My husband has been smoking since he was 12 years old. He's 45 now. I can remember about a half dozen times where he tried to quit. The most successful attempt lasted three months. He was using one of the nicotine gums on the market, along with tons of Big Red chewing gum. He chewed so much and with such a vengeance during those three months that he hardly had the desire or energy to chew his food. His craving for cigarettes didn't diminish during those months. He felt angry, irritable, unfocused, and then finally defeated as he became a smoker again. He's tried the nicotine patch, the patch and the gum simultaneously, and cold turkey. And he's still smoking.
Over the years I've given a lot of thought to what approach he could use to quit. I might have come up with the solution - a gradual weaning. Here's my plan:
We started with a base number of cigarettes. My husband, Ron, smokes about a pack a day on average. So week one he got one pack a day. He had to force himself to remain aware of when he smoked and how long it had been since his last smoke - so he could pace himself and make sure his pack lasted all day.
The next week he got 19 cigarettes a day. I'm not a smoker but I imagine that one less cigarette a day is pretty easy to adapt to. One week after our start date, I wrote the number 19 on my calendar. The following week I wrote in 18 and I took 2 cigarettes out of each pack for that week. And so it goes. He's down to 16 cigarettes a day and doing great.
When he buys his carton of cigarettes he hands it over to me and I get all the packs ready for him. We've got a special drawer in the kitchen, one of those long, skinny ones, just for his smokes. When I took out 5 cigarettes from each pack, I ended up with 50 extra cigarettes - which is enough for 3 more packs! I started to write the day of the week and the date on each pack with a sharpie to keep the drawer of packs better organized. Of course, since each carton contains 10 packs and each week only 7 days, you'll have a decrease in number of smokes per pack somewhere in that carton. I keep some of his empty packs/boxes to reuse and stuff them with the spare cigarettes I have to create new packs. They are a little beat up but he doesn't seem to mind. I also scribble out the old date and write in the new one.
I hope I didn't make this sound more confusing than it is - a gradual, consistent weaning that hopefully will be barely noticeable. I'll keep documenting his progress over the weeks. Maybe if you want to try this idea, post your progress in the comments section so we can follow and support your effort!
I'm beginning to believe that the most important thing in life is attitude. Attitude is everything. We can choose to have a positive attitude or a negative one. The negative one keeps us stuck, unhappy, and blind to the beauty around us. A positive attitude can create change, improve health, and make us and others around us happier. Ron is going to quit smoking. We are not stopping until he does. If one week turns out to be particularly hard for him, we'll stay at that amount of cigarettes for an extra week in order to give him the confidence to move forward. I think this plan makes sense. We will gradually wean him off of nicotine and he will simultaneously change his habits, gently.