I’ve had a few people email me asking me how I’m doing and realized I just haven’t posted for a while. No smoking so far. Just that one tiny infraction on Thursday (day 11).

As I said in that post, I’m glad that happened. It strengthened my resolve to quit.

Now, thats not to say that its been a piece of cake since then. The urge to smoke is strong, even using the patch. But when push comes to shove, if you have the patch on, you know that the urge is psychological – not physical – so you can deal with it a little easier.

I remember both reading Tony Robbins Unlimited Power and listening to tapes years ago, where it was mentioned that people think smoking relaxes them, but what it actually does is cause you to use a different breathing pattern. Its amazing the things you remember but this has popped into my head multiple times over the past week – as well as was mentioned to me yesterday by someone and thats really what I’ve been doing. Deep breathing makes it a lot easier to get the urge to go away.

Some other interesting things that have been going on. I think I have super powers. Most noticeably, I can tell when a smoker has been in an elevator – or where there is smoking going on in the vicinity. This is something I really have never noticed before but I now know how strong (and unpleasant) the smell of cigarettes are. I think this part has been the most interesting to me and I finally get the “Friends” episodes where every time Chandler takes a puff of a cigarette Monica knows.

I’ve also received some feedback like “you should get your car detailed” or “you should get a new car”. Yeah, not so much. I am not SO confident right now that I’m going to drop the money to have my car detailed (or worse buy a new one) until I’ve got at least a few months under my belt and I’m sure I’m not going to go back and ruin it. It’ll give me something to work for.

So thats the update so far. Things are going well. Even with the Day 11 relapse, this is still the longest I’ve gone without smoking since I started – so I know I’m doing something right.

When I started this I thought there would be way more to talk about it. There isn’t. There are definitely times when I am irritable – but I haven’t really had major mood swings much. So far, its been pretty uneventful – almost a non-event to blog about.

So those of you thinking about quitting – think about that and quit putting it off. In the least its an interesting foray into the psychological workings of addiction without having to start heroin …