My first blog as a non-smoker

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Today, 2 December 2011, at exactly 13h20, I extinguished my very last cigarette!

I am now a non-smoker, and I'm very happy to be!

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This morning I attended the Allan Carr clinic from 8am to 2.30pm, I went in as a smoker, sceptical about whether the session would work, and I left as a non-smoker confident that I will never smoke again for as long as I live, which is surely to be even longer now than it would have been had I carried on smoking!

The clinic was excellent, Dr. Charles Nel the 'therapist' is fantastic. I was sure to be a tough nut to crack, yet Charles and the programme cracked me and not only convinced me to quit the smoke for good, but made it easy to do so by successfully changing my psychological and mental attitude to smoking. I won't go into detail about exactly how, but it's a great system that really works!

I have a week or two to deal with the actual addiction to the nicotine, which should be fairly easy to manage with the way I'll be thinking about it, after that I will never again in any way be a slave to that disgusting little life destroying drug that has been in control of me for the last 18 years of my existence! Never again will I be tempted to go back into that addiction, that monster that grabs hold of you and takes over your mind, body and personality!

No, never again, my days of smoking are history, and I am happy to know that I will never smoke again because I don't need to, nor do I want to.

One thing that today taught me is that by giving up the smoking I am not actually losing anything, but rather I am gaining a lot that the smoking has slowly eroded and taken away from me! To name a few things my health, my nervous system will recover, my brain will get back to reasonably normal functionality, my confidence, my dignity, my stamina, my cash, and my life and well-being in general! And of course no longer I'll have the stigma around me of being the smoker in the group, the outcast, and endure the embarrassment and discomfort of being conscious of the fact that my social time revolves around smoking and the next cigarette!

Throughout the session this morning we took regular smoke breaks as a group. I smoked more this morning than I usually do in that amount of time except when I'm drinking. Until we were sent out to smoke our last cigarettes. It was quite an emotional and sombre moment for me as that last cigarette slowly burned down, then it became a fantastic feeling of elation. Despite the nervousness at the magnitude of what I was doing I was overcome with happiness and excitement at the idea that I would thereafter be a non-smoker. It was like a weight being dumped off my back, like a dark cloud clearing and the sun coming out, a feeling of emotional and psychological freedom!

Of course within 20 minutes I was thinking about having another smoke, but I don't see it as a craving, or a need. I see it as that addiction in the form of a little monster that needs to be fed, that tries to con my brain into thinking I need to feed it a cigarette to get some kind of perceived peace and comfort, but I will not feed that monster or give it the satisfaction of fuelling the addiction. I will starve that evil shit until it dies, and soon I'll be free of the cage of smoke! If that makes any sense at all!

To any smokers out there who are considering quitting, it really is the best thing you can do for yourself! You don't realise how that cigarette controls you and takes away a lot of good things in your life without giving you anything good in return except the perception that it makes you feel good. That's just the addiction which needs to be fed like an itch that needs to be scratched. This Allen Carr thing is really good, I certainly recommend attending the clinic (no I don't get any commission or benefit if you sign up), it really does work, and it does not involve any gimmicks or hypnotherapy or drugs or patches or anything like that. It simply changes the way you think, it treats the main problem, the mental and psychological addiction, more than the physical one. Besides, using gums, patches, zybans, etc simply fuels the nicotine addiction, they don't remove it! You don't treat an alcoholic with alcohol, so why treat a nicotine addict with nicotine?

That's about as much as I will go on about this, except to say that I am genuinely excited about spending the rest of my life without being hooked on smoking, and no longer revolving my life around the next cigarette, and not exposing my wife and my beautiful daughter to my disgusting and dangerous cigarette smoke just because I'm addicted to that toxic rubbish! Most of all I look forward to getting my health back and keeping myself fit and healthy and free of that unnatural poison that I've been destroying myself with for so very long!

Good bye Peter Stuyvesant, you will NOT be missed!