def·i·ni·tion

DAY 20 ~ Here at a relatively early point in the weaning, naturally I’m trying as best I can to imagine what it will be like to smoke way less cigarettes in a day. It’s logical to assume that the farther down the line it gets, certain smokes will take on more and more specific identities, such as “the morning break smoke”, or “the after lunch smoke” etc.

I intend to take advantage of this inevitable labeling by using those labels to target those specific smokes one at a time, and develop the necessary techniques to eliminate them by avoiding smoking them entirely, as opposed to the gentle process of postponement through steady expansion of the weaning interval.

An example of that would be something like this; Last night I managed to avoid smoking the last cigarette of the day. Instead of smoking, I got fully ready for bed. After that, instead of walking out the back door to smoke, I got into to bed and opened a book to do a little reading. When I naturally began dozing off, I decided to go ahead and fall asleep rather than bothering to wake up enough to go have the smoke.

An easy elimination of an entire cigarette from the day? This is a much bigger victory than a 5 or 10 minute postponement. To me this has the feel of a step in the right direction, in terms of seeing a genuine way to actually quit. In my mind I can see mathematical logic in it. I should try to come up with a graphic for it.

My hope is that this is direct training of a sort for being a non smoker, but honestly I can’t yet be sure it will be as simple as that. I don’t know if getting good at avoiding smoking translates to real quitting. I am optimistic though… as they say “necessity is the mother of invention”… well, I need to quit right? Yes I do.