This is a journey update for my and my fiance's quest to quit smoking.
If you missed the first article, I'll give you a short recap to catch you up before I introduce the new amendments to the initial plan.
A Familiar Bondage: Recap
We decided to break down our thinking around the topic of smoking. I need to quit because I have been diagnosed with the early stages of COPD, and even though I'm still fairly healthy, it's time to stop putting my body through this hell.
My fiance agreed, so I broke down the thought processes that lead us to smoke each cigarette and the emotional result after smoking.
Basically, we crave a cigarette because of a trigger (like eating, drinking coffee, or waking up), we feel the desire and ruminate on it until it becomes an emotion to strong to resist.
I figured out that this is a result of focusing on the feeling of the first initial drag, rather than the inevitable feeling of not being able to breathe after smoking the whole cigarette.
The goal was to replace the positive memories of taking the first drag with the negative feeling of being out of breath.
In a nutshell, that was the first part of the attempt.... But...
...this doesn't really provide us with any way to gauge if we are making progress.
It is a good start, but we aren't out of the woods yet, so we decided to make some amendments to the plan to keep us on track.
A plan needs to have checkpoints that keep you aligned with your goal.
Here are the changes we made and the rest of the plan:
A Familiar Bondage: Amended
We have broken our smoking down onto an hourly schedule. We were smoking a cigarette about twice an hour before we started, so we decided to start with smoking 1 cigarette every hour to start...
...and only for the first two days. The plan looks like this:
Day 1: One cigarette every hour (unless we make it longer).
Day 2: One cigarette every hour (unless we make it longer).
Day 3: One cigarette every 2 hours.
Day 3: One cigarette every 2 hours.
Day 4: One cigarette every 3 hours.
Day 5: One cigarette every 3 hours.
Day 6: One cigarette every 3.5 hours.
Day 7: One cigarette every 3.5 hours.
Day 8: One cigarette every 4 hours.
Day 9: One cigarette every 4 hours.
You get the picture...
In the meantime, between cigarettes, we'll be using the original method to defeat the cravings and make it to each checkpoint.
My thinking is this: after we make it to a substantial amount of days, we won't have so much trouble just putting them down for good.
Guess what day we are on today?
We just finished Day 2. Day 1-2 went very well and I actually skipped about 5 smoking sessions on day 2.
Tomorrow is Day 3, so it's a big step up, but I think we are ready for it!
Just wanted to give an update. If you try this too, let me know how it goes for you!