All smokers have different smoking experiences, just like all people have different life experiences. Your love of smoking may have developed at a young age. Your affection may have been immediate, or it may have taken years to cultivate a "loving" relationship with smoking.

Before making the decision to quit smoking, take a personal inventory and explore how smoking has become part of your life. This will reveal some useful information about your addiction. For example, you may learn that stress or boredom makes you reach for a cigarette. Or you may discover that you need a cigarette as soon as you wake up. Identifying the situations that make you want to smoke (your "triggers") will help you build a better plan of attack to change your behavior and quit smoking.

It's possible that you may decide that smoking is so integrated into your daily life that quitting may not be appropriate for you at this time. Or maybe you'll identify patterns that may be easier to break than you thought.