Beat Your Smoking Triggers

Separate the Cigarette from the Trigger

Tracking your cigarettes tells you when a smoking trigger will most likely hit and how bad it will make you want to smoke a cigarette. Now you can tell which cigarettes will be the hardest to give up when you quit smoking. But with a little prep work, you can make it a little easier to stop smoking.

What we're going to do now is just put a little distance, a little time, between the smoking trigger and the cigarette. This will help you take your smoking habit off "autopilot." This is called “separation.” It's a key part of re-learning life without cigarettes, and it's going to help make the process of actually quitting smoking easier.

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• What is a trigger?
• Track your cigarettes
• Separate the cigarette from the situation
• Separation Exercises

Lots of times, people don't even realize they're lighting a cigarette...

Whenever they experience a smoking trigger, they just automatically light up, and before they even know it, they're taking their last drag. Here's an important exercise to help you become more aware of these trigger situations, one that will help take some of their power away.

For example, if your Cigarette Tracker shows that you always light up a cigarette when you sit down with a cup of coffee in the morning, this time wait until AFTER you finish the coffee to light up. The next day, try waiting for FIVE minutes after you finish your coffee before you light up. After a few days of waiting five minutes, increase your wait to TEN minutes. Do whatever it takes to get through these short delays. Get up. Drink some water. Feed the dog. Do anything but light up.

Waiting will be pretty hard at first, since you're so used to having your coffee and cigarette at the same time. But what you're doing is loosening the "glue" that's hardened between your smoking triggers and the cigarettes that go with them. And the more you wait, the more you'll get used to not having a cigarette every time you have your coffee.

If one of your big triggers is that after-dinner smoke, do the same thing with this one. Start with a five-minute wait. After a few days, wait until after the dishes are done to have a cigarette.

Here's the important thing. Once you start delaying like this, you're going to experience what an urge really feels like. The good news is, it'll pass. The urge to smoke starts slowly, hits a peak (sort of like a wave in the ocean) and then passes. Up until now, you've smoked at the beginning of an urge or at its peak. But now you're getting practice riding it out. Drink water. Breathe deeply. Talk to a friend. Go for a walk. By practicing riding it out, you're actually doing something with these discomforts instead of smoking.

Alright, what other ways are there to separate and delay? From your Cigarette Tracker, you should know what most of your smoking triggers are. You might find some or all of them in the list below. Pick one, and you'll see we've listed some ideas of how you can begin putting some distance between the trigger and the cigarette that goes with it. These are just the triggers that a lot of ex-smokers say they had. You may have others. But try a few, and soon you'll get the hang of it.