How I gave up smoking — the hard way — Part 1: The Background

Because there is only the hard way.

I have a subscription to an image library — and when I search that library for an image to depict “breaking a habit”, 99 out of a hundred results show smoking or cigarettes. There is a reason for that — tobacco is the most addictive substance known to man. Others are more harmful (heroin, crack, and so on), but nothing quite matches the persistence with which tobacco hooks into our brain, hypnotising us every time the habit is triggered, until the smoke is done. Oh yes, its a mean thing — that tobacco habit.

Entire books have been written about giving up smoking; whole annals of research have been done. But there is still no easy way to give up smoking — there is only the hard way. And for each of us who have successfully given it up, it has been a similar but different path.

Mark Twain once said, “Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world; I’ve done it hundreds of times.” And therein is a truth — giving up smoking is easy — staying off smoking is ridiculously difficult. Why? Because of triggers.

Habits are triggered by something — a cue. I wake up in the morning and wanna brush my teeth because the brushing habit has been deeply connected with waking up — waking up is the trigger to brush. I come home from office and the first thing i want to do is drink a glass of water, because the act of reaching home from office is a trigger to the habit of drinking a glass of water. Inside the basal ganglia, deep inside one of the oldest parts of my brain, neurons are twitching, steadily tracking all my actions. Research says that if I undertake any action even 3 times, the basal ganglia identifies the action (and its trigger) as a potential habit. Habits that have continued for years are so brain-ingrained that i often require zero mental effort to undertake the actions required of me — it becomes automatic. For example, I may have that glass of water and forget that I actually had it. It happens to you too, dear reader — you may have brushed your teeth and forgotten that you did, or parked your car without a single memory of how you did it.

The really powerful habits (and smoking is right up there on the power scale) often get associated with multiple triggers. In my case, I noticed that I had the following triggers associated with smoking:

• The tea-break smoke: On the way to work, I would stop by for a cutting chai at a small stall, and I would inevitably light up as soon as I had the glass of tea in my hand.
• The post-lunch smoke: I always had a smoke immediately after lunch — a break from work of sorts.
• The stress smoke: If I had an argument with someone, I would look for a cigarette “to calm my nerves”, or so i said to myself.
• The hanging with others smoke: If a friend/colleague/co-worker was heading for a smoke, I would join him or her— just socialising, you know.
• The imitation smoke: I see others at the pan shop, just hanging and smoking, or I see a movie where someone is smoking and talking, and suddenly i want to light up as well.

In reality, there were other triggers as well — many hidden, many invisible. One of the biggest triggers that I noticed later — the boredom smoke. I smoked because I was bored of something, disconnected from where I am, disassociated with my situation. For example, I would be hanging out with some people at some social do when I really wanted to be at home reading a book or watching a movie, but I found myself dragged here. I was bored of the people, I was disconnected from the going-ons — I stepped out for a smoke — nice and easy.

My first step in giving up smoking was simply listing down my triggers, because to destroy a habit, we have to make it as visible as possible — really powerful habits are often so automatic as to become almost invisible to us. Listing as many triggers as possible makes sure that we really notice the habit. To further enhance its visibility to me, I started counting how many cigarettes I smoked each day. The purpose was simply to make sure that I was aware of how many I was smoking — I made sure I avoided self-criticism if the number went up and I made sure that I avoided self-congratulations if the number went down.

My second step was to plan things carefully to make it easy around my triggers — avoid the cue and the habit remains un-triggered. So, for each of my triggers, I made a plan:

• The tea-break smoke: I changed my route to avoid the tea shop, and started having coffee in office instead.
• The post-lunch smoke: I always set up a meeting immediately after lunch.
• The stress smoke: I remained clueless about how to handle this, until much later, when meditation solved the underlying problem — I started getting less argumentative because I was less stressed. But in the meantime, this trigger remained active.
• The hanging with others smoke: This was tough, but I stopped hanging out with my co-smokers.
• The imitation smoke: This was relatively simple — i made sure that I never had a cigarette with me.
• The boredom smoke: This was pretty much the most difficult aspect of it. I needed a complete mindset change — I stopped agreeing with my spouse or my family to go to places or events if I felt like avoiding them. And if I agreed to go, it was completely my ownership and my responsibility, which meant that I was attending through my own volition.

And Before All of This, there was step Zero. Step Zero was a mental posture — it was a position that I had taken — a position of power and ownership. Once I decided that I am going to stop smoking, I was clear about this one thing: I would keep at it again and again until I finally gave up completely. I knew right from the beginning that I would relapse into the habit over and over again, but I also made sure that to remind myself that eventual victory would be mine. This was a wonderful position to take; because of this, each time I relapsed, I avoided time in self-criticism and instead focus on only one thing — figuring out what was the trigger that made my relapse and then figuring out how to avoid it next time. I also took complete ownership of my habit — if I got into “hanging with friends” smoke relapse, I was the one responsible for making sure that I avoided it next time; if I ended up bored at a social do and lit up a white stick, it was my responsibility to ensure that next time I put my foot down and avoided the party (or if I went, know that I went because I and I alone chose to). So I relapsed dozens of times, but each time was a learning experience and it only took my further in my quest to give up that “custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.”

Next time, I will get into the details of my plans and list what worked and what was useless.