Quite often, you will read on this site that "quitting is hard work!" But I'm here to say that it's all in how you look at it. As I see it, SMOKING is hard work!
Think about it. When we smoked, we had to clean up after ourselves constantly! Between cleaning ashtrays, covering up burn marks on various items we owned and getting the smoke smell out of our couches, clothes, carpet and cars, we spent a lot of time fixing the damage we did to our environments due to smoking.
We also spent a lot of time coming up with all of those clever remarks and comebacks for when non-smokers would tell us "Smoking'll kill ya" or "You really should quit that!" I don't know about you, but I had quite a few of those comments to shove in their faces... whether they made sense or not! I'm sure much of that time could have been spent doing better things!
Speaking of time, if we smoked an average of 20 cigarettes a day, and spent 6 minutes smoking each one, we spent 2 hours each day feeding our addictions. Now granted, some of that time may have been spent while driving or doing some other activity, but much of that time was spent doing nothing but smoking. For many of us, coming up with an extra 2 hours a day out of our busy schedules is tough! It takes some work!
And we always had to make sure that we never ran out of cigarettes and that we always had enough to get us through our workday, so we didn't go into withdrawal. Sometimes, that meant having to leave the house at midnight to go get cigarettes because heaven forbid we run out!!!
Nevermind the time we spent working to PAY for our addictions. That's hard earned money we threw away because we HAD to have our expensive cigarettes! We worked very VERY hard to pay for those deadly cigarettes!
And to go along with the money we spent, smokers tend to have higher medical bills, even if they don't have cancer or emphysema, because of coughs, or other physical ailments that go along with smoking. That's hard earned money that we used to pay for our medical bills!
Think about it! We really worked hard for our addictions! So quitting is easy compared to smoking! When we quit, we reap the benefits of our hard work, rather than working hard in order to make our lives less healthy. Sure, quitting may be hard, but at least we get to use the money we earn back by not smoking on things that we truly want and enjoy. We quit doing all of the routines that we had to do in order to live with our addictions, and thus have more time to do things that we like doing. We are healthier and don't have to work as hard physically to do things that non-smokers can do with ease like climbing stairs, walking long distances, or even playing with the kids in the yard.
So as I see it, smoking is HARDER work than quitting! Anyone else agree?
Crave the Quit!
[B]My Milage:[/B]
[B]My Quit Date: [/B]6/17/2005
[B]Smoke-Free Days:[/B] 720
[B]Cigarettes Not Smoked:[/B] 18,000
[B]Amount Saved:[/B] $2,973.60
[B]Life Gained:[/B]
[B]Days:[/B] 50 [B]Hrs:[/B] 18 [B]Mins:[/B] 26 [B]Seconds:[/B] 22
