Edit: Added last section.

I was a pretty heavy smoker, unfortunately, for many years. Recently, I quit once and for all. I'm not going to lecture you about how terrible smoking is for your health, or regale you with tall tales about how much better you will feel if you stop.

Instead, I'm going to give you some insights that might help you quit too, if you want to.

Quitting smoking means quitting nicotine.

Let's get clear on what it means to quit.

Quitting means that you will stop using nicotine, let your metabolism break down this chemical and flush it out of your body over time, and then monitor your behavior and psychology to make sure you don't use nicotine again. In perpetuity.

This means that the most direct way to quit smoking is cold turkey, even though it is quite hard and not very pleasant. This also means that limiting smoking, smoking cigars or hookahs, chewing nicotine gum, vaping, or any other altered form of using this drug does not count as quitting. Sorry about that.

Having to monitor yourself for the rest of your life is a handicap. It is what a heroin addict must do. It is not ideal. But it is a small price to pay for your health, and it gets easier with time: just ask someone in a wheelchair.

Understand your metabolism.

How much you smoke is related to how quickly your body metabolizes nicotine. If it does so quickly, then you tend to smoke more often to replenish the nicotine in your addicted system. If slowly, then you can probably go several days to a week without smoking.

Understanding where you fall on that spectrum can be an important tool in your quitting strategy. If you are a heavy smoker, you will have one hell of a quitting week; but on the bright side, you will get through this period quickly and will need to deal mostly with psychological withdrawal symptoms. For lighter smokers, the chemical withdrawal is prolonged and uncomfortable, and to get into the safe zone a long period of time must elapse.

In some sense, being a heavy smoker increases your chances of success. People tend to ignore problems when their symptoms are not pronounced, and when you're a heavy smoker, you will eventually notice the sharp, unpleasant, and inevitable consequences of smoking -- coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, constant diarrhea, gas, bad breath, poor circulation, just to name a few -- and these are likely to encourage you into action.

Dangerously, the symptoms of lighter smokers may be less pronounced and therefore less motivating.

Relapse is the danger and it's not worth it.

After quitting, if you consume a small amount of nicotine, you will almost certainly begin smoking again at the same rate that you always did, or faster. There is no compromise. The difference between being a smoker and being a non-smoker is black and white.

When you are experiencing withdrawal, your body is telling you that if you use nicotine you will feel better. Basically, it is lying.

You might feel some relief if the time since your last cigarette is not very long. However, as the length of time increases and your body's supply of nicotine wanes, relapsing into a sudden large dose of nicotine is unlikely to give you physical relief in actuality.

The sad truth of a relapse is that it puts you into a doubly losing situation; not only will you continue smoking, you will also not rid yourself of the physical discomfort your body was seeking to soothe.

Therefore, as you go through the quitting process, the short-term benefits of relapsing become very small fairly quickly. You can use that knowledge to psychologically reinforce the idea that the time you have invested in your cessation is much more valuable than the relief you will feel from relapsing.

I have my way to quit, and you have yours.

I don't know what the right way to quit is for you personally. Everyone is different. Our goal is always the same: when the opportunity to smoke cigarettes arises, do nothing. But the implementation of such a strategy can take many forms.

Some people quit through sheer will power. Other people support themselves by writing out their personal reasons for quitting and health goals. Still others have assistants physically or psychologically restrain them from smoking. Read up on some best practices and figure out what strategy is right for you. Throw out your lighter, chew some gum, crunch on some celery, avoid alcohol.

Most importantly, do not give up. It will take hundreds of attempts to quit truly.

Nicotine addiction is a disorder.

Most people probably don't realize this, but in the same way that drug addiction is a disorder, so is smoking cigarettes. Smokers are often asked, "Why don't you just quit?" Or a smoker's significant other might say, "Sometimes it feels like you love smoking more than you love me." This kind of discourse comes from a misunderstanding of what smoking is and that, at the end of the day, it is a disease which keeps victims trapped in a vicious cycle of addiction and powerlessness.

If you are supporting someone who is trying to quit, part of your regimen should be a sympathy to the pain and suffering that quitters go through in their process and the recognition that it will take time and effort to get it right. Smoking is not about inter-personal relationships or will power. It is about a well-defined chemical process that causes people to behave in very specific, almost involuntary, ways and is very difficult to overcome.

The invisible door of quitting smoking.

If you ask me, or other ex-smokers, or read some of the comments on this post, you will see a strange phenomenon. Many people who were the heaviest of smokers report that once they went through those weeks of discomfort, they were liberated and never looked back. In retrospect, people feel that quitting smoking is a lot easier than it seems.

When you are addicted to nicotine, the thought of leaving your addiction sounds very scary. It is like there is a huge locked door in front of you, and you are sure that you will never be able to pass through it. Guess what? That door is invisible. It doesn't actually exist.

Step through this door today, you'll wish you had done it sooner.