Davetnova is absolutely right. The physical side is relatively swift and easy to get over - the habit is the problem and breaking the associations is the harder bit longer term.

I used to smoke 20-30 a day and the first thing I did in the morning was light up a cigarette - how on earth I managed to smoke an untipped Gauloise first thing in the morning now frankly baffles me but I realise I had a great physical need to stoke up my nicotine levels.

I gave up the week before Xmas in 1990 and have never smoked a cigarette since.

What helped me enormously was a book called 'How to give up smoking' (original eh?) by Allan Carr (I think). It has a plan to give up over a 4 week period and over that time you smoke however many cigarettes as you want but as long as you obey the 'rules'.

eg In the first week you must change brand, smoke with your other hand, keep a note of when you smoke and which ones taste particularly good, and you were not allowed to smoke for one hour after eating.
Week two you change brand (but also to a lower strength cigarette) and again record what you smoke but this week you can't smoke for an hour after eating OR an hour after drinking.

By week 4 you switch to the lowest strength cigarette (Silk Cut Ultra in UK at the time which had more holesd in the filter than a golf course) and are pretty much not allowed to do ANYTHING when you smoke (but you can still smoke as many as you want within the guidelines) - ie not smoke when drinking, eating, on the telephone, reading, driving etc When you smoked you JUST smoked. Hellishly boring!

And then you stop.

I smoked 16 cigarettes the day before I stopped and have never smoked one since. And genuinely it never bothers me if others do and never did even early on.

Some of the things that did happen over the 4 weeks was that how few cigarettes really 'tasted good' - it swiftly became apparent that that was a myth. The physical nature of my addiction was obvious - I woke in the morning, had 4-5 cigarettes by about 9 and then topped my levels up during the day. It also became apparent how boring smoking IN ITSELF is when you end up doing nothing else.

What it did was to destroy the associations of meal - smoke - good; beer - smoke - good; pick up telephone - pick up cigarette; get in car - light cigarette. After the initial physical withdrawal (made easier by the miuch reduced levels of nicotine swimming round the system) most of the habit/association bit was easy to deal with.

Strangely the only place I ever think about smoking is on summer holiday - in Greece I was very aware of it. The combination of people smoking - the weather - lots of time on hands - relaxation etc was one association that I had never broken and it's still there after a long time. It's easy to ignore it though after all this time!

Stick with it - it has lots of benefits.

My father had lung cancer when he was 41 and following having one of his lungs removed became a huge medical curiosity by living nearly forty times longer than the year he was supposed to survive for. When he died late last year the cause of death was still linked to his smoking forty + years ago. Most people don't defy the odds in quite the same way. One thing I always remember him telling me was when he was still in Brompton hospital having had his lung out in a ward with people with chronic emphysema, people on oxygen, people with limbs removed because of circulatory problems etc there were STILL these same people slipping out (hopping out?) to have a cigarette!!

It ain't easy to do but I hope that you succeed. The benfits are definitely worth it and IT DOES GET EASIER!

And just remember not to have the first one - the other ones are easy.