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I think making a link between quitting smoking and drinking to excess in bars is often a lie cooked up by your addiction to keep you smoking. Yeah, you can make the claim that your smoking activity only ever happens when you've had a few drinks down the pub, and try to avoid the circumstances and situations that lead to you lighting up... but you then put yourself in the unsustainable situation of having to avoid what constitutes a lot of your normal social life, which for better or worse, within our culture, is always going to play out in bars and with alcohol as a social factor.
Conflating this with quitting smoking makes the whole endeavour far more difficult to maintain, because you are no longer just trying to quit smoking, you're also having to cope with quitting drinking at the same time, and worse, doing all of this without the support of your normal social networks and activity. You don't really need all of that going on if you're just trying to accomplish one thing. It's quite common for people to also throw in stuff like giving up eating meat, while they're at it, and edging into a weird virtuous self-denial headspace. In most cases, people seem to keep this up for a couple of months max before reverting to previous behavior. Which of course, suits your nicotine addiction fine.
I think the best way of quitting smoking is to normalise non-smoking within your life as much as you can, not try to make huge life changes because you're scared to face engaging with your normal day-to-day existence without the support of cigs. Once you have quit for a decent period of time, it really is absolute bollocks that you somehow "need to smoke while drinking" or even that "smoking makes drinking better". It doesn't. It just fills a whole that wasnt there in the first place.
All of these things are carefully crafted lies told to you by your addiction and supported by anecdotal evidence from other addicted people. There is no real truth to it. Eventually you cease to associate the two things and forget all about it. It doesnt even cross my mind these days that other people in a bar have even got cigarettes, let alone that I might want one, and I used to smoke 20+ marlboro reds a day for years. Once you've been quit for awhile, all of these circular arguments you get caught up in whilst quitting become largely irrelevant. Silly, even. I found that the best approach was to stop thinking too much around the subject and focus on building strong mental blocks on certain physical actions:
1. Don't go to a shop and buy cigarettes.
2. Don't ask someone to give you a cigarette.
3. Don't put a cigarette in your mouth.
Make those actions seem bizarre and alien to you. Concentrate on dissassociating from those three specific physical activities. Try to convince yourself that doing any of those things is way outside the scope of your range of behaviour. I think it's also important to not make too much of a big deal out of it, because that feeds the addiction as well. Take it all in your stride, tell yourself it's easy, try to project into a future when smoking is no longer a factor in your life. |
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