REFLECTIVE ESSAY
Quitting smoking is a worthwhile, but lengthy undertaking. In 7-8 weeks after a decision to stop smoking, I will hardly be able to celebrate the decisive victory over the habit. However, I will have chance to assess interim results, and adjust plans if required. With an aim to make the reflective process more orderly, I will consider a range of important issues. Firstly, I will consider periods when quitting smoking is particularly difficult, and analyze the causes. Secondly, I will identify factors that hinder the process of quitting, and consider what can be done to address them. Finally, I will identify facilitators, and reflect on how they can be incorporated into the process of accomplishing the goal.
The objective of this reflection is to test the hypothesis that quitting smoking is a process that is a multi-step process whose success usually depends on effective socialization.It would be wrong to assert that quitting smoking is easy. Although I had a strong motivation to break this bad habit, there were many moments when I felt that I needed another cigarette. I spent a lot of time to identify situations where my motivation to quit smoking weakened. The most important discovery that I made during this period was that my motivation to quit the habit weakened when I saw my friends smoking. Each time I wondered whether smoking was as bad, as I read about it. When I saw people smoking, I had very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I realized that most smokers knew about smoking triggering cancer or causing cardiovascular problem. On the other hand, even knowing about these and other consequences did not stop those people from smoking. When facing with this discrepancy, I assumed that all those statistics on the relationship between smoking and diseases was overestimated. Many people around me were smoking, and nothing happened to them.
My motivation was decreased when some of my friends let jokes or remarks about my decision to quit smoking. When my friends learned about my decision to quit smoking, some of them joked about it: “There is nothing difficult about quitting smoking. I did it many times.”
I think quitting smoking would be much easier, if my friends supported me. I later found confirmation of my assumption in Simons-Morton & Farhat (2010). The researchers point to the relationship between socialization and substance abuse. When an individual sees his friends smoking, he is likely to smoke too, because no one likes to be a white crow. At the same time, I realized that I was lucky to quit smoking in Australia, rather than in any other country. Australia is a “dark” market, because there is a ban on advertising and point-of-sale display of tobacco products (Burton et al., 2015). An individual who is not surrounded by heavy smokers is likely to quit the habit, because he does not face with appeals that smoking is cool, relaxing, or an important attribute of modern life.
The first seven weeks of my undertaking were the …
