The back door again

Here's the example from chapter 1 again, some months later.

It's ten past eleven on a Tuesday, and the same client has been rude, and wrong, for fourteen minutes. Your jaw is tight. You pick up your coat, because it's cold out, and go down the stairs and out of the back door by the bins.

You stand there for five minutes with a tea. You breathe. Two of the people from the second floor are out there, smoking, and you talk about nothing much. The call still annoys you. Partway through the tea you work out what to say in the follow-up email, and you go back upstairs and write it.

It isn't a transformation. The client hasn't improved, the job is the same job, and you were angry for about as long as you'd have been angry before. What's different is what was missing. You came downstairs carrying one load this time. There hadn't been a second one building underneath it since half past nine, and you hadn't spent the morning doing the quiet arithmetic of when you could next get out. When the shoulders came down, it was because you'd walked away from your desk and taken a few slow breaths. That was always most of it.

I'd like to be realistic about that day. It won't be the day after you stop, or the week after. There'll be a stretch in between when the back door is a hard place to stand, and you may choose the front steps for a while. There may be a lapse or two on the way, and a few pounds. You may still, years on, catch a whiff of someone's cigarette on a summer evening and feel a brief, fond pull. That's a memory, and you can let it go by.

I've argued that the cigarette does almost nothing. It delivers a small stimulant effect that you could get from a cup of tea, and beyond that it relieves a need that exists only because of the last cigarette. The calm, the focus and the pleasure were real experiences, and each of them was mostly a return to the level where non-smokers spend their whole day. The break and the company were real too, and you can have them without the smoke.

If that argument has landed, stopping looks different from how it looked at the start. You aren't giving up a comfort and gritting your teeth for the rest of your life. You're going through a few uncomfortable weeks to be free of a need, and after that you won't have to keep refuelling it.

One thing to do today. If you haven't yet, find the number of your local stop smoking service or book ten minutes with your pharmacist, and choose your day. Put it in your calendar like any other appointment.