Shownotes

Keywords

quit smoking, nicotine addiction, smoking cessation, personal journey, behavior change, empathy, support, health, recovery, self-compassion

Summary

In this episode of the Quit For Good podcast, Jennifer Green shares her personal journey of cigarette addiction as she reads from her book. She discusses the societal perceptions of smoking, the struggles of addiction, and the importance of empathy and support in the quitting process. Jennifer emphasizes that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to quitting and encourages listeners to find their own path to a smoke-free life, highlighting the significance of self-compassion and understanding in overcoming addiction.

Takeaways

• Jennifer Green shares her personal experience with smoking addiction.
• The journey to quitting smoking involves understanding personal struggles.
• Societal perceptions of smoking can influence addiction.
• Addiction can create a cycle of perfectionism and failure.
• There is no right way to quit smoking; different methods work for different people.
• Using nicotine replacement therapy can be a valid option for some.
• Quitting smoking can lead to immediate health benefits.
• Self-compassion is crucial in the journey to quit smoking.
• Empathy and support can significantly aid in the quitting process.
• Quitting smoking is possible with the right mindset and strategies.

Sound bites

"There is no right way to quit smoking."
"I have made countless mistakes."
"Quitting smoking is absolutely possible."

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Quit For Good Podcast
00:51 The Journey of Addiction Begins
05:12 The Struggles of Secret Smoking
10:19 The Cycle of Perfectionism and Failure
12:51 Revelations on Quitting Smoking
16:22 Empathy and Self-Compassion in Quitting

TRANSCRIPT:

Jennifer Green (00:05)
Hello, I'm Jennifer Green, and this is the Quit for Good podcast. I'm here to help you quit smoking for good. The problem with most smoking cessation advice is that it comes from well-meaning health professionals who have never felt the pain of nicotine addiction. I smoked for over 30 years before quitting for good in 2016, and I've been offering advice and coaching to quitters ever since. No matter where you are in your quitting journey, you can always begin again. So let's get started.

Today, I'm gonna read to you from my book, Quit Smoking for Good, which takes you on a transformational journey from hopeless smoker to healthy nonsmoker in five simple steps, using compassion, empathy, and personal truth-telling combined with science and psychology-based strategies for behavior change.

How It Began...

We snuck into a bowling alley where they kept the cigarette machine in the lobby. We fed in the coins and pulled the lever for an impossibly grown up packet of Marlboro lights. It screamed sophistication and prestige to me, from the gold string that unpeeled the plastic wrapper to the crisp silver foil you would unwrap like a present to get to a tidy formation of perfectly white cylinders. They had a curious odor I couldn't stop huffing.

even before I lit the first one. It was an exotic smell that came to mean danger, intrigue, adulthood, misbehavior, and getting away with something to my impressionable young brain. Once we lit them inside my friend's bathroom, the smell transformed into something darker and nastier. I transformed, too. My pupils dilated.

I felt like I had traveled outside of my body where I could observe my own brain lighting up like a pinball machine. It was an incredible feeling, despite the smoke in my throat making me cough. But even after I put out the cigarette and stuck the other half back inside the box, I couldn't stop sniffing that crazy nasty smell. I like hated it. Like a mosquito bite, you can't stop scratching until it draws blood.

Because of its treatment in popular culture at the time, smoking cigarettes was also associated with feelings of sophistication, rebellion, and success in my undeveloped brain. My friend's mom called out to ask what we were doing in the bathroom together. Giggling, we opened the window and frantically waved magazines while spraying an aerosol can of Aquanet hairspray all over the place. I don't recall her yelling at us. She must have smelled the smoke.

I have no idea what she thought about it. Regardless, there were no consequences. If you came of age in the 80s and 90s, you might have had a similar experience. Our parents loved us, but they weren't our friends or our confidants. They tended to be either authority figures or pushovers, to be lied to, manipulated, or avoided. My parents didn't go to therapy.

They weren't in touch with their emotions. They weren't familiar with the concept of generational trauma. They were too busy wrestling with their own struggles to take much notice of my sister or me, unless we were causing a considerable problem for them. When I got home, I opened the side door as quietly as I could, hoping to sneak into my room unnoticed, but my parents were standing at the top of the stairs. They smelled the smoke on me and asked to see inside my handbag.

When my dad pulled the open pack of cigarettes from my pink preteen purse, he didn't seem all that shocked, maybe because he had also smoked as a teenager, or perhaps because smoking wasn't as frowned upon societally at that time. To my parents' credit, they did lecture me and told me to knock it off. By the time I entered eighth grade, I fell out with those girlfriends and didn't smoke again for a while.

but nicotine had its hooks in me. In high school, I found a different crowd of friends, many of whom drank and smoked. I had low self-esteem and adolescent hormones. Naturally, I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be cool. I went to a party one day and smoked five cigarettes in a row while we drank cheap beer a senior had gotten for us. I was thrilled to be part of the gang. After that party, though,

I was sick for three days. When I felt better, I went out and bought a pack of Marlboro's. If you know, you know, I became a daily smoker that summer at just 15 years old. Years passed. I continued smoking all through my teens. I smoked on the plane when my family went to Florida to visit my grandfather who was dying of cancer. I remember visiting him in the hospital and going to the smoking room. In the hospital. The irony was lost on me.

Cementing my Addiction:

I married in my mid twenties. My husband smoked too, but we decided to stop smoking in the house. We had a three season porch with comfortable seating and some protection from the elements. We lived in Wisconsin. If you smoke real cigarettes rather than an anywhere vape, you probably know the pleasures of having a special place to indulge in your habit.

It becomes a sanctuary where you can drop your cares for a few minutes and take a few deep breaths, which is always mentally restorative, even when they're filled with smoke.

As the years rolled by, cigarette smoking became less glamorous. First, it was banned in restaurants. Then, eventually, in bars. Remember, this is Wisconsin. The temperature regularly drops to the teens in single digits in the winter here. It took a long time to ban indoor smoking because nobody wanted to hang out in the equivalent of a walk-in freezer to have a smoke. But guess what? Once that was the only option, they did. And they still do.

After I separated from my husband and moved to my own place, I continued to smoke outside, but now I had no screen porch to sit down in. I would huddle under the back porch awning to avoid the rain and snow. Yep, still living in Wisconsin. Midwesterners don't question our climate lottery. We just suffer. I began dating and making new friends. I tried yoga and went to various studios to practice.

I dieted and exercised. This began the period of secret smoking. I wore a special outfit to smoke in to keep the rest of my clothes smelling nice. Most acquaintances and even a few of my friends had no idea that I smoked. I had a small inner circle, some smokers and some not, and it was such a relief to hang out with them without having to pretend. Yet even with my loved ones who knew I smoked,

I felt awful about interrupting good conversations or walking away from a nice meal at a restaurant because I needed to go outside for a cigarette. You might wonder why I hid my smoking. The best way I can explain this is that it made no sense with the rest of my life. I practiced yoga regularly and was in good shape. I didn't eat meat. I didn't drink much alcohol, at least by Wisconsin standards.

Health was becoming a strong value for me, but I was addicted to cigarettes and couldn't seem to give them up no matter how much smoking was at odds with the rest of my life. So I hid my habit, feeling guilty and ashamed much of the time.

The problems with living a lie were revealed when I took a trip out west to visit a friend who was a massage therapist. She hadn't known that I was still smoking when she invited me, and I hadn't thought through how uncomfortable it would be, both to smoke far less than I normally would because of my embarrassment, and when my withdrawal got the best of me, to smoke in front of her.

I remember stepping outside one morning at her beautiful house in the suburbs of a small Colorado mountain town and feeling like I was soiling the place. She was a health professional. Our shared interests include included vegetarian food, yoga and meditation. She had recovered from breast cancer, a brutally unfair disease for someone with her healthy lifestyle. Lighting up at her house, even outside, felt like the equivalent of taking a shit in her living room.

We spent the day at the beautiful mountaintop wellness center where she worked. I walked off into the woods to hide and smoke. There was no place to throw away the butt without stinking up the facility, so I grounded out and hid it in the woods. Satisfying my nicotine craving was miserable. I'm sure she could smell the smoke on me when I returned, but she was too polite to say anything.

I like such a stupid failure about my filthy habit that I let that friendship wither and fall away. Although it had plenty of downsides and uncomfortable situations just like that trip, I continued to smoke.

The impossibility of change. As a deeply neurotic person, I've always been interested in psychology. In my many efforts to improve my health, I've often wondered what was wrong with me. I knew what I needed to do, but I couldn't follow through. Knowing better and continuing to make the wrong choices was a kind of torture for me that went on for more than another decade.

I fell into a long-term cycle of perfectionism and failure that always looped back to needing the comfort of cigarettes in order to soothe my shame for being a smoker. It was a great source of suffering for me for many years.

I began studying personal development, habits, addiction, and behavior change. I read dozens of books, signed up for online and in-person programs, hired coaches and therapists, and followed online experts.

Thinking that perhaps the solution to my troubled existence went beyond cognitive methods, I also pursued multiple forms of spiritual seeking, including attending various churches, sanghas, and practicing meditation. I've since discovered that for all those years, I was stuck in the contemplation phase from the trans-theoretical model of change, which has six stages.

During the contemplation phase, a person recognizes their behavior as problematic, but still feels conflicted and unsure about making a change because they often see the barriers or costs of change as overwhelming. Hello, overwhelm, my old friend. Many, many people never get past this stage. One of the reasons for my conflict was the way that I viewed the problem. Quitting smoking was framed as giving something up, something that I loved in spite of how terrible it was for me.

Powerful secret number one: how you perceive your reality can literally change your experience of it.

If only I had realized the way I framed smoking as a treasured escape a medication for all that ailed me and a Necessity was a big reason. It was so hard to stop. I Wish I'd had this book. I Tried reading Alan Carr's easy way to quit smoking, but it was not easy for me

and it didn't work. I could see the logic of his argument. You aren't giving something up. You are no longer feeding your physical addiction to nicotine, which will finally allow you to stop wanting to smoke. The physical symptoms of withdrawal are finite. They don't last forever. But addiction is complicated. So is brain chemistry. Thoughts and mindset are powerful. And if anyone knew the secret to controlling our thoughts 100 % of the time,

We wouldn't have a multi-billion dollar self-help industry, a thriving illegal drug trade, an opioid epidemic, alcoholics, sex addicts, or compulsive gamblers, or smokers. Smoking is still the number one cause of preventable death and disease, both in the US and across the globe.

Powerful Secret Number Two: There is No Right Way to Quit Smoking.

Along with psychology-based tips about behavior change and a simple step-by-step path to follow, the key premise of this book is that there is no right way to quit. We are all different. There are many tactics. Some may work better for you than others. After multiple failed attempts, my own revelation

was that I didn't have to give up nicotine to quit smoking. It's been nine years since I quit. I still use nicotine replacement therapy in the form of mini lozenges. Is this terrible? It beats the alternative. Multiple doctors have told me it's far better for me than smoking. Some research even indicates that nicotine therapy can help people with Alzheimer's disease, [which my mother does suffer from].

Please understand that I am not recommending that you use long-term nicotine replacement therapy or suggesting it's the only way that you'll be able to quit successfully. I am sharing what would have been a revelation to me the first time I tried to quit and failed, that giving up nicotine cold turkey made the bar too high for me to stay quit. When I let go of trying to have the perfect quit, where I gave up cigarettes and nicotine all at once, I was able to stop for good.

Yes, I still use nicotine replacement therapy, but I am a non-smoker.

If you feel strongly that you must not use nicotine in order to quit successfully, you can still get support and tips about behavior change from this book. Quitting never gets easier, but the benefits will start immediately. If you've tried to quit and believe that giving up cigarettes is impossible for you, or especially if you've tried other methods that didn't work, I ask you to consider lowering the bar and letting go of perfection just for now.

Not everyone has to quit cold turkey. What have you got to lose? Now is the time. Adapt the information and tactics in this book to craft your own self-compassionate plan to quit smoking.

Why should you listen to me?

I am a 55-year-old woman who quit smoking in 2016. Before that, I traveled a 35-year journey of addiction to cigarettes and recovery, though not in the usual sense. I have made countless mistakes. Nine years later, I continue to use nicotine therapeutically because it keeps me from suffering from depression, and it prevents me from relapsing.

I don't experience negative consequences, and I can afford it. I've made peace with my imperfection, and I'm a non-smoker who doesn't miss cigarettes at all.

The message I have for you is that quitting smoking is absolutely possible. If you think using nicotine is cheating or wrong, and you would rather not take advice from someone who uses it, don't read this book. Read Alan Carr's book, Easy Way to Stop Smoking. I genuinely hope quitting will be easy for you. If instead, like me,

You need all the help you can get, this book is an empathetic guide to quitting, built on my own experience and years of research into the psychology of behavior change. I invite you to take advantage of my mistakes and hard-won knowledge as you create your own self-compassionate map to a smoke-free destination where you can stay quit for good. I believe in you.