Great American Smoke Out - 3 Days before Quit Date

 

3 Days before Quit Date		Great American Smoke Out TAKE A STEP FOR HEALTH
Action Step	Plan your first day as someone who doesn’t smoke.  Schedule the day to include time for supportive activities and breaks.
Look at your work and personal schedule and ask yourself what you can do that day to support your plan to be smoke-free. Maybe there are work activities that you can do that are less likely to set you up for wanting to smoke.  If you have a party or outing scheduled for the evening, and you know there will be alcohol served there as well as friends who smoke, it makes sense now to think about what you can do to stick to your commitment so that you’re not taken off guard, without a plan, in the moment.
Resources for Quitting	Check out audio tapes, videos and books written by people who’ve successfully quit smoking and other cessation experts available at your local bookstore.
Gaining Insight	A stumbling block for some people is the mental trap of the fear of failing.  People may psyche up for quitting, do some things to prepare, tell loved ones their quit date, and then quit - for some period of time.  And then they have a slip. The slip is a one-time event and doesn’t need to lead to a return to smoking; but for most of us, it does.  This has to do, in part, with how we define and respond to “failure.”  Technically, when a slip occurs, the plan or process failed, but most of us feel like we are the failure, which sets up certain avoidance behaviors and may limit our ability to try new approaches (hoping for the one magic bullet that’s got to be out there!)  For some of us, “failure” causes shame, which can actually lead to feelings of hopelessness and more smoking. How we think about the process of working toward a goal can make a big difference in our experiences with success and failure.   Consider a professional basketball player who is working on a lay-up shot.  A good athlete notices what does and doesn’t work with the lay up.  If the shot is missed, there’s an information feedback loop that lets the athlete know what to adjust for the next shot.  A missed shot doesn’t mean the game or practice is over - in fact, a missed shot may lead to the very next perfect shot, if the athlete is paying attention to the feedback. When scientists formulate a hypothesis and conduct research, they pay careful attention to what’s working and what’s not.  Major breakthroughs have been produced out of failed experiments, because scientists take note of what went wrong and then set a new course for the experiment. Detectives look at the clues - especially the ones that don’t add up, in order to fit all the pieces together. Now think about the process of quitting: If quitting smoking is more like a process than an event, do you have any greater freedom to experience failure along the way? If you take on quitting as an athlete, scientist or detective would, what might you do differently?  How might you view failure?  Imagine that you have the freedom to try new things and experiment with the process of quitting.  What might you do differently in working on quitting?

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Last Modified: Nov 4, 2009 03:24 PM