Welcome Phil,
Most of us here have had unsuccessful quits in the past. While each one of those quits has been a learning experience, the bottom line is we failed at them. At some point the urge to get nicotine into our system overcame our desire to stay quit. Why is that? That's because you and I are addicts, addicted to a substance that is deliberately added to Tobacco products to keep us addicted. It's a powerful drug, so powerful that recovering drug addicts say that nicotine is the hardest of all to give up. So if the addictive quality of nicotine is a constant, then it is our desire to stay quit that must change. The problem we face is complacency. When we first start our quit, our awareness and resolve are at high points, and, as time passes, we begin to forget the hell we went through to quit, we begin to forget that we are addicts, we begin to think we can have "just one". So the key is to never forget that you are an addict.
Here we are reminded each day that we share an addiction with other brothers and sisters. Each morning we wake up, stumble over to a computer, and put our name on a list. That act of posting our name represents far more than a number of days quit, it represents a promise to everyone that we are not going to use nicotine at all that day. We quit just for one day here. Tomorrow we wake up and do the same thing.
Does it work? I will tell you this: I have been quit for 54 days now, after having used for over 30 years. In that 54 days I have craved nicotine, craved it bad. But never once did the thought of buying a can cross my mind. That makes this quit very different from any other.
30.
