Smoking

After all the talk about smoking and using it as an example in class this week, I thought I'd use it as my blog topic. Not so much the actual health problems associated with smoking (because I am sure we are all familiar with them) but the amazing lengths smokers will go to in order to justify or downplay their habit.

First of all, a disclaimer. I have been known, on occasion, to smoke a cigarette. I won't go into the circumstances/social influences at the time, but it has happened. It's definitely not something I'd pick up as a habit, partly because of the health risks and partly just because I think it is disgusting (and thought so even as I was doing it). So I am not just criticizing smoking from a perspective of someone who has absolutely zero experience with it.

I have been lucky enough (or unlucky enough?) to grow up with two great case studies about smoking-related behaviors. One one hand, there is my father, who did smoke for years but who quit sometime when I was in middle school....and then again when I was beginning high school. The second time stuck, and now he is completely disgusted by the smell/sight of cigarettes. In terms of the factors for behavioral change we talked about in class, I think it was mostly personal factors that led him to quit. He did it on his own and to me it seemed like one day he just woke up and decided he was done. I don't think he has ever explained a reason (at least not to me), but maybe have two teenage kids helped; he may not have wanted to be a role model for that kind of behavior.

On the other hand, there is my mother, who smokes about a pack a day. I am not kidding when I say that I go home in the winter and see visible tufts of smoke wafting around my living room. It's especially bad when some of my friends from high school come over (who also smoke) or my sister is home (...who also smokes). I usually end up outnumbered in the corner breathing through a sweatshirt. Her attitude toward smoking reminds me of the "precontemplation" stage (or some distant stage before that one...). For years my sister and tried to get her to quit, before she apparently gave up and joined her.

My mother is smart; she knows the health risks and says all the time that she wishes she had never started smoking. She'll say this while lighting up a cigarette with her morning coffee, and then proceeding to heave and cough in that way only TB patients and chronic smokers can. She accepts that it is an addiction (both physiologically and behaviorally in her case) and just continues doing it. When I was growing up she always told me not to smoke, partially because of her own experiences not being able to quit later. And she still tells my sister to quit...even when loaning her cigarettes.

It's just interesting to me, to talk about theories that try to explain why people change their behavior. Why people decide to quit something like smoking and stay quit. But I always have to go back to my own experiences; listening to my mother have negative opinions of smoking, voice those opinions, and yet continue to smoke (somewhat hypocritically). A lot of the theories talked about attitudes and motivations as beginning the change process...but if there is already dissonance between the attitude and the behavior what else could possibly cause it to change?