My biggest Accomplishment

Activity 3.5 Task2 Chapter 3 text book: Turning Point…

MY BIGGEST ACCOMPLISHMEHT

Goal to quit smoking

Quitting smoking was one of my biggest accomplishments in my life.
I used to smoke for 7 years, when I realized that it was not a healthy habit. Once when I was sick I discovered by chance that I felt like I was experiencing the same withdrawal symptoms as if I was quitting smoking. Since I had tried to do it few times, I knew these sensations. The sickness gave me an idea when I was cured: “Why not pretend I was still sick when quitting smoking and facing real withdrawal symptoms?” I prepared myself mentally. I fixed a date to quit smoking and I really stopped. I avoided social events since a lot of people smoked.

One year later I decided to go to my friend’s party. Obviously, most of them smoked, so I was very tempted and smoked the weakest cigarette, hoping that it would not affect my desire to not smoke. Unfortunately, this one cigarette made me come back to my previous tract of smoking. I again become a cigarette smoker. Shortly after that I read an article about Silva’s visualization method which allows individuals to imagine themselves being successful in chosen field. So I started to imagine myself in different situations without smoking. In my imagination I didn’t avoid smoking people; I imagined I had pleasure without smoking in any situations. But again, I had to fix a day when to stop smoking.

I planned to go to catholic pilgrimage to the polish city Czestochawa with hundreds of thousands of other pilgrims. In such an event no one is allow to smoke. I had to decide to stop smoking at the day when the pilgrimage was about to start. And it was a year after the party when I started smoking again. A few days before the event I planned to take part in, I realized that an unforeseen obstacle would not let me fulfill my plan. I was very upset because my plans were about to fall dawn. But to my surprise, that day when the pilgrimage started, I woke up without feeling the need to smoke. My concern then was not to take a cigarette in my hand. I had no desire to smoke for the whole day. The second day passed and I didn’t feel any withdrawal symptoms; that was unusual. The third, fifth, tenth and following days passed and, again I didn’t experienced withdrawal symptoms. It became obvious that the visualization program worked. I realized that habits exist mostly in your brain so you have to convince your brain that you are free of bad habits; I’ve been successful up to present, decades when I really stopped smoking.