by Louis J. Bruno

Every cigarette you smoke shortens your life by 14 minutes.

Twenty-two years ago I was smoking three packs a day, or cutting four days off my life for each week I continued smoking. With luck, I would die at my desk a few years before retirement. Not my idea of a fun ending.

To stop smoking, I used my training in psychophysiology to make a plan that breaks both the behavioral and physical habits. Here's how it works.

The habitual smoker is a bundle of behavior sequences all chained to smoking and reinforced by the powerful nicotine rush. Every smoker will recognize these examples:

What makes it difficult to stop smoking isn't only the physical addiction of nicotine in the bloodstream, but the scores of behavior sequences, like those above, that make up the behavioral or psychological addiction. The heavy smoker can hardly make a move without reaching for a cigarette. The chain smoker reaches for one cigarette after another.

To treat both aspects of the smoking habit, it's necessary to (a) reduce the concentration of nicotine in the blood, and (b) break the links joining other behaviors to smoking. The plan does this by gradually drawing out the time between cigarettes while using the clock rather than other behaviors to cue smoking.

To work the plan:

(1)  Count the Number of cigarettes you smoke on an average day.
N = __________

(2)  Estimate the number of Minutes you're awake each day (waking hours x 60 minutes).
M = __________

(3)  Find your average Inter-Cigarette-Interval (ICI) by dividing the number of Minutes you're awake by the Number of cigarettes you smoke.
ICI = M/N = __________

For example, a three-pack-a-day smoker (N=60) who sleeps 6 hours (M=18x60=1080) smokes a cigarette once every 18 minutes on average (ICI=M/N=1080/60=18).

(4) Use your personal ICI to set the time between cigarettes for the first day of the plan. Use a kitchen timer, a watch with an alarm, or a pocket calculator with an alarm function to tell you when to have a cigarette. Set your timer for your own ICI. Smoke a cigarette, whether you "want" one or not as soon as possible after the timer clocks out. (Remember to reset the timer as you light up.)

Always smoke on cue from the timer (to maintain comfortable nicotine levels), but never at any other time (to extinguish the links between other behaviors and smoking). When you're tempted to smoke "between times", realize that you're next cigarette is only ICI minutes away, not never. You can wait that long, can't you?

(5) Each day lengthen your ICI by 10%. The heavy smoker in our example will start his ICI at 18 minutes, increase it to 20 minutes the second day, 22 minutes the third day, and so on. After one week his ICI would be 35 minutes; after two weeks 72 minutes. The changes are gradual, almost imperceptible, but each day the level of nicotine in your system diminishes and your ability to "go without" a cigarette increases.

(6) When your ICI reaches five or six hours (heavy smokers will achieve this after a little more than a month), your body will start to react to cigarettes as it did when you first started smoking. You'll have difficulty inhaling, cough, and get light-headed and nauseous. The taste and smell of cigarettes will once again become repugnant. You'll find meaning in the slogan:

At this point, your body is rejecting tobacco; your physiological addiction to nicotine is ended. If you haven't "cheated" by "saving up" cigarettes for after the movies, or after dinner, or whatever, you've also broken most of the behavioral sequences that used to trigger the "desire" to smoke.

You are just as free to stop smoking now as you were to start smoking years ago.

You've broken the habits, the rest is up to you.

Good luck!