Lists/Commitment Reinforcement
Hey Indi and everyone;
Glad you worked on those lists. I really think they help. I like lists
so this was not so difficult
for me to do I guess. One way that they will help is just from the
simple act of writing , you are
putting some of this information into your subconscious. That’s why
teachers want kids to take notes
in class. Even if those kids never look at those notes again, the
information has been input via
speech and then again by writing that information down. The brain is
hit with the info twice. In our
case, we think of our reasons for quitting, etc. and then we write it
down for reinforcement. Bam Bam
- double whammy and commitment is more secure. I used this when I
smoked my last cigarette, only
backwards. I wrote my quit list the day before I was supposed to quit -
I was supposed to do it at
least a week before I quit but even though I like making lists, I’m
still a notorious procrastinator.
Since I’d been thinking of quitting for a while and the reasons why I
wanted to quit, it didn’t take me
long and commiting that list to memory was easy (the simpler the list
the better as far as I’m
concerned).
Please forgive me if you’ve heard this before but I don’t think I’ve
posted this here. I stopped
smoking on a Sunday night. I was going to “officially” stop the next
morning, but I thought what the
heck, let’s see if you can make it through a few hours before you go to
bed, you chicken shit. Well,
lo and behold, I made it to bed without my evening smokes. Maybe I did
this just to test myself a
little (easier than the big test coming up).
The next morning I had my quit ceremony. I got up (thought about
smoking ), took a shower (thought
about smoking), got dressed (thought about smoking), went out to the
garage, got my pack of cigs.
There were about 12 left in the pack. I stood over the trash can and
tore each cig up one by one and
for each one, I named one of the reasons I was quitting. Then I put my
nasty ashtray in the tray, said
goodbye and closed the can. By doing my little ceremony and repeating
my list of quit reasons, I was
hoping to reinforce my commitment. So far I think that it’s helped, who
knows? All I know is that
it’s still hard because every morning so far I get up (and think about
smoking), take a shower (and
think about smoking), get dressed (and think about smoking) and so on.
But it’s very slowly getting
easier to handle the quit and if I remember to do the ABC exercises, it
makes the urges pass with less
stress.
Well, got a lot to get done today as I’ve taken the day off and I can’t
spend it in front of the
computer all day.
Later Gator,
Cat - almost 18 days without a smoke