. At the very peak, I ended up smoking 3+ packs of Marlboros daily. This has a major effect on anyone’s health, and I was feeling it.

A friend of mine said something to me that made a ton of sense. He told me that I was addicted to the nicotine, and that nicotine wasn’t that harmful to you. His suggestion was that I kept on using nicotine, but gave up the habit of smoking, because that’s what was really destroying my health. Whether his argument is really true or not is beside the point, but the advice made so much sense to me that I went on the patch a few days later.

The nicotine patch costs about as much smoking, but if you quit, the amount is quite less over time. But the patch will at least drip nicotine right into your veins, so your addicted little heart should be very happy. As this happens, you conciously break the habits of smoking. You know the actions: buying cigarettes, find a place to smoke, etc. All of the little heart-breaking moments that scream “I am weak” because I need to ingest this crap. At least with your supply of nicotine being intravenously fed to you, you feel one heck of a lot more content than you would otherwise.

Once you realize you broke the “smoking” habit, it gets much easier to break the nicotine one. You “step down” your dosages until you hit 0. I ramped down in 30 days total because I didn’t want to spend the money on the patch. Now there’s no miracle here, but the “secret” to me is quite obvious. If you realize you’re hooked on the nicotine, the smoking part is easier to drop. Isolate your habits and defeat them one at a time. And, if worse really came to worse, you would probably be somewhat better off ingesting nicotine through formats other than cigarette smoking.

For anyone out there thinking of quitting: I say give it a shot. You have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. It doesn’t matter what method you try, just as long as you’re convinced it works. I can tell you from personal experience that the patch worked very well for me because of the reasons I just outlined.