I want to quit smoking, but all of my efforts have failed badly. I feel that it’s hurting me, but even that doesn’t encourage me to quit smoking. I know it’s because of my stresses, but even feeling its damage to my body causes more stress and so smoking more. Ridiculous. :))
I asked ChatGPT about it. Although most of its advices weren’t practical, I found one of them interesting. It was about setting a goal in the future. For example, planning to stop smoking after two weeks and reduce the number of smoked cigarettes gradually during this period. I think it may be practical, but I’m not sure if it’s because of being something in the future and not needing to do anything hard right now.
It doesn’t matter. I have tried for many times and failed every single time. I’ll try it. In the worst case, it will be just another failure in my resume. 😀 But if I failed this time too, I’ll visit a physician to receive medicine. One of my friends had a success story of quitting in this way.
I have to learn to do the works that are unrelated to my job at home. I do everything in my workplace, and it hurts my performance both at my job and my non-job affairs. If I stay home, I’ll defenitely smoke less, but I have spent one day completely at home for that past few months.
Also, I have to learn to do something other than smoking when I’m bored. Maybe eating seeds is a good option. A lot of blog posts had suggested it.
Another practical strategy is to carry only one cigarette outside if I want to go out and smoke, not the whole package. If I take the whole pack outside, I may sit there and smoke forever. Regardless of its damage to my body, it’s a waste of time. I may spend more than an hour just sitting in the yard and doing nothing but smoking and playing chess.
Drowning in meticulous activities is a perfect strategy for me. I remember a day I was busy building a robot with lego pieces. I worked and worked, and a few hours had passed after I finally finished building the robot with a pain in my neck. I’ve experienced a lot of similar situations when I focus on my task in my job. The only problem is that there are a loooooooooot of distractions in my workplace. Maybe I have to work in one of those one-person rooms that are built for online meetings. That may work. I’ll test it too.
Another effective strategy to reduce the number of cigarettes is to wait for 10 minutes whenever I encounter nicotine craving. I started to write this blog post because I wanted to go out and smoke at 01:47, but it’s 02:24 now and I haven’t smoked yet. A combination of this trick and the previous one.
Oh no, now that I wrote about it, I really want to smoke. It’s time to finish this post. =))
Just as an ending note, Kian once told me to try not to break the promises you give to yourself. Because once you do so for the first time, you’ll start doing it more and more. After some time, you’ll have no power to stay committed to your decisions and you’ll end up with a fucked up life. Now I see he was goddamn right.