Quitting smoking is easy I did it more than 100 times. This is the most representative joke that I’ve heard about this subject. Everyone who ever smoked or continues doing it knows very well what this is all about.

Many nights after I put out the last cigarette, I promised myself that the next day I’ll quit smoking, but after breakfast I could not resist the temptation and fell again on my ingrained habit. It was worse when I decided to quit smoking “right now”. Twisted the package before throwing it to the garbage and after that I dived in to rescue them. In other opportunities, being too late and with all the shops closed, I used cigarette paper to put together a new one with the  remains of several cigarette butts that I had put out in the ashtray.

I became an addict and didn’t want to recognize it, so I didn’t ask for professional help. I started using some tips that my friends recommended me. One of them was to throw the cigarette butts in a jar with water where it turned into a nicotinic drink that I had to smell breathing deeply into it every morning. Didn’t work. Another was to tell my girlfriend to soak a cigarette with a drop of oil and mix it with the rest so I would grabbed it without knowing which one it was, taking me by surprise and disgusting me, but I ended up smoking a cigarette that smelled like fried egg.

My daughter Maria Eugenia had the habit to steal the package, take out the cigarettes one by one and break them. Having no arguments to punish her I had to stare at her while she did this. This attitude from her made me make a bigger effort, but doing this only focused me more on my addiction which made it more difficult to get it out of my head.

Once I began to realize the power the cigarette brand and the characteristics colors of the package had over me. I made it a part of my personality. Keeping it away was like denying a part of me, but I also realized that to quit smoking I had to stop thinking about it and use a strategy to attack the habit in two levels, first the brand and everything it meant to me. Also I had to act on the chemical dependency. Every cigarette besides nicotine have typical additives different for each brand that give them a particular taste.

I had to focus my attention in those things I could handle, for example alcohol, coffee and mate (I didn’t leave my wife because I could never handle her). This three elements are the principal allies of tobacco, but I could live without them and make the effort not to focus on the real problem. I also made a list of all the brands that I knew and made the commitment of not smoking the same brand twice unless I had finished the list and had to start all over again. Of course my favorite brand was excluded.

I don’t remember how much time I proceeded this way, maybe a month, but I do remember that one day I started feeling awful, was out of breath and had tachycardia so I went out to take some fresh air. I was so scared, breathing deeply didn’t help me and was still out of breath. Then I felt worse, went inside directly to the bathroom and threw up.

That was the last day of my life as a smoker, I was 34 years old, had done it for 20 years, since I was fourteen, and after that never lighted a cigarette because it caused me rejection. You could say it was autosuggestion or anything else, that doesn’t matter. At the beginning of this article I said “quitting smoking is easy I did it more than 100 times” I was successful one time only and for me it was more than enough.