Quitting Smoking Successfully

by Patrick Reynolds, founder of the Foundation for a Smokefree America

If you have tried to quit smoking and failed before, take comfort in the fact that most smokers fail several times before quitting successfully. Your past failures are not a lesson that you are unable to quit. Instead, view them as part of the normal journey toward becoming a nonsmoker. You can do it!

It’s important to get into a good stop smoking program, such as the one outlined in my 10 Tips/Ways to Safely Quit Smoking. However, after people quit, 80%, even if they use the best programs we have today, find themselves smoking again within one year.

So let me give you the most valuable secret I can share with you.  After you quit, your urges to smoke will become more and more infrequent. But overwhelming surprise attacks are sure to come in moments of stress, a few weeks or months into your new smokefree life.

When these nearly out-of-control urges came (they always engulfed me in unexpected moments), I learned that if I did my deep breathing, I could HOLD ON for 5 minutes – and at the end of those crucial, excruciating 5 minutes, my overpowering urge to smoke would completely pass.

That is by far the single most important thing I learned -- the hard way -- about  successfully remaining tobaccofree.

Because I didn't know this simple truth, I failed 11 times. I thought I could have just one. I finally stopped for good on my 12th try, in Spring 1985. And this is the key to what has empowered me to stay smokefree all these years. After nearly 20 years, I hardly ever have an urge to light up again. I am nearly free! 

So as you embark on this journey, hopefully for the last time, know that out-of-control, very nearly irresistible urges to have "just one" are going to take you by surprise, like a sudden gale that seems to come from nowhere. This will happen one or more times in the coming months. Every time it does, do your deep breathing hold on for 5 minutes -- you can do it -- and the urge will completely pass. I'm convinced that this is the single most important secret to quitting for life.