Cognitive Quit Smoking

Hi Steve and All
Well here I am back from my weekend safe and sound and still sane and smoke
free.
It went really well and I didn’t have any major urges. The hotel was nice we
had a lovely ground floor room which opened out onto the lake so I could walk
my dog. Food was great, pool was great and the party went off really well.
The dreaded in laws were not too bad so that didn’t cause me any major
stresses. I ended up sitting with the kids at dinner which - although it was
hard work - was on the whole my choice.
When we were sitting down to eat all of the adults seemed to be avoiding the
kids (wonder why) which meant that it was going to leave the 2 eldest
grandchildren (16 and 14) supervising them. That would have meant a lot of
behave yourself! eat properly! sit stills!!!! etc resulting in the little
ones crying and whinging then the in-laws would have got ‘loud’ which would
have stressed me out.

So I reckoned that if I sat with the kids then at least I would have some
control of how the meal went and it worked out pretty good.
A lot of the party smoked and we were sat in a very big square so the smokers
kept trooping out to the bar to smoke between courses - eventually the waiter
closed the sliding doors so they could smoke at the table!!!!
I was a bit upset about that but there was nothing I could do about it and
fortunately I was not sitting near any of the smokers so it wasn’t too bad.
I took myself off to bed when I was ready and did not get stressed about what
hubby would think - so all in all I got through my first major social event
as a non-smoker and it was no where near as painful as I expected.
In fact it wasn’t painful at all and I never wanted to smoke. I did think
about it sometime in the early afternoon while we were sitting in the hotel
bar/reception - just because it seemed like there was a big chunk missing.
But I did as Steve suggested, observed the smokers - looked at how edgy they
got if they couldn’t find their cigs - looked at how awful they looked and
funny putting this white smoking stick in their mouth and inhaling this smoke.
What a wierd thing to do - why would anyone choose to do that - it doesn’t
meet any need that I can think of and thoughts like this were going through
my mind.
But the best thought of all was I am sooooo proud that I can choose today
whether or not I do that and I am sooooo proud that I choose not to.
So although the title of the post is all that worry for nothing I guess it
wasn’t really for nothing cos it helped me prepare for and cope with what
could have been a very unpleasant experience.
Next time it will be a piece of cake!
So once again folks thanks for all your help cos don’t think I could have
done it without you all.
Namaste
Indi

This entry was posted on Friday, February 21st, 2003 at 2:44 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.