Understanding Smokers

Picture from Unsplash

According to the statistic, I’m living in one of the countries with the highest tobacco users, with roughly about 76% of the population smokes in my country, while in other countries the government condemned their people to smoke with strict regulations, it’s hard to be implemented over here due to its long economic history of tobacco.

While the World Health Organization described smoking as a pandemic, over here people described it as a lifestyle. It’s not a taboo thing in my eyes when I could see people smoking in every corner that I have crossed, it is also often for me when I saw kids were smoking.

I’m not going to give a lecture about how smoking affecting our health, I don’t even think I’m worthy enough to talk something about that professionally, so I’m just going to give another perspective as a smoker myself.

I picked my first cigarettes about three years ago, although that I’m not denying by the fact that I’m also smoking and just adding another number to the statistic that I have mentioned above, I never really agree when people described it as a lifestyle — or even considered smoking as a cool thing to do — in fact, I was ashamed by this bad habit of mine.

Here are some things that I realized as years of being a smoker.

Smoking with depressions and anxieties

It’s very common when people linking smoking with depressions, people began to smoked when they were depressed, but ironically according to the research smoking contributed to depressions itself.

Video from Youtube

An example of how society linked smoking with depression.

Even for myself, it was one concept that I had in my mind, just like any other teenager, I was doing foolish things and always had the urge to try something new. As a teenager, I experienced a lot of things for the first time, including my first heartbreak — not literally the first, but that time it really hurts — that’s when I thought the world was about to end, and I began to starting puff that poison into my lung.

Failing to accept my vulnerability

For me every cigarette that I light served a purpose, having a bad day light one, another heartbreak light one, getting bad grade light one, missing someone light one, the list goes on and on, I begin to lose my count on how many cigarettes that I have smoked.

I failed to accept that the world was never meant to be perfect and I failed that just like any other human being I also have flaws.

I tried to numb my emotions, especially sadness,

“I don’t want to feel sadness, I just want to be happy and happy, that’s it”

I’m using cigarettes to escape from my reality, with thousands of bad chemicals giving me this quick sensation of happiness, but sadly, no matter how far I have escaped, in the end, the reality will bring me back, realizing that I ended at the same spot before I leave, it brought me nowhere.

Even though I tried my best to numb emotions, I learned the hard way that nobody in this world could numb emotions, the best thing we can do is practicing to accept our vulnerabilities, made peace with them, it’s an endless process but it’s worth to make harmony within ourselves.

I know how hard it is to quit smoking, I have tried many times, even though I had no luck yet on it, I will try again sometime soon. If you’re having the same problem and still smoking, It’s best for us as smokers to not causing any collateral damages to the environment and people around us.

Here are some commonsense when you have the urge to smoke:

1. If you need to smoke, make sure that you are at least 20 meters from any other persons around you, this will help them to avoid being a second-hand smoker.
2. If you’re smoking with another smoker, although it seems acceptable for them to breathe the smokes that we had produced, it still impolite, push your smoke to below as you puff the cigarette.
3. Don’t litter, make sure you always find an ashtray or find a trash can to throw your cigarette butts. Also, don’t forget to kill the fire as you’re finished.

Although that it seems to be only us that’s doing harm to ourselves, sometimes because of our foolishness we still doing harm to others, don’t be selfish.

As cliche as it sounds, in order to achieve the success of quitting smoking, we have to be equipped with the best education that we can have, I do understand how hard it was for me to quit smoking, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do, here is a talk that I found on the internet to arm us for our next quitting journey.

“We need emotional solutions for emotional problems”. It’s very inspiring and very helpful to overcome our smoking addiction.

I also found a nice app on my phone, to help me quit smoking, it’s called SmokeFree (not sponsored), it’s free and easy to use.

I hope the best for ourselves, even though we have tried and failed, that doesn’t mean we are starting again from the scratch, we are evolving and becoming stronger, don’t be afraid to try it again, because I also will.