METHOD THREE
Enumerate Roll & Dilute
“I quit smoking in December. I’m really depressed about it. I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes. I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist’s life, and now people like Bloomberg have made animals out of smokers, and they think that if they stop smoking everyone will live forever.” – David Lynch
Written on papyrus and stuffed deep into the catacombs of ancient history, never again to encourage or advise the ones who aspire to forsake the dreaded reefer, is method three, enumerate roll and dilute. ERD is a technique as old as it’s name and for this reason I chose to unearth and unleash to you the dynamically persuasive power of ERD.
How could you effectively discontinue your enslavement to the coffin nail by using such an unsophisticated and primitive technique? you may be asking yourself. I will respond to your query with a query of my own. How can you not quit, using this method?
Withdrawing from the multi-daily ritual of wheezing back a smoke has been done on many occasions using ERD. Those who think themselves sympatico with the medico would unquestionably agree that if you can count, you can certainly find success with ERD.
Enumerate Roll & Dilute works in three simple steps:
- Enumerate or Count. Over a period of Seven days starting with Sunday, you count how many cigarettes you smoke during the day. Here’s where it gets a little complicated, you have to write down those numbers. After seven days of enumerating you’ll take those numbers and add them all up. You’ll have what mathematicians call a “total”. (If I’m going too fast just stop and go back to the top.) Next you’ll take your total and divide that number by 7. This will give you an average of your daily consumption. For example, if you smoke a total of 133 cigarettes in a week, divide that by 7 days, you’d be averaging 19 a day.
- Roll or Flip. Now that you know that you’re ingesting 19 butts a day, you can admit straight away that you have a pretty bad addiction and should hang your head in shame. Ok, 19 butts. Take out an empty pack of smokes and add 19 cigs and flip one of those over. This will be your test. You want to have that one smoke there at the end of your day. Not smoking that one flipped over cigarette will be your gold medal for the day. Pat yourself on the back. You won today’s battle.
- Dilute or Reduce. Every Sunday you will remove one cigarette from that pack and flip over another. So on the second Sunday you will put 18 cigarettes in your pack and flip one over and pace your day and spread them out. The following Sunday you’ll put 17 cigarettes and flip one over and so on and so on. If you can’t figure out what to do the following Sunday. Move on to method four.
In this scenario, it will take you twenty weeks to quit smoking. Maybe you’ll get stuck at a certain number. That’s referred to as plateauing. Don’t be discouraged, you’ve cut back so far and that is a good thing. At some point you will arrive at a final week where you find yourself with one cigarette in your pack and it will be flipped over. You can keep it there as a reminder and a very powerful symbol of your commitment, a show of your superior will power over the death stick. Yes, you too can become an annoying and irritating ex-smoker.
After just three days of not smoking Decanoic Acid Dextrose, Heptanoic Acid and Furanon you’ll be bragging to your friends about your capabilities to breathe easily. It’s really because your bronchial tubes inside your lungs have started to relax and open; but they don’t have to know that. You can just go walking around breathing effortlessly, you big show off. Go ahead, exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen easily, you’ve got this, it’s all you. You won’t be able to hide the extra lung capacity from anyone and you know that’s all they’ll be talking about around the water cooler.
To you my friend, who thought quitting was absurd just a few minutes ago. I applaud and salute you.
“…[T]here is no “safe” dose of a carcinogen.” Rachel Carson, Silent Spring