We recommend you answer these questions before you come into our office: Why do I want to quit? Why do I want to live smokefree?

Write down your answers (your feelings, your desires, your dreams) now while they’re still fresh in your mind. What are you moving away from, and what are you moving towards? Also, please be brutally honest when you do this. Hidden in these questions may be reasons you don’t want to quit. What are your fears? What does smoking represent for you? What are your beliefs around smoking? Write all this down because at least you can bring to the forefront some of what’s going on for you. It’s all “in there,” so let’s get it all out. You’re the only one who will see this unless you choose to share it with someone in your life. We’re not going to ask to see it.

(If you’re not someone who enjoys writing, then videotape yourself talking it. Or, go into Google Docs and do a “text to speech” recording where it’s automatically typed into a Google Doc.)

Why do this? Do it so you can go back and look at it an hour from now, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, or next decade. At some point in your smokefree journey, you may forget what you now know in every fiber of your being. The mind can play tricks on us, and there may be times when you forget what you now know is so important to you. Plus, you’ll see whether your fears were true or not. (For example, did you know that studies show when people stop using nicotine, anxiety, depression, and stress levels are lower?

Also, as you start feeling better being smokefree, you can write these milestones down too. You want to be conscious of all of this, otherwise you may not even notice and when you don’t notice, you forget and you don’t have much to hold onto when one day you think, “Oh, I can have just one,” or “Only one won’t hurt,” or when you start to romanticize how wonderful smoking (or vaping or chew) was.

Your brain may go offline when life gets tough, so what you write now will be that cheat-sheet that reminds you of what’s important to you. This way you’ll be able to make choices based not on a fleeting thought or feeling, but rather on what you value most in the long-term.

People quit smoking for multiple reasons.

Maybe a parent has become ill from smoking or died and you’re scared that this could happen to you. Maybe you want to quit so that you can see your children grow up. You want to be a good role model for them — you want your children to see that we have the ability to change and can do things that may be hard. Also, you probably don’t want them to smoke when they become teens. Maybe your spouse or children want you to stop smoking. Maybe you’re thinking of having children. Maybe you need an operation, and the doctors won’t operate until you’re smoke free. Maybe you want to hold your new grandchild, and your child doesn’t want to when you smell like smoke. Maybe you don’t see yourself as a smoker — it doesn’t fit with the health values that you embrace. Or maybe you want to be able to run and play soccer like you used to or be able to walk up a flight of stairs without getting out of breath. Maybe you want to be free and don’t like being tethered to your cigarettes. Maybe you’re scared for your future you.

The reasons for wanting to become smoke and nicotine free are many and for each of us who smoke, we need to figure out our own personal reasons.

It helps also to come up with not only future reasons, but also our now reasons. What will we get from being smoke-free today? We tend to look at quitting smoking as giving up something — as a loss or a deprivation. Yet, what are you gaining? Every choice not to smoke, is a choice for something else. What is that something else for you?

Write all this down, so you can go back to it. And as you stop smoking and start feeling better, you can add to this document or make more videos. Notice the all the positives as they happen because we also tend not to notice those things, and it’s easy to take for granted when we start being able to breathe easier, or we don’t smell like nicotine, or we don’t have to stop every half hour on our long drives, or our skin starts to look better, or we don’t need to hide from our kids or run in to take a shower before we see them, or we have extra money in our bank from all the money we saved, or…. the list goes on and on and on.