Dwight Simmons: 25 Years of Smoking, Quit by Pure Discipline

People don’t like it when I tell them I quit cold turkey with no aids, no medication, no gum, no patches. They think I’m bragging. Or they think it means quitting is easy and they should be able to do it too, and that if they can’t, they’re failures. I want to be clear: I’m not bragging, and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It took me six attempts over fifteen years. I didn’t quit because I’m more disciplined than anyone else. I quit because I finally applied the discipline I already had to the right problem in the right way.

My name is Dwight Simmons. I’m forty-eight. I live in Atlanta, Georgia, in the Cascade Heights neighborhood on the southwest side. I work as a project manager for a commercial construction firm. I smoked Kool cigarettes for twenty-five years, and I stopped on June 1st, 2024. That’s twenty-two months ago.

Where It Started

I grew up in College Park, right outside Atlanta. My mother raised four of us by herself. She didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, went to church three times a week, and worked two jobs. I respect that woman more than anyone I’ve ever known. She’d be devastated to know I smoked for a quarter of a century, and for most of those years, I hid it from her.

I started at twenty-three. I’d just graduated from Morehouse and was working my first corporate job, a junior project coordinator role at a development company in Midtown. The stress was immediate and intense. I was the youngest person on the team by ten years and I was the only Black man in upper management. I was performing my job and performing my composure every single day. A guy in the parking garage offered me a cigarette one afternoon when I was standing by my car trying to decompress, and I took it. Kool menthols. That minty burn hit my lungs and something loosened in my chest. Not physically. Emotionally. For five minutes, I wasn’t performing. I was just standing in a parking garage, breathing.

That’s how they get you. Not with the nicotine, not at first. With the permission to stop for five minutes.

Within a year I was at a pack a day. I smoked in my car, I smoked at the office, I smoked at home. I never smoked around my mother. I’d drive to Sunday dinner at her house in College Park and pop a breath mint and spray my jacket with cologne and she never knew. Or maybe she did and never said anything. Mothers are like that.

Six Attempts

I’ll run through them quickly because the failures aren’t the interesting part of this story. The interesting part is what I learned from each one.

Attempt one: age thirty. Cold turkey. Lasted four days. Learned that willpower alone, without a plan, is just suffering.

Attempt two: age thirty-two. Nicotine gum, the Nicorette fruit chill flavor. Lasted three weeks. Learned that handling the physical craving without handling the mental one is like putting a bandage on a broken bone.

Attempt three: age thirty-four. Cold turkey again. Lasted eight days. Learned that telling nobody you’re quitting means nobody holds you accountable, and nobody helps you when you’re about to break.

Attempt four: age thirty-seven. Patches, Nicoderm CQ 21mg. Lasted about a month. The longest I’d ever gone. Then a project at work went sideways, I pulled three consecutive sixteen-hour days, and I was smoking in the parking lot of a QT gas station on Cascade Road before I even consciously decided to. Learned that stress without a plan for stress will destroy any quit attempt.

Attempt five: age forty. I tried a hypnotherapist in Buckhead. Nice office, comfortable chair, soothing voice. I didn’t smoke for six days. Then I went to a Falcons game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium and the combination of beer and crowd energy and the smell of the smokers outside the gates broke me. Learned that changing your subconscious doesn’t work if you haven’t changed your environment and your routines.

Attempt six: age forty-six. June 1st, 2024. This one stuck. And here’s why.

The System

I sat down with a notebook, an actual paper notebook, and I wrote down every single thing I’d learned from five failed attempts. I filled three pages. Then I wrote a plan that addressed every failure point.

Problem: willpower alone isn’t enough. Solution: build a structure around the willpower. Treat quitting like a project, because that’s what I do for a living. I manage projects. I break big goals into phases, set milestones, track progress, and hold people accountable. I’d never applied that thinking to quitting. I’d always just white-knuckled it and hoped for the best.

Problem: no accountability. Solution: tell everyone. I told my supervisor. I told my crew. I told my best friend, Terrence. I told my sister LaShonda. I told my mother. That was the hardest conversation. She sat at her kitchen table and looked at me and said, “Baby, I’ve known since you were twenty-five.” And then she said, “You’re going to do this. You’re a Simmons.” That woman doesn’t accept failure.

Problem: no plan for stress. Solution: I identified my top five stress triggers and wrote a specific response for each one. Work deadline pressure? Walk around the building twice, not to the smoking area. Argument with someone? Call Terrence and vent for five minutes. Boredom? Twenty pushups. Driving in traffic? Audiobook, already loaded and ready. Late-night loneliness? Go to the gym, which I’d joined specifically for this purpose, a 24-hour Planet Fitness on Camp Creek Parkway.

Problem: environment unchanged. Solution: I deep cleaned my car, my house, and my office. Threw out every lighter, every ashtray, every emergency pack. Washed every piece of clothing I owned. Got my car detailed. Replaced the air fresheners. I wanted the smell of smoke removed from my life entirely so that if I encountered it, it would feel foreign instead of familiar.

I put all of this in a spreadsheet. Yes, a spreadsheet. I tracked my cravings by time of day, intensity on a 1 to 10 scale, trigger, and what I did instead. I’m a project manager. Data is how I make decisions. And when I could see the data showing me that cravings were getting shorter and less frequent, it gave me something concrete to hold onto during the bad moments.

Going Cold Turkey

I chose cold turkey because I wanted the nicotine out of my system as fast as possible. I didn’t want to taper. I didn’t want to prolong the physical withdrawal by feeding it small doses through gum or patches. I wanted to rip the thing out by the root. That’s not the right approach for everyone, and I want to be honest about that. But for me, with my personality, clean and fast was better than slow and gradual.

Days one through three: the physical withdrawal was exactly as bad as every other time. Headaches, irritability, this foggy feeling like my brain was wrapped in cotton. I couldn’t focus. I sweated through my sheets at night. My hands shook when I tried to type. But I knew from my previous attempts that this part was temporary, and I had the data from my spreadsheet to remind me.

Days four through seven: the physical symptoms eased, and the mental battle began. This is where I’d failed before. This is the grind phase, where your body is recovering but your brain is still screaming for a cigarette every thirty minutes. I followed my plan. Walk around the building. Call Terrence. Twenty pushups. Audiobook. Gym. I did not deviate.

The Hardest Moment

Day sixteen. A Saturday in mid-June, Atlanta heat, the kind that hits you like a wall when you step outside. I was at a cookout at Terrence’s house in Lithonia. He’d cleared all the cigarettes and smokers out of my immediate area, because he’s that kind of friend. But his neighbor came over and lit a cigarette about twenty feet away, and the smell hit me on the breeze and it was like someone had flipped a switch in my brain.

The craving was a 10. The only 10 I recorded in my entire spreadsheet. My whole body wanted to walk over to that neighbor and ask for a cigarette. I could feel the ghost of the cigarette between my fingers. My lips tingled. I tasted menthol in the back of my throat, even though there was no menthol anywhere near me. Phantom cravings. My brain was manufacturing sensory hallucinations to try to get me to smoke.

I went inside Terrence’s house. I stood in his bathroom and I did the breathing exercise from my plan, four seconds in, hold for four, out for four. I did it ten times. The craving didn’t go away. So I called LaShonda. She picked up on the second ring and I said, “I’m about to smoke.” And she said, “No, you’re not. Talk to me.” And I stood in Terrence’s bathroom for twelve minutes talking to my sister about nothing, about her kids, about what she was cooking for dinner, about whether the Braves were going to make the playoffs. And by the time I hung up, the craving had dropped to a 3.

Accountability saved me that day. Not willpower. Not discipline. My sister’s voice on the phone.

The Turning Point

About two months in, I looked at my spreadsheet and realized something: I’d gone an entire day without logging a single craving. Not one. For the first time in twenty-five years, I’d gone a full day without wanting a cigarette. I stared at that empty row in the spreadsheet for a long time.

The next day I had two cravings. The day after that, none. Then one. Then none. The gaps between cravings were getting wider, and the intensity was dropping. The data didn’t lie. I was winning.

At three months, I ran a mile and a half without stopping. I hadn’t run a mile since Morehouse. My lungs burned, my legs ached, and I was grinning like an idiot by the time I finished. A guy at Planet Fitness looked at me funny and I just said, “I quit smoking.” He nodded and said, “My man.”

Life Now

Twenty-two months out. I run three miles three times a week. My resting heart rate has dropped from 88 to 68. My blood pressure is down. The morning cough is gone. My clothes don’t smell like smoke. My car doesn’t smell like smoke. My mother hugs me now and she doesn’t pull back with that slight wrinkle in her nose that I used to pretend I didn’t notice.

I’ve saved roughly $6,600. Kools in Georgia were about $7.50 a pack at the gas station, and at a pack a day, that adds up fast. I used some of the savings to buy my mother a new recliner for her living room. She doesn’t know it was cigarette money. Or maybe she does. Mothers are like that.

The cravings are rare now. Maybe once every two or three weeks. They’re a 1 or a 2. They pass in under a minute. I still log them in the spreadsheet because the data matters to me. The trend line is clear and it only goes in one direction.

I told my mother last Thanksgiving that I was twenty-two months clean. She looked at me across the table and said, “Twenty-two months is good, baby. Now make it twenty-two years.” She’s not the type to give extra credit for doing what you should have been doing all along. I love that about her.

To the Person Still Smoking

I’m not going to tell you to do it my way. Cold turkey with a spreadsheet and a phone-a-friend system isn’t for everyone. Maybe you need Chantix. Maybe you need patches. Maybe you need a support group or therapy or hypnosis or all of it together. Use every tool available. There’s no honor in suffering.

But I will tell you this: if you’ve failed before, you haven’t wasted those attempts. You’ve collected data. You know what didn’t work and why. Write it down. Look at it. Build your next attempt on the ruins of the ones before it. That’s not failure. That’s iteration.

You are not alone. There are millions of people who failed five, six, ten times before they got it right. The only attempt that doesn’t count is the one you don’t make.

My name is Dwight Simmons. I’m forty-eight, I live in Atlanta, and I quit on attempt number six. There’s nothing special about me except that I tried again.