Well there you go. I’ve gone and done it. I‘ve managed to join the millions, no, make that hundreds of millions, of happy ex smokers who have successfully quit smoking for more than twelve months. [Read more...]

Anxiety. Like most ex smokers, I used to believe smoking relieved it, and for two decades I counter intuitively used my addiction to cigarettes as a means to deal with the condition. Unbeknownst to the fact, that in reality, I only ever made things worse. [Read more...]

At around five months into my quit I had a pretty significant breakthrough. I was able to see a predictable pattern emerge. For several days I would feel comfortable living my life as a non smoker, only to then encounter a handful of days full of cravings. [Read more...]

One of my biggest fears about quitting, had been that as a non smoker, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy a beer or social occasion. After all, for the best part of two decades, any social event I attended involved binge drinking and smoking [Read more...]

Something great happened around the fifth week of my quit smoking campaign. I had at some point, stopped continuously thinking about smoking and the fact I was no longer a smoker. [Read more...]

For me, 2011 was a year of tremendous change. I had spent the last six years building a management career, often at the expense of having a quality family life, only to discover my efforts were fruitless and a complete waste of time. I had become stuck in an unrewarding and dissatisfying job for a large, poorly managed, telecommunications company. [Read more...]

When will this end? I found myself asking this question time and again, day after day, during the first few weeks of my quit campaign. By around the two week mark, I had well and truly broken the chemical dependence to nicotine. Yet still, I could not stop thinking about smoking, or more, the fact I was no longer doing it. [Read more...]

Five, was my “magic” number. It was how many days it took to break through the most intense hurdle of my quit, the chemical dependency. [Read more...]

At 11pm on August the 10^th 2011, I lit my last cigarette and there was nothing celebratory about it. In past quit campaigns, I had always made out that my last cigarette was a big deal, an emotional break from something I was going to miss.

Not this time. [Read more...]