Any ex smokers out there? Options

[Random_Stranger]

Seriously, what is the most effective way to quit? I wish I could just get a shot that magically made me not want to smoke any more. After my uncle died this year of liver cancer, I promised my mom I wouldn't let her bury me and want to quit for her. Yet I think about the consequences, I know it is a matter of will power (not my strongest suit). Do those patches really work? The gum doesn't cut it for me. Anyways, I just thought I would ask.

[GriffGirl]

I think that while you're entitled to your opinions, the whole point here is to just keep the thread on topic. (A point, I might add, would have been better and more clearly made had people kept it short and sweet and not engaged.)

Faustino - one of the tactics I used before I quit smoking was to change up my habits/patterns. First I started by waiting a little longer to smoke after dinner; eventually to just not smoke after dinner, or maybe sometimes I would and sometimes not. Also, I managed to stop smoking on my breaks at work. Yeah, that sucked. But you have to find something else to do on your breaks. Drink water. Go for a walk around the block. Whatever it takes to ride it out for that 10 or 15 minutes of your break.

The single hardest pattern for me was to NOT smoke while I drove to and especially home from work. I never really liked smoking in the morning, so that wasn't too hard, but to this day sometimes it's still difficult to not smoke on the way home. It's that time I use to decompress from my day... first I would set little "goals" for myself, like waiting until I hit a certain exit number off the freeway until I smoked. Some days I couldn't wait, so instead I just made sure I only smoked that one cigarette on the drive home. Waiting until I was halfway home helped a lot though, that way I could kind of work it into the middle of my commute and still only smoke 1 cigarette.

When I actually did quit, I bought lollipops with gum in the middle for those drives home. I only ate them maybe like 3 times though, because I had already worked for about 2 months on changing up my habits, so by that time I was pretty well prepared for it. What really sucked was I actually quit like 2 weeks before my birthday, and I knew I would absolutely have to avoid bars because (for now) we can still smoke in bars, and anyone who has ever smoked will attest to the fact that it is damn near impossible to drink and NOT smoke. So I avoided going to any bars for several months. I'll be honest - it's still REALLY hard to not smoke when I'm drinking, particularly if I'm out with friends drinking. At this point though, I don't feel a compulsion to smoke, so I actually WILL smoke some if I find myself getting pretty liquored up. I don't feel bad about it, and it doesn't kick up any renewed desire to buy cigarettes or anything. By the next day, I'm totally fine and do not experience any cravings at all. Mind you though, I'm telling you this almost exactly one year (tomorrow!) after quitting. It'd be a different story if it was a month or two after quitting. You have to distance yourself from it for a long time.

Wow that was long. Sorry.