Quit Meters
Steve,
Made perfect sense to me. I personally love using the quit meter to
keep track of how many cigarettes I haven’t smoked and how much money
I have saved. I don’t keep it up and running on my computer all the
time. I check it about once a week now instead of all the time when
I first quit. Trust me, that meter has saved me from giving in on a
few occasions.
I say, whatever works for you, do it. If it’s using a quit meter,
terrific. If not, then terrific too. Do what you feel is best for
you to stay quit. In fact, this email list is one of the things that
I think is best for me at the moment. 
Happy Holidays!
Linda
2 months, 2 weeks and 3 days smoke-free!
ddsteve <ddsteve@…
Hi there,
I think I may have given the impression that I don’t like meters or
think that their use is unnecessary or unimportant or frivolous. If
that’s
the case then I need to make a correction. I think that the amount of
time
we’ve been quit is important in the sense that … that’s one way
we
measure our quits. Dealing with a pattern of behavior that was always
time
sensitive, it’s only natural that time would continue to be one of our
criteria for accomplishment. I think quit milestones should be
acknowledged
and celebrated.
However, I do not think that ‘time quit’ is necessarily an
indication of
progress toward ‘being quit’. It’s interesting that to those who are
hanging on, how long they’ve been hanging is of such monumental
importance.
Maybe that’s where so much of the ‘meter frenzy’ comes from. Cog
quitters,
while appreciating their time quit, also measure their quits in terms
of
shifting perspectives and altered behaviors. I think that the
retraining of
Warren and his increasingly automatic choosing of nonsmoking options
is the
most important criteria for quit success. And if a quit meter is used
to
mark out that success in terms of time, great.
Did that make any sense?
Steve