How I quit smoking

I am coming back to blogging after a long break of six years. My friend Srikanth this morning asked me to share my experience of getting rid of my smoking habit. He felt a real life experience is better than any counselling. Without thinking, I said yes to Srikanth. If my experience of quitting my smoking habit of almost 3 decades can help even one person to escape from this degenerative habit, my time is then worth the spending.

Alleppey is a small town, although it grew famous due to its backwaters and houseboats. Both my parents hail from respectable families in our community. I was in my teens and in high school, but I thought I was already a grown-up man. I had batch mates who thought the same way. I used to sit in the back benches in the class sharing space with the ones who had similar traits and many of them are very good friends with me even now after four decades.

I cannot remember exactly when I had my first drag of a cigarette but remember the gold flake brand clearly and it became a brand name that I was addicted to before migrating into to another brand called Wills Navy Cut. I was hardly 15 years of age when I started smoking for the fun of it. From the high school days to the College and to the next stages in my life as an IT professional my smoking habit has grown part of my character. Initially I felt that smoking is masculine and gives an image of being an alpha-male. My parents came to know about my smoking habit and many attempts by many of my elders to avert me out of it has gone in vain. Over time, everyone reconciled with the reality that I am a regular smoker. Those days the awareness of the ill effects of smoking wasn't high enough and everywhere cigarettes were available. I remember seeing cigarette distributed to invited guests after marriage parties. Everyone smokes in public, and no law prevents smoking anywhere. On my first flight to a foreign country in 1993, I remember smoking inside the flight and tapping the ashes into the ashtray affixed on the flight seat. Smoking inside a car, public busses, trains, movie theatre etc was normal and not considered a public health problem during those days. Many of my friends used to smoke, but I was particularly a heavy smoker with a very high frequency that my friends used to jokingly say that I was eating cigarettes. 

I think it was during the initial years living in Dubai, I began to see some changes in people's attitude towards smoking. Couple of my friends stopped smoking completely to my surprise who used to be heavy smokers like me. This inspired me to make an attempt to stop the habit. I have decided to stop smoking for the lent season which occurs 50 days before Easter every year. During this 50 days, Catholics like me are supposed to abstain from eating non veg food and drop few other things as a sacrifice. I stopped smoking during the lent and continued without smoking for an year. During a party which had many friends around me and smoking, I was tempted to take one drag. One drag lead to fag which followed by many. My next day started by going to the grocery shop and buying a pack of fags. I have heard from many people of their similar experience of stopping and restarting smoking in a similar way. One problem with the smokers who drop the habit for a short period is that the frequency of smoking increases when they re-start. The same thing happened in my case as well. I started smoking again with a vengeance and blissfully sleeping with smoker's cough and loud snoring for the next several years. Meanwhile, I got married, have children and many developments happened in my personal and professional life with a mix of everything that happens to every average human being. 

In 2009 during the academic year change, me and my family have shifted to Bangalore. New place and new people and new work. There was work pressure, uncertainty compounded with a global gloom with a financial meltdown, which were good reasons for continuous many formal and informal meetings at the office. To make matters worse, there was a place where we can have meetings while we continue smoking. Despite the hard rooted habit that had grown with me over decades, my awareness of the pitfall of my habit also grew in me.  My parents, wife and children used to plead with me to stop this, but without any change in my habit, although I myself wanted to quit, but I used to postpone it for the future perpetually. I knew that this can potentially give me a nasty surprise somewhere in the future, although not sure when. I am heavy built with very less physical activity with a profession that demands long hours of sitting, the perfect formula for a sudden health surprise, a ticking time-bomb. I knew and I wanted to stop it but did not know how to come out of this chakravyuh. Yes, it is a habit that you can go in easily but extremely difficult to get out.

My wife had started a silent protest by that time against this habit. She had already realized that arguing with me on smoking is counterproductive. After any such argument, there is no result but the unpleasant environment from the argument last sometime. She has been a ardent Christian from her childhood. I noticed that she has stopped having ice cream and I knew that she was very fond of it always. Now, without any reason she started avoiding it and I was curious but she wouldn't tell me the reason. Eventually my children told me that she has taken it as a sacrifice for divine intervention to drop my smoking habit. Obviously I felt bad when I heard it, but dismissed it as silly and my work routine used to keep me busy always.

As I already wanted to quit this habit fully realizing the consequences of this like most smokers, it was in my mind to make a plan that will be successful, not like the last attempt which was failed after just an year. This is the time my work has taken me to a large hospital in Bangalore. Like always happened in my life, work contacts grew as personal contacts and some of them become very close personal friends, closest among all there was Srikanth himself who asked me to write this to help others. I used to take a smoke break from meetings and activities at work, which Srikanth has been noticing and used to regularly tell me to try to leave this habit. All his data points where valid, but all of them I knew before. But his continued pursuit during that time and by everyone including my children has influenced me to seriously think of a plan.

I knew to drop this habit, one needs to have enormous self-control and I am not a very strong willed person. So, the first thing I thought was to prepare a method that will have a lasting effect. I have seen several attempts made by many people. Some of them try to reduce gradually so that they can stop. Some of them will stop carrying the cigarette packet in their pocket, some of them shift to nicotine patches, some of them start using chewing Gum or meeta-pan and there are so many methods. Most of them ended up with different kind of explanations for why it wasn't successful. In all these methods I noticed one thing in common that the attempt is around diverting our mind into something else. Here the problem is, our mind is such a powerful machine that the more you try to divert our thoughts, it will create more powerful thoughts. After a while we will be overwhelmed with the same original thoughts. So, I was sure that it does not work in this way, with one experiment failed in the past. I wanted not to divert, I wanted to take it head-on. I started to let my mind indulge in all consequences of smoking continuously which smokers usually avoid, for obvious reasons. I brought all possible consequence such as possibility of cancer, cardiac arrest, other organ failures due to this habit that can happen to me and how will this affect my life and all my loved ones. I allowed these thoughts grow in me to the extend it started to make me worry that, this is imminent and I do not have a chance. This could be the same thoughts probably make a smoker suddenly stop smoking after a heart attack as the thoughts overwhelm the patient which makes it easy to take a decision that otherwise was impossible before the event. The only difference was that I let my mind to raise such thoughts before such an event to the point my fear has become my weapon to fight my deep-rooted behavior.  

Now, I was full of fear to the extend I was paranoid about something is going to happen to me, it was a matter of deciding a course of action and preparing to execute it. I continued to smoke but with a extremally high desire to leave it. Christmas was about to come and we usually have a 24 days of abstinence from 1st Dec to Christmas Eve. On 25th we usually have the feast and resume normal routine life. May times in the past I have observed this short abstinence from smoking, but this time it was different. I have stopped having the cigarettes as a preparation to drop it for ever. I didn't declare it to anyone including my family. I kept my fearful thoughts active during the abstinence period. On the Christmas day, usually we wake up thinking that now we can get back to our regular life with everything that we like, but this time there was a big difference. I was about to drop the habit completely and I thought I would make it a new year resolution to stop smoking for ever. I would have consumed a few more cigarettes amid my fearful thoughts to make sure that my will is strong enough to any future temptations. On the 31st of 2011, I left my half empty packet in the cupboard and went to bed with a resolution that I will not wake up to searching for my fag. My half empty cigarette packet was lying in my cupboard that reminded me and flare up my fearful thoughts every time when I open the cupboard. 

It has been nearly 12 years since then, I have been to several parties and in the company of many smoker friends without any temptation to take a drag. Mostly I now feel like I never was a smoker and I get suffocated with too many people smoking near me. I think my mind has erased the liking that I used to have towards taking a stick out of a pack and lighting it after having a coffee that I used to think was the ultimate. 

The method that I tried worked for me well. My smoker’s cough has almost gone during the last decade and my snoring has also reduced substantially. I am not sure whether my method will have the same effect on everyone, but one thing I am convinced that if you like to drop this habit, rather than hiding from it, face it and kill it the same way you approach a virus.