Although everyone agrees that quitting smoking is the healthiest and most sensible choice, we suggest answering these questions: What do you lose if you quit smoking? What did it give you? Why are you quitting?
It may seem strange, but understanding, validating, and being compassionate toward the part of you that wants to smoke can help you quit. That’s why we ask: What was your initial motivation for starting to smoke?
We can distinguish between the motivation to connect: with other people, with sensations, with pleasure, with reward, with a more attractive side of yourself; and the motivation to disconnect: from your surroundings, from a task, from stress, from emotional distress, from suffering, from family, or from work.
When disconnection is pursued, it is often about creating a space of one’s own through the cigarette.
You may also be trying to fill a void. Consuming means filling, acquiring, and that is why people often consume to ease an internal sense of lack, of emptiness. Or, you may start smoking to seem more interesting or more adult, or to rebel.
As you can see, there can be different motivations behind smoking, and they can be very personal and subjective.
If you feel you are still undecided about whether to start—or not—a period of abstinence, we recommend doing a balance sheet, where you write down, in a 4-cell table, the benefits you feel you get from smoking (1.) and from being abstinent (2.), and the disadvantages you associate with smoking (3.) and with abstinence (4.). This exercise can help you clarify the relationship you have with tobacco, make a decision, and look for alternatives to obtain the benefits you feel tobacco gives you.
When weighing the reasons in favor of smoking against the reasons to quit, you need to make sure that the reasons to quit carry more weight, and that they are your own reasons, not someone else’s. If you don’t feel that way, perhaps you are in an earlier stage, and you should give that balance more space and time.
Also, you can begin to distinguish the motivations behind the different cigarettes you smoke over the course of a week, since not all cigarettes are smoked for the same reasons: because your body craves it, as an automatism or habit, to cope with discomfort, as a reward, a break, or a prize, or as a small space for yourself, to step out of your routine, to seem older…
However, when there is an addiction, it often happens that the motivation becomes detached from the use. That means the motivation that was present at the start of smoking (connection, disconnection, filling a void, seeming older...) no longer needs to appear for the use to occur, because it repeats itself without the need for motivation.
If you feel your balance tips toward abstinence, it is important for you to know that, sometimes, a sense of loss and grief is experienced when quitting smoking. Grief is a psychological and emotional experience in response to a situation lived as a loss, and each person can experience it differently. It may seem contradictory, because you actually want to remove tobacco from your life, but let’s remember that this means there is a part of you that feels tobacco was giving it something, and it is okay to listen to that part too, instead of denying it.
To move through grief, it is advisable to remember what you were looking for in tobacco, how and when it came into your life, whether there is anything good it may have brought you, whether there are anecdotes or curious situations in which you remember yourself with a cigarette in hand; but also to think about why you want to distance yourself from it.
Part of this process is expressing the associated emotions, which can be of any kind: sadness, due to the loss; fear, about what is to come; anger, due to the consequences suffered, etc.
To move forward through grief, you need to allow that psychological experience, not just punish and demonize your smoker "self." Allowing the feelings involved in these phases will make it easier to move through and integrate them, and ultimately, to move forward. In contrast, inhibiting this content can promote stagnation or regression.
In that sense, farewell rituals as a form of emotional digestion are a good predictor of the success of the process. With them, you can psychologically anchor the transition to the new phase of your life, and influence the psychological background of dependence.
Qualitative research indicates that if grief is processed, allowed, and made explicit through a goodbye letter to tobacco, commitment to and the good prognosis of abstinence increase (more information in the chapter "Quit Day"). It is even suggested that the letter be shared aloud with other people around you or who are in the same process. This is a symbolic exercise, and each person can think of other farewell rituals that feel comfortable to them.
It may seem strange that we give so much space to saying goodbye, if what is actually desired is to get away from cigarettes as soon as possible. It is also true that there are people who do not feel that loss or grief, and who can skip this part.
The justification for these proposals lies in the fact that the person–tobacco relationship, especially if it has been prolonged, can become a complex relationship. In some ways it can resemble the relationship you may have with other people, and be built on the basis of subjective ingredients that can be addressed, if that helps you in your purpose.
As for the reasons why you are quitting, we ask you: why now and not before?
Surely you are very clear about your reasons for quitting smoking: the health benefits, financial benefits, benefits in relationships, etc.
But you have chosen this exact moment, and it may be helpful to know why, since that will connect you with your personal motivation. And as we have already seen, to overcome an addiction you have to be an active part of the change.