Читать книгу Quit Smoking for Life - Suzanne Schlosberg - Страница 10
Оглавление• Why you still smoke: letting your “little devil” speak
• Quitting for yourself, not for your family or doctor
• Exploring the values you hold dearest
• Your devil versus your angel: the final showdown
One morning Cheryl Procter-Rogers phoned a girlfriend, and a gravelly male voice answered. Startled, Procter-Rogers said, “Sorry, I have the wrong number.”
“Hey, girl, this is me!” the voice replied.
After clearing her throat, Procter-Rogers’s friend, a longtime smoker, sounded like herself again. But in that moment, Procter-Rogers, a 25-year, pack-a-day smoker, decided to quit.
“The sound of her voice shook me to my core,” recalls Procter-Rogers, a Chicago public-relations professional who was 38 at the time. “It was like someone on a ventilator.” Her decision wasn’t easy — she loved the minty flavor of menthol on her tongue and enjoyed smoke breaks with her friends at work and church. But it was final. “I thought, I’m not going out like that. I’m done.”
On your journey to becoming tobacco-free, nothing will serve you better than simply making up your mind that you will never smoke again. Medication will help. Planning is critical. Encouragement from friends will go a long way. But what will steel you through temptation, what will stop you from caving when a buddy offers you “just one,” is being able to say, with conviction, I’m done. Your decision to quit is your paddle in a canoe. It’s what will propel you forward and give you something to hang on to when the waters get rough.
What if you don’t feel ready to commit? What if, instead of I’m done, you’re thinking, I know I should quit, but darn, I love my cigarettes. Or I want to quit, but it’s too hard. That’s okay. Really! You can decide to quit even if you still enjoy cigarettes or fear failure or can’t yet imagine yourself as a nonsmoker. Commitment is only a first step, but it’s the crucial one that sets the course for all the steps to follow. It’s possible — in fact, it’s human — to take a vow while still harboring doubts. The strength of your commitment is sure to build with time, as you show yourself that you can keep it.
In this chapter, we help you sort out your feelings about cigarettes—what you love, what you hate—and gauge whether your reasons for smoking withstand your own scrutiny. If you’re already excited about quitting, this chapter will boost your resolve. If you’re feeling ambivalent or pressured, we will help you make an authentic decision to quit.
Why You Still Smoke: Letting Your “Little Devil” Speak
The way Burke describes it, before her restroom episode in the Atlanta, airport she had “a little devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other.” Her devil would say, “Hey, I’m stressed. I deserve a smoke.” Her angel would shoot back with, “No, this stuff is killing me,” only to have her devil reply, “But what’s one cigarette?” As any smoker knows, that little devil is sneaky and persistent, especially when you’re around other smokers or feeling anxious. How can you silence him for good? As you venture toward a decision to quit, explore your internal conflicts about smoking. Give your devil his due — and then outfox him. Here’s a rundown of the smoking devil’s best shots.
“But I enjoy smoking.” For some folks, there’s nothing quite like holding a filter between your fingers or filling your mouth with smoke. “That first drag just sets off a little thrill in your brain like nothing else can,” says Nancy Kruh of Nashville, Tennessee, who smoked a pack a day for fifteen years. “It’s like a little jolt of wonderfulness.”
Kruh’s enthusiasm began to fade after a heart-to-heart talk with a lifelong friend. “She got serious on me and said, ‘I’m really worried about your health.’ If it had come from one of my holier-than-thou friends, I’d have said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ But our friendship had always been supportive, not judgmental.” For Kruh the final straw was watching Lucie Arnaz interviewed on TV after her father, Desi Arnaz, who played Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy, had died of lung cancer. “Lucie was literally outside the hospital, probably having just watched her father drown in the fluid of his own lungs, and some hideous reporter stuck a microphone in her face. All Lucie could choke out were two words, ‘Don’t smoke.’ ”
Kruh, now 58, had grown up watching I Love Lucy and had a deep nostalgic connection to Desi. “Knowing what a lifetime of tobacco abuse had done to him and witnessing his daughter’s raw emotion— it just hit me up the side of the head like a two-by-four.” Kruh quit smoking a month later.
Let’s consider exactly what it is you enjoy about smoking. Besides that “jolt of wonderfulness,” what gives you pleasure? Is it possible that what you enjoy is relief from the discomfort of withdrawal? Yes, you feel better when you light up, but as we explain in Chapter 1, that’s largely because you’re addicted to nicotine. When you take a smoke break at work, could you be enjoying the break from your work even more than the cigarette? Might you find other break activities that deliver the same sense of relief? Maybe you’d enjoy chatting with a coworker, walking around the block, or checking the online game you’re playing with a friend. In Chapter 8, Conquering Your Urges to Smoke, we help you find worthy substitutes for cigarettes.
If you feel certain the momentary pleasure you get from smoking cannot be duplicated by another activity, ask yourself: Could life as a nonsmoker be more enjoyable than life as a smoker? We’ll explore that answer in the Chapter 4 section titled “Five Amazing Ways Your Life Is About to Change.”
“But I deserve a smoke.” For years Faye Reese suffered in a marriage to a man she felt was trying to control her. She considered smoking a reward for putting up with the rest of her life. “Smoking was my little corner of freedom in the world, where no one told me what to do or how to fix my hair or what to wear,” says Reese, 55, of Little Rock, Arkansas, who smoked up to two packs a day. “I thought it was something I deserved for myself, and at the time, I really believed it.”
It’s easy to understand why: Of course you deserve rewards — we all do — and “I deserve a smoke” is one of the little devil’s most devious tricks. It sounds like he’s on your side, but ask yourself: Is smoking really a reward? Think of the reasons you want to quit. How can all these negatives — the health risk, the cost, the stigma — be considered a reward?
Consider what you truly believe you’ve earned apart from the cigarette. Perhaps it’s the alone time that smoking provides the excuse to have. Or maybe it’s the feeling of connectedness to the other people you smoke with. Eventually, Reese realized she had mistaken cigarettes for what she really wanted from life: the freedom to make her own choices. “I wanted to be in control of my body and my thoughts,” she says. Reese left her husband, remarried, quit smoking, and became a runner. She found that what she “deserved” was not an hourly dose of toxins but good stamina, fresh breath, and the ability to enjoy a nonsmoking restaurant without having to excuse herself for a cigarette.
You’ve spent a lot of time learning to perceive smoking as a reward. It may take practice to change your thinking, but if you look, you will find abundant ways to reward yourself that are good for you.
“But smoking helps me cope with stress.” This is the little devil’s go-to argument! Nearly all smokers believe they can’t handle stress without a cigarette. Humorist David Sedaris, author of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, writes that at the peak of his addiction, he had 34 cartons of cigarettes — his “inventory” — stockpiled in three different locations. “The only thing standing between me and a complete nervous breakdown,” Sedaris writes, “was my inventory.” Surprising himself, he didn’t have a nervous breakdown after he quit smoking.
It is simply untrue that smoking relieves stress. Quite the opposite: As an expensive, all-consuming addiction to a stimulant (nicotine), smoking increases stress tremendously (as explained in Chapter 2). Chapter 11, Coping with Stress, offers healthy strategies for relieving anxiety.
“But smoking makes me smarter and more creative.” Jack Johnston considered smoking integral to his vision as an artist and writer. “I’d write something really witty and then light a cigarette,” says Johnston, who smoked a pack a day for 30 years. “If I was working on a drawing, I’d step back and smoke. That pause, that swirl of smoke, was part of my creative process.”
If you’re convinced you do your best work with a cigarette in hand, you’re giving the cigarette more credit than it deserves. Though smoking may feel like a natural part of your creative process, it’s actually a break in the process. Besides, a cigarette won’t place ideas in your brain that weren’t already there. When you quit, you may experience a transitional period where you feel a bit “off” because you’ve given up a routine you were used to while creating. However, the cigarette was not the source of your ingenuity. You were!
Much to Johnston’s surprise, his output as an artist increased when he gave up cigarettes. Now, if he’s on a roll, he can carry ideas through without interruption. “Before, I’d be satisfied if I had one good sentence or one clever piece, but I’d get distracted by smoking and not follow through on themes. Now, my ideas are sharper, and they don’t have to come between nicotine urges. I actually have a portfolio, rather than just wishing I had one.”
“But the dangers of smoking are overhyped.” If you’re feeling healthy and don’t know anyone who has suffered from a smoking-related illness, your little devil may cling to this notion. After all, you rarely see ill smokers around town. There’s a good reason: It’s not especially convenient to drag an oxygen tank to the sushi bar or the grocery store. Not to mention that folks on oxygen don’t have the stamina to be out and about.
In truth, the odds are stacked against smokers maintaining long-term health, and in the short term, smokers are more susceptible to respiratory diseases and infections. If you are blind to the damage that smoking is doing, it just means you’ve gone out of your way to avoid looking.
“If someone handed you a glass of poison and said, drink it, you’d say, ‘Are you crazy?’ But cumulatively, that’s what cigarettes are — a glass of poison, drop by drop by drop,” says Kruh, the I Love Lucy fan. “As a smoker, you have a whole raft of positive cues to minimize the effect of the poison you’re ingesting: I just made deadline; I’m going to reward myself. I’m so stressed out; I need this. You just don’t reflect on the long-term, cumulative effects. Your best interest loses out miserably.”
Yes, some smokers puff away for 50 years and avoid chronic, life-threatening disease. But far more smokers lose ten or twenty years of life to tobacco. Do you really want to gamble with which category you’ll land in?
“But everyone’s got to die of something, so I might as well live it up.” You hear of marathon runners who drop dead at 40. You read about how the environment is killing us all, slowly. Yes, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow!
Malcolm Montgomery of Palouse, Washington, sold himself on these arguments, despite watching relatives suffer and die of lung disease and emphysema. What he didn’t consider was how smoking affects life, rather than death. “I thought about the unpleasant end,” Montgomery says, “but not the time in between.”
These days, Montgomery, the office coordinator, is spending that time in between managing the effects of 41 years of smoking. He quit at age 57 but was later diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Today, at 63, he uses three inhalers daily and takes a half-dozen medications; if he travels to elevations higher than 4,000 feet, his breathing is labored — “like a fish out of water,” he says. Hot, steamy showers are out; so are saunas and hot tubs, and places that are hot and dry or cold and dry. “Waking up every day knowing that you screwed yourself is not a good way to start a day,” Montgomery says.
Yet he remains grateful he quit smoking. “I’m certain that if I were still smoking, my COPD would have progressed much faster,” he says. “I might even be on oxygen 24/7 by now. I can’t even imagine what that would be like.”
Assessing Your Top Reasons for Smoking
Think about your own top three reasons for continuing to smoke — what your little devil has been whispering in your ear. Now write them down.
How compelling do you find these statements? In the space below, respond to each of your reasons with a persuasive counter-argument. For example, This is just rationalization or I’m sure I can find other ways to cope with stress or take a break.
Quitting for Yourself, Not for Your Family or Doctor
The first time Burke quit smoking, she did it to appease her daughter, Ellen, who was ten at the time. “For five years she was relentless, telling me, ‘I don’t want to be an orphan because you smoke cigarettes.’ But the guilt trip infuriated me,” says Burke, a single mom. “I felt like, So, you’re not going to pay attention to all the good I do? I’m a good person. I’m a good mom. Nagging just makes a smoker mad.”
Burke’s first quit lasted three days. “I felt so guilty when I went back to smoking, and guilt is toxic. It makes you feel so bad that you just smoke more.” In retrospect, Burke says, she failed because she hadn’t found reasons to quit that genuinely resonated with her. It wasn’t until the airport incident, nearly two years later, that Burke found her own motives for quitting. “That experience challenged me in a way that no human being could,” recalls Burke. “I felt embarrassed that I couldn’t even obey the law.”
Burke had reached the all-important tipping point: the moment when you want to quit smoking more than you want to continue. A couple months later, after more reflection and some preparation, she smoked for the last time, on a morning break at work. “When I crushed out that cigarette, I said to myself, This is going to be my last one. I felt so great.”
Chances are, you’ve been battered by shoulds—you really should quit. You know you should quit, right?—from your kids, your physician, your employer, your own head. But should is not a helpful word. It’s not a source of inspiration. All smokers know smoking is harmful and they should quit. But who likes being told what to do? You may attempt to quit because you’re tired of being badgered. But as Burke discovered, a quit made under duress isn’t likely to last.
What if you haven’t experienced an epiphany, like Burke did at the airport and Cheryl Procter-Rogers did when her girlfriend answered the phone in a gravelly voice? Don’t wait for one! Plenty of smokers arrive at the decision to quit without the drama of a desperate moment. You have compelling reasons to quit; it’s just a matter of uncovering them.
Your motives may not mesh with what others are telling you, and that’s fine. We’re talking about you, not anyone else. If you’re feeling healthy, the promise of more stamina or avoiding serious illness may not resonate. So let’s find out what does. Maybe it’s the prospect of saving $250 a month and upgrading to a better apartment. Maybe you’d love to sit through a basketball game without having to dash out during halftime in the freezing cold for a smoke. Maybe smoking has stolen your singing voice, and you want it back. Maybe you want to go with your friends when they walk to a new restaurant that is uphill from work. Whatever reasons you come up with for quitting, make sure they are your own. What you need to knock that little devil off your shoulder is your own vision of success.
Exploring the Values You Hold Dearest
If you can’t yet pinpoint a compelling reason to quit, take a few minutes to consider your core values, the ideals that mean the most to you. Here are some common core values:
• health
• living in a clean home
• caring for your a family
• being a good role model to your children
• honoring your spiritual beliefs
• caring for the environment
• performing well in your occupation
• saving money
Which of these are among your own deeply held values? Does using tobacco conflict with these values? Does quitting support them?
Answering these questions may spur you to action. “Internal” reasons—those that come from the heart—tend to be more powerful than “external” reasons—orders from your doctor, a new smoke-free policy at the office, an ultimatum from your boyfriend. As inspiration, “I want to know my grandchildren” tends to work better than “My brother won’t get off my case.”
For Benjamin Johns of Seattle, the conflict between his addiction to smoking and his passion for yoga proved impossible to live with. “If there’s anything unique to yoga, it’s breathing — the idea of the breath as conduit between mind, body, and spirit. To attack my breathing apparatus was against who I am. It required blocking out the truth, telling myself, For today, it doesn’t matter. But, of course, it does matter, because all that really matters is today.” Johns, who smoked half a pack a day for fourteen years, quit smoking at 34.
Zakiya Shaw, a pack-a-day smoker for ten years, quit at age 28 when she rededicated her life to following Christ and was working as a residential rehabilitation counselor in Tacoma, Washington. “I didn’t feel smoking aligned with the word of God,” says Shaw, now 32. “I feel the body is a temple, and it’s sacred, something we should take care of and value. I was supposed to be living a life as Christ did, and smoking was not something he would have done.” Shaw also felt that as a smoker she couldn’t set a good example for her son.
For Reese, the contradiction between smoking and her values was staring at her in a job opening she wanted to apply for. The sign on the building read: Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality. “I thought, Wow, that would be embarrassing to be working for the Department of Environmental Quality when I was polluting the environment.”
List here any of your core values that don’t align with smoking. Whenever your sneaky devil rears his head, refer to this list.
My Core Values That Don’t Align With Smoking
How do you feel about violating these values by smoking?
For some smokers, finding the impetus to quit doesn’t involve much soul searching. These folks quit for reasons that are more cut and dried, like they simply can’t afford to buy cigarettes, or they will lose their job if they continue to smoke. Author Sedaris, as famous for his chain smoking as his wit, quit because he was being aced out of fancy hotels.
Sedaris travels the country reading his humor essays. As he explains in When You Are Engulfed in Flames: “I began to find myself outside of the city limits, on that ubiquitous commercial strip between the waffle restaurant and the muffler shop.” A typical motel that accepts smokers, he notes, has no pool, “yet the lobby smells like chlorine, with just a slight trace of French fries.” Reflecting on his quit, Sedaris writes, “It’s embarrassing, but what got me through my moment of weakness was the thought of the Four Seasons in Santa Barbara.”
List here your top three reasons for wanting to quit smoking. Once you quit and start experiencing the advantages of being a nonsmoker, you no doubt will add to the list.
My Top Three Reasons for Quitting
Your Devil Versus Your Angel: The Final Showdown
Folks often keep their reasons to smoke and their reasons to quit in separate mental boxes. Try settling the conflict between them by writing them all out together. Note your top reason for quitting, such as “I want to be able to walk up stairs without wheezing” or “I want to spend more time with my grandbaby rather than duck out for a cigarette.” Then, jot down your devil’s response, like, “It’s my only vice left” or “It’s my ‘me’ time.” Next, instead of arguing with your devil, simply write down again your top reason for quitting. Repeat this sequence for a half hour. When you’re done, you may just discover that the little devil’s voice has quieted down. That little voice may never go away completely, but you are much bigger than that voice. You can learn to tell it, “Thanks for sharing,” and move on.
Acknowledge that some of your needs that are currently being met by cigarettes are legitimate; we all need to take a break from stress and carve out time for ourselves. Once you are ready to find and practice other ways to meet those needs, you know you’ve turned a corner toward saying goodbye to tobacco. In the next chapter, we look at how quitting smoking can transform your life. Knowing what you have to look forward to will not only cement your decision to quit but also get you excited about it.
When Ilene Barth began her journalism career in the mid 1970s, the air in her New York City newsroom was a hazy blue-gray from cigarette smoke, and veteran reporters crushed their butts on the linoleum floor. Barth herself smoked more than a pack a day. When she’d try to quit, she’d find herself “seized up” and unable to write. “I’d be so kidnapped by the deprivation that I couldn’t concentrate,” she says.
So Barth quit trying to quit, pushing the dangers of tobacco out of her mind. She even wrote a book, The Smoking Life, celebrating tobacco in popular culture. She called cigarettes, as depicted in the movies, “an accoutrement of elegance as well as a prop of grit,” and she railed against the “self-satisfied majority” of nonsmokers.
Nonetheless, on the advice of a doctor and to give herself peace of mind, Barth agreed, at age 48, to undergo a CT scan of her lungs. “I told myself I was not genetically likely to have cancer because everyone in my family smoked and nobody had developed cancer.”
Barth, the mother of three, was stunned when the scan showed a spot on her lung. A biopsy confirmed the diagnosis: lung cancer, but operable. “Early detection saved my life,” says Barth. “If I had waited until I had symptoms, it likely would have been too late.”
Based on research funded by the National Cancer Institute5, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends lung-cancer screening, using low-dose CT scans, for smokers and former smokers ages 55 to 79 with at least 30 “pack years” of smoking — in other words, smoking one pack a day for 30 years or two packs a day for fifteen years. Some organizations, including the Lung Cancer Alliance6, and physicians also recommend low-dose CT scans for smokers age 50 and up — and in some cases younger — with a twenty-year pack history (a pack a day for twenty years or two packs a day for ten years) and at least one other risk factor, such as exposure to secondhand smoke.
In the weeks before her surgery, Barth quit smoking. “I was so upset, so nervous, and so sure I was going to die and leave my children without a mother that quitting wasn’t hard.”
After surgery and chemotherapy, Barth’s lung capacity was so compromised that she couldn’t have blown up a balloon. Her doctor warned her she’d have trouble breathing in Telluride, Colorado, a town at an 8,700-foot elevation, where her family spent summers. Barth wasn’t deterred.
“I didn’t want to give up Colorado. It was so beautiful, and I had so many friends there, and my children loved it.” Barth wanted more than Telluride, though; she wanted to pick up her life where she’d left off. “I didn’t want people asking, ‘Do you need to sit down?’ And I reasoned if athletes came to high altitudes to train, maybe I could make the thin air work for me, too.”
Little by little, Barth strengthened her lungs with easy ambles in the mountains. Back in New York, instead of hailing a cab, she walked blocks and blocks or tackled long flights of stairs to take the subway. Three years after her surgery, Barth’s stamina was better than it had been before her diagnosis. She was on skis again and playing tennis, albeit doubles.
“I still think smoke smells delicious,” Barth says, “but when I see someone walking down the street smoking, I just don’t feel the need for it.”
QUIT TIP
“Before you smoke, ask yourself, What do I want from this cigarette? Then smoke it and notice whether it’s giving you what you wanted, whether that is time alone, relaxation, or something to do with your hands. Consider: Are there other ways to fill that need?”
— Anne Herman, Quit Coach
QUIT TIP
“Your thoughts control your actions, so keep your thoughts positive. If you add the word but to any negative statement, you can change it to a thought that is more helpful. If you are thinking, I sure would like to have a cigarette, change it to I sure would like to have a cigarette, but instead I will go for a walk. Thoughts can be changed at the drop of a hat.”
— Janet Wilson, Quit Coach
QUIT TIP
“To remind yourself why you want to quit, put a picture of your kids or grandkids in your car, or a sticky note on your bathroom mirror that reads, ‘I’m saving $2,000 a year,’ or post an empowering quote like, ‘I can choose to live my life however I want.’ ”
— Bruce Fugett, Quit Coach and former smoker
“Compared to giving up your life, giving up your cigarettes didn’t seem like such a big deal.”
5 National Lung Screening Trial Research Team, Aberle DR, Adams AM, Berg CD, et al. Reduced lung cancer mortality with low-dose computed tomographic screening. New England Journal of Medicine; 365(5): 395-409. Epub 2011 June 29.
