Quitting Smoking and Getting Sober at the Same Time

People thought I had lost my mind.

My AA sponsor suggested it. She told me in her direct, no-nonsense way that she had quit smoking and drinking at the same time in 1997 and that for her, keeping one foot in addiction had made it harder to leave the other one behind. She was not prescribing anything. She was just telling me what she had learned. But when I mentioned it to other people, the reactions ranged from skeptical to alarmed.

“One thing at a time.”

“You don’t want to overwhelm yourself.”

“Smoking will help you not drink.”

That last one is the one I think about a lot. Because it sounds protective and thoughtful, and I understand why people say it, but for me personally it was exactly backwards.

How It Started

I was 23 when I started drinking heavily. I had been a social drinker in college but the year after graduation was hard, I was in a city where I didn’t know anyone, I had a job I hated, and I discovered that the bar two blocks from my apartment was friendly and loud and full of strangers who didn’t know my name. Somewhere in that year, drinking stopped being something I did sometimes and became something that organized my evenings.

I had been smoking since I was about 22, just casually at first, then less casually. In Austin the smoking and the drinking were completely intertwined. You couldn’t smoke inside the bars, so you’d step outside with a cigarette and that became its own social ritual. The cigarette meant you were taking a break, stepping away from something, creating a little pocket of time for yourself. It also meant you were definitively not trying to drive home yet. There’s a lot of social function packed into one cigarette outside a bar.

By the time I was 28, I was drinking most nights and smoking close to a pack a day. I didn’t think of myself as someone with a drinking problem because I kept my job, I kept my apartment, I wasn’t drinking in the mornings. The benchmarks I was using were too low. Eventually a friend said something to me, carefully, that I argued with for six months before I accepted it.

I went to my first AA meeting in October 2020, in Austin, sitting in folding chairs in someone’s backyard because of COVID precautions. I got sober over the next few months, not without setbacks.

The Decision to Quit Smoking Too

My sponsor, Patti, had been watching me for about four months. She had seen me handle the early hard weeks of sobriety. Then she said: “You should think about the cigarettes too.”

I told her I couldn’t do it. One thing was already a lot.

She said: “I know. Think about it anyway.”

What she explained was this: for her, the cigarettes had been a way of keeping a door to the old identity open. Every cigarette was a small vote for the self that drank and smoked and stood outside bars at midnight. She wasn’t saying that was true for everyone. She was saying it had been true for her, and she wanted me to sit with whether it was true for me.

It took me a few weeks of honest reflection to admit that she was right. When I smoked, I stood in the same spots outside bars where I had stood while drinking. I had the same feeling of stepping away from the world for a few minutes. The cigarette did not make me want to drink, exactly, but it kept me in a relationship with a version of myself that drank. The muscle memory, the posture, the ritual of it.

I also recognized that whenever I was in the grip of a craving for alcohol, a cigarette would reduce it temporarily. Which sounds helpful. But what it was actually doing was training me to satisfy the alcoholism craving with tobacco, rather than learning to sit with discomfort and let it pass. I was not learning to handle the feeling. I was just redirecting it.

So I set a date. March 15, 2021. I was four months sober. I quit cold turkey.

What Most People Got Wrong

Almost everyone predicted it would fail. Their concern came from a real place. The conventional wisdom in addiction medicine has shifted back and forth on this over the years. Some research does suggest higher quit rates when people address one thing at a time. I understand that research.

But here’s what I can tell you about my actual experience: the tools I was building in early sobriety, the ones you develop in AA, were exactly the tools I needed to not smoke. Sitting with discomfort. Calling someone when the craving is loudest. Changing the routine instead of fighting the routine. The HALT check: am I Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired? Those skills transferred directly. What I was learning to do for alcohol, I could apply to nicotine at exactly the same time, because the skills were the same.

Keeping the cigarettes would have meant I was developing those skills for alcohol but practicing the old response for stress in general. That felt like a contradiction I couldn’t afford.

The Hardest Moment

The first sober, smoke-free Friday night in Austin.

I don’t know how to explain to someone who hasn’t spent years in Austin on a Friday night what that environment is like. Sixth Street. The sound of live music from multiple directions at once. Warm air in March. Everyone holding a drink or a cigarette or both. It is, in the most literal sense, a city designed to make you want to drink and smoke. I am not saying that critically. I love Austin. But I knew I couldn’t go near Sixth Street that night.

So I didn’t. I drove out to Barton Creek Greenbelt in the late afternoon and walked until I was tired. I ate dinner at home. I watched something forgettable on TV. I texted Patti around nine o’clock and told her I was fine, just bored. She texted back: “Bored is good. Bored means nothing is on fire.”

The craving for a cigarette that night was specific and persistent. Not frantic. More like a low hum that wouldn’t stop. I had been prepared for something dramatic and instead it was just this relentless low-grade pull, especially when I was sitting still. I made it to midnight and went to bed.

The next Friday was easier. Not easy. Easier.

Three Years Out

I am 32 years old. I have been sober for a little over five years and smoke-free for close to four years. I sponsor two women in AA. One of them quit smoking in her first month of sobriety. I did not suggest it. She asked what I thought. I told her my experience and told her it was a personal decision. She quit and she’s doing well. The other one kept smoking and is also doing well.

What I know is that doing both at once was right for me. It is not right for everyone.

My life in Austin looks different now. I still go to Sixth Street sometimes, for concerts, for the food, for the particular feeling of that city on a warm night. I stand outside sometimes and breathe the air and notice that people are smoking nearby and it does not undo me the way I thought it would. That took time. A year before I could do it without a physical response. Now it’s just a smell.

My lungs are in different shape than they were at 28. I run three or four times a week in Zilker Park. The first time I ran a full mile without stopping after quitting, I sat on a bench at the end of it and cried a little. Not dramatically. Just a quiet acknowledgment that my body was doing something it hadn’t been able to do for years.

To You, Still Smoking

Maybe you’re also in recovery from something else. Maybe you’re doing exactly what I was told to do, handling one thing at a time, and that is absolutely fine. There is no single correct sequence.

But if you have been sober for a while and you’re still smoking, and the cigarettes feel like the last tether to a version of yourself you’re trying to leave behind, I want you to know that cutting it is possible. You already know how to sit with discomfort. You already know how to call someone when the craving is loudest. You already know that cravings pass.

The tools you built in recovery are the exact tools you need to quit smoking. You are not starting over. You are using what you have.

You are not doing this alone. There are a lot of us out here. It gets quieter. The Friday nights get easier. The bored-is-good nights become ordinary and then they become fine and then they become something you actually prefer.

It’s possible. All of it.