How to Quit Smoking For Good

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

In this article I’m going to share with you how I quit smoking for good.

I had been a smoker for all of my adult life and quite a bit of my teen life as well.   I would go through phases where I would try to quit and then would start again, and would hide the fact that I had started again for as log as I could and sneak off to smoke.

Obviously I knew that smoking wasn’t right for me and I was ashamed that I was doing it or ashamed that I had failed to quit.  Either way the stress of not quitting or always hiding it kept me smoking for years, and years.

I tried every gimmick on the market to try to quit smoking and many of them worked for a  period of time and then I’d get derailed and find myself smoking again.

I believe my first attempt was laser treatment,  I’m not even sure if they do it anymore.  But what is was, it was like acupuncture without the needles.   So they would use a laser to hit the trigger points, that would somehow tell my brain to forget that I was a smoker, to erase any evidence that I wanted to smoke at all, or something like that.  All the triggers that would make me want to smoke, like driving, or reading or having coffee, drinking etc, would no longer activate my urge to smoke.  My car was a big one for me, it’s like my car wouldn’t start until that cigarette was lit.

Anyway, that seemed to work for a while, I quit for at least 6 months with that way, but I seem to remember that something always seemed to be missing and gnawing away at me.  I couldn’t go anywhere without a bag of sunflower seeds to keep my hands and mouth busy, and I drank a lot more beer.   So I hadn’t really kicked the habit, just traded one for 2 others.

So I started again. 

I always seemed to have  two different groups of friends, the ones like my softball team, who I would freely smoke around and then the ones, who I was ashamed to smoke around.

For years, some of my closest friends didn’t even know I’d smoke because, whenever we were at conferences or events, I would always sneak back to my hotel room and smoke out on the balcony hoping nobody would ever see me.   Talk about a stressful situation.

I tried nicotine patches, that did nothing for me, I’d take the patch off just to have a cigarette and then put it back on afterwards.  Dumb!

I tried a new drug called Zyban, which turns out was actually an anti depressant   It worked  well to for a while.   The thing with Zyban is, you start taking these pills and continue to smoke, and the idea is to wean yourself off of the cigarettes slowly.   Again it was something that affected the brain, I would literally forget to smoke.   I’d be at a point where I’d say to myself okay I’m going to go smoke now, then I’d get sidetracked and literally forget to go and have that cigarette.   Wild.

The only thing with Zyban was, it would give me really wild dreams and my sleeping became very interrupted    I am a very lucid dreamer anyways and can nearly always remember my dreams upon waking, but this Zyban did something to heighten them even more, so not only were my dreams crazy but I would wake frequently during the night, so I stopped having restful sleeps.  So obviously the pills had to go.

I started again, feeling even more defeated then before.

Quitting was too hard, so I decided at that point that I am a smoker and I am just going to smoke and stop beating myself up about it.

A few years later, I went to a women’s fun night and event of some kind, most likely a fundraiser.  I can’t remember the details of the event exactly, but I do remember that was the first time I got hypnotized.

Apparently I am highly susceptible to suggestion, I found myself on stage, swooning over the hypnotist because I thought he was Ricky Martin (power of suggestion), I was surfing on stage, I cried over a fish that died, I was flying the Star ship Enterprise, all sorts of crazy things.   I am a great subject for hypnotists, and since then I have been hypnotized in many situations but that’s for another time.

Yep I had sworn off quitting again but when I saw an advertisement to quit smoking by Romane I had to attend the session, knowing how easily I can be put under.

Again, notice the pattern here?  It was another method that involves the brain to quit smoking, not drug replacement therapy, not sunflower seeds, not the timer that tells you when you can smoke and slowly decreases the amount of cigarettes you can have, not feeding more nicotine into my system.   This was another way to quit that focused on the brain at a subconscious level.

That hypnosis session worked!

I walked out of the auditorium, through my cigarettes away and didn’t pick up another one for almost 2 years.

Damn!

When they say don’t even take one puff, they mean it.  This was when flavored cigarillos had hit the market.   I tried one of my ball team members, Raspberry flavored Prime Times and that was it.

That was all it took and I was a full time smoker again.  I tried another Romane session again and it worked, (*or should I say I worked) briefly and I was smoking again.

Now I will tell you, I couldn’t put a regular cigarette to my lips because it just tasted to bad, but my now Strawberry Flavored Bullseye cigarettes were a joy to smoke.

So how did I finally quit smoking for good?

How do I know it is for good?

A book and a one day workshop was all it took for me to quit smoking for good.

I don’t even remember who told me about this book, perhaps it was Jay because he wanted so much for me to quit, but whoever it was thank you.

The book is called.   “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking”

What’s amazing about this book and his 1 day workshop is, it’s just all common sense.  It truly reprograms your brain so you don’t even want to smoke, you become a non smoker.

As you are reading the book, he’ll tell you to smoke through it constantly, the more you read the less you want to smoke.  (normally)

He doesn’t use any scare tactics, no statistics about dying young, lung cancer, emphysema  none of those things.   It’s just a short entertaining read that taps into your brain and makes you realize how utterly, ridiculous it it to smoke.

It helps you empower you and tap into your inner power to take back control of your life instead of being a slave to the little nicotine monster.

I love being free! 

This book alone I believe will work for the majority of people who want to quit smoking for good, but I wanted a little more reassurance.   Se one of the things that keeps being pointed out in the book is how shitty cigarettes actually taste.

OOPS BIG DILEMMA FOR ME! I LIKE HOW MY STRAWBERRY SMOKES TASTE.

I could see the logic in the book and everything he wrote sounded right on but I felt like I needed that extra little boost to guarantee my success so I registered for his one day workshop he did in Vancouver.

Again, it’s all logic, a little visualization, lot’s of fun and they keep forcing you to go out for scheduled smoke breaks.   Normally when I’m attending an event, I can hardly wait for our breaks so I could go and smoke.   But not this one, by early afternoon, I was not enjoying my smoke breaks at all.

When I left that night, I left my cigarettes in the room and knew I would never smoke again.

Or so I thought…

…I did the stupid thing a week or so later and bought a pack of Bullseye, and started to smoke them, I don’t even know why.  Something major had probably happened, so I started smoking again.  (that was my excuse)

I think I smoked for a day or two but everything from the book and the seminar kept creeping back in my mind, and the beautiful thing was, …  it was stronger then any desire to smoke was, the logic of it over powered any nicotine monster and my brain and my will took over and clearly made me realize that I am a non smoker and I have quit smoking for good!

That was five years ago.

People ask me if I miss it, NO.

Will I ever smoke again?  NO.

Matter of fact many of my close friends in Honduras smoke and I have zero desire to go there again.  I will admit I had a puff one night and it sucked more than anything.

I know without doubt, with full certainty that I have quit smoking for good.

From a person who has tried everything, this will assist you to quit smoking for good if you want to.

To breaking free,

Michelle

P.S.  Please share this article, if it can help just one person break free from smoking and enjoy their life, then please share.  Get the Easy Way to Stop Smoking Here

P.P.S.  If you want to break free financially in your life check out this video >>almost a secret<<