My 41 days of Journey

Hello everyone, it has been 41 days since i quit smoking and I really feel great about myself. This quitting has significantly increased my will power and has made my self-belief going through the roof, and I know if I can do it, you can do it as well.

I have been smoking since I was 17 years old, in high school just to look older and cool, then I got hooked to it and realized after 7 years of continuous smoking a pack a day that i have a problem and tried to quit several time but was not able to go across a week’s mark. I tried nicotine vapes, patches and gums, but still wasn't able to quit. Every time my mind tricked me into taking that one puff which brought me back to a pack a day addiction.

Now i am 31 years old and working in a very competitive environment with time attacks, thinking and innovating new engineering systems, and i realized one thing that there is never going to be a right time to quit. It needs to be here and now. I was living a sick man's life and in the new world smoking is not cool anymore. Infact i was being frowned upon because i had to leave meeting and significantly important life moments just to go out and burn one. In the times of stress i would just go for smoking more than usual as if this would help me, but it never did.

The real issue was that I was not mentally convinced that I had to quit and still saw it as a cool thing to do inside of me. I started reading and educating myself that how bad it is for personal health, what are the normal reactions when anyone quits. I started observing people who were smokers and how sick they looked and bad they smelled. This made me realize that i would be looking the same in front of the world and it does not look macho but I look like an addict who has no control over his life and would do anything to get a cigarette if ran out of it in a middle of nowhere. That made me question, what kind of a strong person's attitude is that?

So i decided to quit on a Saturday Morning January 13th. I had 15 packs of cigarettes at home and gave it away to a non-smoker friend to keep it with him as I didn't have the courage to throw them in the trash. Friday night i smoked my last cigarette and slept. Saturday was the day it all started, the first was really bad. The whole day the only thing i can think of was cigarettes and had a really bad headache. I told everyone around me that i am going to be really mean for a week, please don't take it to the heart and ignore, that is all the support i need. My mind played so many tricks on me to make me believe that i should smoke just one cigarette to get over this negativity, but i always started reading about the negatives about smoking and visited various blogs to read about the success stories that all the people had and the experiences they went through. This gave me strength and really motivated me. My loved ones: wife, family and friends were really supportive. On the third day I could not bear the suffering as I had insomnia and really bad temper problem and this was Monday the back to work day, I took a sick day off and went to a pharmacy and got some nicotine gums to relieve this extreme pain, and I kept reminding everyone around me that i would come off as a really offensive person please ignore it. The gums did relieve the pain a little and i could at least perform normally in the work environment, I took it for 14 days and quit them as well. I still went out on smoke breaks with my coworker and did not smoke. This only increased my belief on how sick the addicted person looks and it does not look cool at all. Now I am on my 41 day and absolutely a better person. I am more fit and focused. To overcome the depression of quitting I started working out to release the dopamine from my brain in a positive way. I read somewhere when I touch the 90 day mark I will be golden and most of the damage I did to my body will recover.

I know the struggle is real to quit and wish all of you the best to achieve this maneuver.