There's really only one drawback to writing as a "trigger action" - I have to be at my computer to do it. But I'm here now, battling a fairly strong craving in the early morning hours as I have a cup of coffee. Thankfully, I was prepared for this.

The method I decided to use to quit is a series of ideas and thoughts I had several months ago, when I was coming to realize how very little I was actually enjoying cigarettes. As mentioned yesterday, I started with a "smoker's journal" that I kept fairly faithfully. What I accomplished with that was, for the most part, just increasing my awareness of what I was doing and why. Most of the time, I think smokers reach for another cigarette without being truly aware that they are.

In the course of keeping my smoker's journal I learned that my smoking followed a pattern, whether I was aware of it or not. I also learned some of the things that tend to make me want to smoke more. The term used in my booklet (I'll introduce the booklet later) is "triggers". The things that make me want a cigarette are my triggers. The way a person handles it when they stumble on a trigger is called a "trigger action"... in other words, what you do instead of smoking when encountering a trigger.

By the time I'd kept my journal for several weeks, I knew enough about my addiction to know it wasn't going to be permanent. I decided this for a couple of reasons. I'd recently lost two people, one a friend and one a family member, to cancer. The family member was so addicted to smoking that, if she didn't have a cigarette every 20 minutes, she'd become uncontrollably angry and distraut.

Of course, her children didn't understand. A couple of weeks after her funeral, I took her son on an outing. We stopped for lunch at an outside cafe, and I lit up a cigarette. Alex went on skipping about and playing in the parklike setting. When I was done with my smoke, Alex came and sat on my lap. He told me that he could still smell the cigarette.

I asked him if it bothered him and he nodded his head yes, somewhat shyly. I told him if it bothered him, I just wouldn't smoke for the rest of the time we were together, and he wouldn't have to worry about it. That made him cry, which really confused me. When I asked him what was wrong, he said "Are you going to yell and scream?"


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I gotta tell you, that moment is galvanized in my brain. Reading my own smoking journal over, thinking about how I go long periods of time without a cigarette, and how that little boy's mother was so addicted that she couldn't go 20 minutes, made me realize that one of two things were likely to happen. Either I would quit, or I would decend into the level of addiction that Alex's mom had to deal with, and its consequences.

I wrote that whole story down in my journal as the last entry, and said that my next trip to see Alex would be a monumental one, because I was going to hold him in my lap and tell him I had quit for good and that I'll never be angry or yell because I can't have a cigarette again. I look forward to that so much.

One of my other trigger actions is going to sound very funny. Alex gave me a teddy bear before I left. Whenever I miss him or want a hug from him, I just hug the teddy bear. Then all the hugs get stored up in the teddy bear, and when I come back I'll bring the bear with me. He'll keep the bear and extract all the stored hugs until we get together again. (his idea - cute, no?) Cool kid.

So anyway, I'd made a decision. I would quit - but how? There ensued a great deal of research on the various methods of quitting and their reviews both by medical professionals and by people who had used them. The most impressive to me was a friend who was a heavy, heavy smoker who quit by using the patch. I was astounded, but she said it had been relatively easy. She was the last person I'd have thought would be able to quit. Well, if she could do it - so could I!

I asked what brand of patch -- she responded "Just generic." In case you aren't familiar with it, the patch is more or less a bandaid with the padding of it saturated in a gel form of nicotine. You put one patch on for 24 hours, and the nicotine slowly leaks into your bloodstream by way of absorbing into your skin. The idea is that, by supplying your body with a low dose of nicotine, your cravings will be much easier to deal with and you can quit damaging your lungs.

Each "step" of the plan lowers the amount of nicotine in each patch. By the end of the 8 week course, you're only getting a measly 7 mg of nicotine a day, and from that point you should be able to pull off the patch and deal with nominal cravings without any more nicotine replacements. If you do have horrid cravings after that, you can always get the "gum" (although if you've ever tasted it, the gum is really not an option for me).

I liked the idea of training my body to deal with lower and lower levels of nicotine over time. I decided to experiment and see if I could deal with this kind of plan. Over the next two months, I went from 10 cigarettes a day to 8. Then from 8 cigarettes a day to 6. From 6 to 4. When I got to 3 or 4 cigarettes a day, I felt very confident that the patch would work for me.

If you're sitting there reading this, thinking "My heavens, if you got down to 3 or 4 a day, why didn't you just quit?" - you don't understand addiction. Physically I probably could have. Emotionally and psychologically I still couldn't. I had the "motive", I had the "drive" but I didn't yet have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to life without having some nicotine in my system.

Did you see the movie Ray? Even after he went through his whole withdrawal scene, and the worst of it was over, he still sat in that day room talking to his doctor with his addiction in plain sight. He was still psychologically, perhaps even spiritually, unable to face the things that made him so vulnerable to addiction. He had to face those things squarely, head on, before he could truly be free of his habit.

Well, that's me too, I suppose. It's just a different substance I'm addicted to. I'm very happy I've made it to day 3 with the patch. I can say exactly what my friend told me - the patch takes the edge off. It isn't perfect, and nothing on this earth is going to make quitting "easy". But I'm very, very fortunate that I took a couple of months to prepare myself and come to some realizations and decisions before I went forward with using the patch.

It's kind of funny - when I opened the box and read the pamphlet, it started talking about the "Six Stages of Change". The first stage is Pre-Contemplation, where you have acknowledged that quitting is an option, but you just aren't ready or you just don't want to quit. The second stage is Contemplation, when you begin to seriously think about quitting and acknowledge that you really do at least kind of want to quit. In my opinion, those stages happen naturally. They are what lead up to somebody like myself buying "the patch" and reading that booklet in the first place.

The third phase is Preparation. That one kind of took me by surprise. I remember thinking, as I read it - "Wow, these people might actually know what they're talking about. They've sure got me pegged!" Contemplation, as you've read in this post, is when you make the decision to quit soon - like, within a month or so - and begin making changes or experimenting with ideas of how to quit.

The fourth phase, Action, is when you actually put your cigarettes down for good. So right now I'm in the Action Phase. Amen!

The last two phases, Maintenance and Termination. If you remain smoke free for six months, you're in Maintenance. Once you get to the point that you no longer have any cravings or temptation to smoke at all (IF you ever get to that point) you've reached Termination.

I don't know if I'll ever get to Termination. But I will make it to Maintenance, and give Phase Six my every effort.