This might be my second or third post about this on Steem and unfortunately here I am again, the same difficulty in front of me with the same failures behind me. Quitting cigarettes. Of course the posts where I failed and started smoking again are missing from my Steem profile but maybe 3rd time's the charm.
I've been smoking for about ten years now with some breaks here and there, I grew up in a nice school where only a few students were smokers and we didn't even start drinking until we were 14-15 which is pretty uncommon for Finns. I never understood the addiction to smoke at the time, looking at smokers and thinking "why don't they just quit? It can't be that hard", oh boy was I young and naive. As I was making my way to mandatory military training I remember everyone saying "yeah that's where they get ya, everyone starts smoking there cause of the pressure and stress" but I didn't take those seriously cause I never had those problems and I was sure I would not face them. I was right, for the most part, I didn't start smoking for most of my military training except the last couple months when things died down and there wasn't a lot to do and we were just hanging out doing nothing with some smoker roommates. You could pretty much say I started smoking out of boredom as dumb as that sounds like it's unfortunately true.
I was probably in the best shape of my life at the time and I didn't see smoking as something bad right then and there. I used to run 10-15 kms per day and took smoke breaks now and then cause it just tasted amazing to me at the time and as long as I'm still being healthy with everything else this could not hurt much, could it? Well shortly after we had to move and being in a new place without knowing many my good habits of running and working out quickly turned into gaming and being up late procrastinating online while continuously smoking.
To keep this post a bit shorter and cut out all the years of smoking I wanna get to the last few years where it really has started taking its toll. For the past couple years I've been feeling unlike myself, self-diagnosed I'd blame it on thyroid and cholesterol but who knows haven't been on a checkup yet. You may wonder why that is and I'd tell you you're not the only one wondering that. Maybe it's self-destructiveness, I read somewhere that each human has that ability built in and some just tend to do it more often than others, I don't know. To tell you the whole truth it would get quite personal and bring up a lot of other things that may have an effect on everything I would not want to share here today yet, maybe some time in the future, who knows.
I think this would be a good time to take a break, try really hard to get rid of many bad habits I've amassed over the years and feel a bit healthier and in a better situation for HF21 as Steem is still my main focus. I'll also be posting a bit more than usual, it usually goes in waves where I don't post much for a long time as I have other things outside the chain to do but still for Steem and some other times like these when either everything is flowing well (which hasn't been the case lately) or there just isn't much to do for me personally where I get back to posting. For now though I'm gonna try and force myself to take a break from all the other responsibilities, maybe try and not talk to others as much during the next few days as I'm quitting smoking - don't take it personally if I'm not replying or acknowledging your comments on my posts during this period - and hopefully I'll be back better than ever with the new HF to make the most out of what the new changes bring and make it possible.
I am still very hopeful and looking forward to how I can help out the most not just myself but everyone I deem worthy of being a good Steemian on our chain. For now, wish me luck, the image above are my last three cigs that took me forever to put in that position with shaky hands which has also caused my lines when drawing to not be the best they can be. Hopefully that will go back to normal after a few weeks of non-smoking.
This time around I'm going to try and be honest if I fail with quitting and maybe write some more posts about my progress throughout it. I'll also be using an app called QuitNow which counts the time and money I've saved so far by not smoking and also drops in some achievements and statistics of your health which are pretty interesting, will keep you up to date on that too.
If you've been in a similar situation as I am now and managed to quit and have some good advice for someone attempting to go cold turkey in a very hot climate, now would be a good time to hear them - I'm mostly planning on curating, writing and watching a ton of anime to get the time to go as fast as possible but I fully expect to sweat a lot, be restless, get annoyed quickly, do some collateral damage and keep bugging my roommate to give me "just one last cig" even though I've told him like 3 times so far not to listen to me when the time comes.
