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Pick a Date, Already!

Home » Smoking Cessation » Getting Started » Pick a Date, Already!

So, you've decided that your lungs have had enough; you wake each morning with a cigarette hangover, you haven't found any actual enjoyment in smoking a cigarette in years, and the pressure your friends and significant others are applying is getting kind of ridiculous, and you've run out of witty retorts to, "Smoking will kill you, ya know." At this point, you're just sick of it. Sick of the cigarettes. Sick of the smell. Sick of buying the bloody things. Sick of hearing other people criticize your habit. And most of all, you're sick of the fact that someone else - a huge corporation - is taking your money and giving you nothing but a slow death in return.

So, where to start? Before you even figure out your method of smokus interruptus, you need to pick a date. In a way, I think, the date picking is sort of liberating, plus it gives you something to tell the folks who keep kvetching at you for smoking ("Don't worry; I'm quitting on the 1st. Really.) Here's a little advice, though; give yourself a few days or weeks. You need to have a little time to get used to the idea of quitting. If you tell yourself that you're quitting tomorrow, you may never get the closure you need. Smoking, in a way, is just like a long-term relationship -- you need an adjustment period and you need some time to properly say goodbye. Spend sometime with a pack of smokes to reflect on the reasons why you've decided to quit, and to prepare yourself for the long, uphill battle to the end of your smoking life. If you force yourself to quit tomorrow, you won't have enough time to adjust yourself to the loss, and I suspect that a relapse will be more common.

On the other hand, there's not much sense in picking a date way off in the future - six months or a year from now. Picking a date that far away doesn't really show you're serious, and chances are, by the time the date arrives, you will have pushed it ahead another few weeks or months.

Personally, I picked a date three weeks into the future, which gave me plenty of time to think about what I needed to do to quit, the stuff I need to get together, and how I needed to adjust my mind to like after cigarettes. Invariably, as the date grew closer, I thought of all sorts of reasons not to stick to my quit-on date, but once you've set the date, you need to stick with it -- and making up all sorts of excuses not to suggest that, if you don't do it now, you never will. There will always be a reason not to give up smoking; a simple justification for pushing off your quit date one more day or one more week. So, just pick a date and stick to it.

I'd also suggest picking a date that's easy to remember -- the first day of the month or something like that. Personally, I wouldn't pick a birthday or a holiday to decide to quit smoking - those are the times you want to smoke the most because smoking is often associated with celebration in your mind, and there is no sense in making it that much harder on yourself. A lot of people choose New Year's Day to give it up, and I've never thought that was a particularly good idea - the beginning of the year is often a stressful time, and do you really want to lump yourselves with everyone else quitting? Try to make a stand on your own.

Finally, if you have a friend or a family member who is also quitting, try to pick the same date. There is a lot to be said for solidarity -- plus, you can keep each other's back during the very difficult time ... and there is a lot to be said for competition among friends for driving your need to quit.

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