lessons from 15 Years of smoking, ep1

Hi, welcome to the You Can Quit Smoking podcast where we go over stories of success with overcoming smoking addiction. Many people have moved through this radical transformation and used smoking as an opportunity for inner growth with deeper self awareness and a greater capacity for compassion. So many have done it and you can quit smoking too. I'm your host, Jessi Hartnett, founder of Honor Your Heart.

Hey, everyone, welcome. I'm so excited to be here for the first episode of You Can Quit Smoking. I'm gonna start the show off by telling my own story, kind of walk you through how I started smoking, what it was like for me, and ultimately how I ended up quitting. I just want to start by painting that picture of what you have to look forward to by quitting.

I loved smoking, then I hated smoking and thought I could never get out, but here I am, and it is enriched my life in ways that I couldn't have even imagined. It's like I'm a totally different person than who I used to be, but in reality, I'm actually just closer to who I really am. I was able to shed away all that baggage that came with that smoker identity and the stuff that had led up to me getting into smoking.

So I'm gonna start by walking you way back, back to when I was just a kid. I tried smoking for the first time at thirteen. And man, it was rough. It tasted horrible. But, I went to it looking for something. Looking for a sense of identity, for a community. Looking to become an adult really. You know, growing up around smoking, it was a very adult thing to do. And I was always trying to grow up too fast as a kid. I had a lot of trouble fitting in school and so started hanging out with older kids because it was easier to relate to them and to talk. And so they all smoked. It makes sense that I would try it, that I would pick it up too.

And as I started, you know, smoking cigarettes, I also started smoking pot. And that was really blessed by the people around me, the adults in my life. I got some pretty bizarre advice that I shouldn't smoke cigarettes because they're so addictive. But, you know, smoking pot is better because it's not addictive. I wound up very addicted to cigarettes and pot, ended up smoking both daily from just 13 like I said.

What started to happen is that smoking became like my main hobby. Like I would wake up and smoke. My whole day was centered around smoking. Where was I gonna get my stash and who I was gonna smoke with? And, you know, even as I was doing other things like, you know, going to school and working my jobs, even as a young teenager, I was always thinking about smoking. I was always working hard to get that smoke break or to unwind at the end of the end of the shift. And it started to be that I didn't really want to spend time with people that weren't smoking. I was always thinking about it, doing it or with people that were doing it too.

But at the same time, I was also having a lot of pressure to perform well, to be successful, to do well in school. And that was driving me really hard. I kind of had this weird pattern where it was becoming like a perfectionism thing where I would want to be perfect and put a lot of pressure on myself, and then I would like unwind from that with smoking. And now when I look back, I kind of see that both of those sides of me are pretty obsessive and fixated. So my workaholism was tied to smoking big time. It became like a reward punishment thing for me. It actually acted as both. So I would, you know, be working hard in school and ace the test and I would celebrate, oh, I did great, let's smoke! And at the same time I would be stressed out like, oh no, I didn't study and I have to do this thing. And, and I'm not good enough, not smart enough. I'm not competitive enough. Let me smoke to kind of punish myself cause that's all I could do to handle the stress.

And I really just got roped into the cycle of using smoking as a tool to cope with my emotions, any unwanted emotions. So loneliness, depression, anger, sadness, stress, you name it, I would turn to smoking. I just got really hardwired in this pattern super young and had that tied to these kind of drive. I had this ambition and it's for external validation. So the, you know, this continued on. Outwardly, I'm doing really good, you know, top of my class and holding down multiple part time jobs and, and everyone is telling me, "Hey, you're successful, you're doing great!" And so I don't see any real problem with the pattern I'm developing.

And I go on to go to college and that's when things really started to take a turn for me.
So during high school, you know, I had moments where I really did want to quit. I had like some cough and just, you know kind of racing around and, and trying to get the money for it and all that was kind of difficult. And I played music and it was interfering with my music and things like that. But just given that time that I was young and, and so full of energy still, it didn't really impact me that much that I could see yet. And it wasn't really until I got to college that I started to really kind of just slide downhill with my outlook on life, my outlook on myself, and my feeling of belonging and purpose in life just was plummeting. So it was always my dream to get to school, and I got there and kind of just had this feeling like, well, now what? You know, I've worked so hard to get here. What's next? What am I really meant to do? Who am I? And started having these kind of thoughts. But I was studying science at the time and had always been on that track from, from young age. That's what part of my drive was to, to be a, you know, pioneer as a woman in science. And I just found myself getting really depressed by it. Everything, all the data had was pointing to this kind of nihilist perspective where everything is like disconnected and kind of random and meaningless.

And even though we have all these indications of, you know, environmental decline and, you know, the work that I was doing with animals, like it was very clear that we're aware of the effects of things like pollution and what not, but that wasn't really resulting any societal change. I mean, I was polluting myself every day. I couldn't even manage that much. You know, how could we change the world? How could we have a connection with nature and with each other in a way that's meaningful and not just a competition driven? You know, this kind of like Darwinism idea that it's survival of the fittest and we're all working against each other to get limited resources. So this is really getting me down. I could see this kind of playing out in my social dynamics, you know, in the classroom and with my professors. And we just wasn't really feeling excited to get up in the morning. And so was really leaning on smoking heavily. Every time I kind of got caught in this little cycle, I would just sit there and smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke to try to cope with it. There was something really wrong in the world and I couldn't felt like I couldn't fix it and that I had no place. And so I just was up for, you know, destroying myself. I didn't think that I would make it to 30. I didn't really see any point in living. And I was like borderline suicidal at this time. And I honestly just didn't really care if I lived or died. Every day was kind of like an experiment. Well, let's see how this goes.

And things kind of turned around. I actually was very fortunate. I was listening to the radio and I heard this man come on and speak and he was talking about the meanings of words and kind of caught my interest cause that was something that always got me excited was, you know, history and just how things came to be. And so he was speaking locally. By this time, you know, I was out of school and was working a successful career, what have you. And, but was still kind of feeling like I was on that hamster wheel. Like I didn't really know what I was doing anything for other than to get that "good job" from everybody. Everyone is telling me I'm doing great, but I'm not feeling great. And so I decided to go to this talk and, you know, we come in and I think it's an academic lecture or something. We start out with a song and I just felt the energy in that room, the connectedness and the beauty of life for the first time in years. No,  I shouldn't say that, you know, I had some of that, but just not that magnitude, and that power. And it just really spoke to my heart. The words that this man was saying, the stories he was telling, it just it felt like truth. And he was telling me that I had a soul and that my career really didn't matter that much.

Something in me just broke open and I decided that maybe I had things wrong. That maybe there is actually more to numbers, more than we can see, more than we can quantify and explain with proof, scientific proof. And maybe there really is something divine and magical here, that we have just inherent worth and that we're all unique and special and that matters. You know, this was kind of like tough for me to shift out of that framework I had just hammered myself with for decades, but I was at least open to it. And so I started going down this path of really discovering my spirituality and who I was. The way that I did this was really dive into myths. They helped me so much understand what it means to be human and that these core characteristics of humanity have persisted over time. That we haven't really changed as much as you would think with the technology in the modern world. That there's actually some consistency. There's actually something that's timeless about being human. And in some ways we've kind of been distracted and taken away from these really principal truths of why we're here and what we're meant to do with our lives.

And so I really started to give attention to my thought patterns and was seeing how busy and crazy my mind was, and started to pick out and recognize different voices and thought patterns that I had never really noticed before. I was just so distracted, always working hard, always partying. I never really took time to listen to myself and be curious with it. I kind of just took it for granted. Well, this is who I am and this is how everyone thinks and this is how it is. But I started to kind of pick that apart and saw some really kind of crazy negative self-talk. I realized how critical I was being to myself. And so as I was trying to quit smoking, you know. I was trying to quit on and off for the like this whole time really. And  I mean probably from the time I was like 18 on, I was just buying a pack at a time and every pack I had was my last pack. And then I would, you know, go a few hours, maybe sometimes a day and then just be so strung out and stressed out that I would go and buy another pack.

So as I'm, you know, getting older and out of college now, I started to have some real physical effects from smoking. I'm having gum disease, nearly losing my teeth, just awful surgeries, very, very much painful, discomfort, horrible. And so I'm smoking through this, I can't stop. And I'm having rosacea. My skin is in awful shape. But I can't stop, I'm still smoking. But I'm practicing now. And I'm going days without smoking, I'm going weeks without smoking. I'm even going months without smoking, but I keep going back. And so I started getting really curious about this. Like, why do I need this? Why do I have to go to the gas station and buy this thing? Like what is it doing for me? And you know, what's going on with the self-talk around this? So I was able to clearly link all my smoking cravings, every time I would go back to smoking with negative self-talk, really harsh criticism, and a feeling of overwhelm too.

So I'm realizing by this point that the bulk of a smoking addiction is not physical because that's what I've been told that, you know, quitting smoking is harder than quitting heroin and these horrible withdrawals. But I had been through that withdrawal so many times. It was just like, you know, finding your way through your own hallway in the dark. Like, I know what's coming around here. I know I'm gonna get through this. But it was the self-talk. It was what was going on with me spiritually that was connected to my dependence on smoking. Because I really had no tools to regulate myself emotionally. I didn't even know how to take care of myself. I had to learn everything as an adult, basic things like cooking. So that's what really what my smoking was all about. It's just not having the tools and not having the confidence in myself, the sense of worth that was actually necessary to go through the hard thing to quit smoking and to value myself enough to not harm myself anymore.

Because I had a lot of self-hatred going on. And this willpower thing just wasn't working for me. That's what I would use throughout school, throughout working. Just work hard and push through and no matter what you're feeling, just go, go, go, go. And that was not working with smoking. I tried that like hundreds of times. If I was just a better person, if I was just a stronger person that I could make it through this. But I had to really shift all of that into understanding what it was I was actually needing like reconnecting with myself. Because I had been so turned away from what I knew to be true, that I had to come back and recognize that intuition is a real deal here. And it doesn't come from that logical thinking mind that's always planning and wants things to work out and be easy and be charted out and have a pattern. It's much more spontaneous than that and it's much closer to truth than that because it comes from the heart.

And that's where I was able to access the things that I actually needed to quit. I needed to access forgiveness for myself. I needed to practice acceptance and love for myself that I was a worthy person and that I was good enough and that I could just be kindly to myself to motivate myself rather than be harsh to myself, which was my mode of operating for decades. And so it really took a shift of like coming down into who I really was, finding what my true needs were, and then using imagination and try on error to figure out how to meet those needs in a genuine way which was actually not smoking. I thought that smoking was meeting those needs. That's why I was so programmed to go back again and again to try to meet those needs in that way, but it didn't work. And so maybe it worked in the beginning, but definitely didn't work at by this point. And so I had to change those beliefs I've had for so long. And it was not an easy thing. And it took a lot of practice. It took a lot of patience.

But it was ultimately what helped me stop for good was changing the beliefs I had about myself, about smoking, and about my place in the world and my connection to others. So that's how I made it through the other side, in a nutshell. I go a lot more into this and my book, Honor Your Heart. It can guide you through some of this, like, really deep transformational ideas that I came into knowing, like I said, very late in life and had to really wrestle with and pick apart for many years to understand how it applied to me and applied to my life. It really comes down to beliefs. You only see the things you believe, and you can't change them if you don't recognize them and understand that they are just beliefs, and they can change.

So that's what this podcast is all about. I want you folks to understand that it's your beliefs that are keeping you stuck with smoking. And then if you start believing that you can do it and get overcoming that self doubt, no matter how many times you've tried to quit smoking, that's gonna help you move forward. If you can imagine your life without smoking, and that's what you want for yourself, you can start to have the imagination and motivation to get there. And it's not easy. Change is not easy, so I'm not trying to fool you. And, and wait, you know, think you're gonna, it's gonna happen overnight and you're in a wave of magic wand and everything's all better. This takes a lot of work. I mean, I had to go through hell and back to really get to the root of why I was smoking and start to heal those deep wounds, and they're not healed.  I got some scars and I'm still doing work, but I've come so far, and that's what it's really all about. It's not about being perfect. It's about looking back and seeing how far you've made it. And know that you can keep going, having that trust that you're gonna keep going deeper and deeper and get closer to who you really are. Because we all take on baggage in life, it's just how it happens. You know, other people tell us what to do and how to be, and, you know, we take that on and we forget who we really are and what our real needs are.

I'm gonna wrap up here and tell you a little bit more about myself as we go on with these podcasts, but I'm also gonna be sharing stories from other people because there are many paths to a smoke free life. It's not just my way or the highway. So many people have done this and they're all valid ways. And I know that you can find your own path to stopping smoking. Thanks for listening. I'll be back with you guys soon. Thank you.