2%... That's the percentage of smokers that quit each year. About 40% try, but only 2 out of every 100 succeed

I started smoking when I was 16. It wasn't anything serious at first. A cigarette a day at most. I had actually started smoking marijuana before cigarettes. I think the biggest appeal was the nice pick me up it gave me. Like I had drank a cup of coffee and the caffeine had just kicked in, but without jitters or a crash later. Over the years, the once a day cigarette progressed to 2, 3, 4, 5, until I was up to about 10 when I was 18.

I moved on campus to college when I was 18. I didn't know anyone, and often felt cooped up in my room. My go to for getting away from that feeling was to go smoke a cigarette outside the dorms, and I soon found out it was my roommate's go to as well. We hadn't really bonded that much at first, so our way of bonding came through 10 minute breaks taken outside to smoke. At the end of my first year, I was nearing a pack a day. This did not improve over the summer. What did improve was my social life and thus the number of times a week I was smoking weed, drinking, or ingesting other substances.

One day I realized all the toxic crap I was bringing into my body. Like I actually started to fathom it to some extent. I was never a super athlete, but at least in high school I run track, played football, and just kept myself in shape. Now, I was sitting around all day slowly poisoning myself for a good feeling. I decided it was time I did something. I wasn't ready to give up any of the things going into my body, but at least I could do myself some good and go running. It had been at least a year since I had done so, but I felt confident in my ability to run my favorite 3 mile course around town. 1 mile later I was walking drenched in sweat, with a side stitch that I was sure to be appendicitis. I managed to off and on jog the rest of the way. After that, it was off to smoke with some friends. I woke up the next day feeling as if I had been hit by a car.

I kept up with the running though. At first it was every other day, but I managed to ramp it up to every day after the first week. After another week, I decided to tag on a workout after my run. Simple stuff like pushups, pullups, crunches, and squats. I had let myself get too soft. I was letting my body down, and I had to make up for it, no matter how much my lungs burned and complained. After a month of doing this, I realized that smoking and running were inherently contradictory. Smoking diminished my lung capacity and the amount of oxygen in my blood stream, and my running ability was directly effected by that. I couldn't keep them both up forever. I saw that I know had an ultimatum: I could give up smoking, or I could give up running. I couldn't bear the idea of quitting something beneficial like running so that I could smoke. The thought of it just disgusted me, so I stopped smoking that day. Not just cigarettes, but everything. I had urges, sure, but I knew I had made the right choice, and that kept me from ever seriously considering smoking again. The urges dropped off eventually and I haven't smoked since that day. Unfortunately, not smoking weed meant slowly drifting away from some of my friends. It's not as if they disowned me or anything, but "come smoke" was our way of saying "come hang out" so when I stopped smoking, they stopped thinking of inviting me when they all got together. I miss them, but I don't regret my decision.

I didn't have a real reason to quit until I gave myself one. Even then, it was only because of how much I regarded my reason for quitting that I was successful. Your mind, your self control, your ideals: those are your biggest assets when trying to quit anything.