Well I'm here giving you all another update on my journey to quit smoking. I apologize that I have not updated you all sooner, but I have been really busy with life itself.

I am happy to report that in about an hour from now I will have quit smoking for eight full days and will begin my ninth day of being smoke-free!

Honestly, relationships in my life this week have challenged my bid to quit smoking. I struggled on Monday and Tuesday and felt like dropping the ball. But I stuck to my goal and went back to the basics of my thinking during those days.

I thought about how I could get through 30-45 minutes blocks of time without smoking. This truly is what got me through those two days.

But things are better for me now on Wednesday in that area and in the area of not smoking...today has been much easier than the past two days.

I've learned a couple of things that I want to share before I stop writing tonight. First of all, based on my experience, life will probably never give you a "good time" to quit smoking if you're on the verge of quitting and are waiting for "the right time."

It seems that alot of unusually challenging things have come about this past week for me as I've been quitting smoking. And I've tried to look at these situations and see if maybe it was the way I was approaching things that caused the negative.

I was more irritated and my attitude has been much stronger this past week, so I thought maybe that could be the reason that things seemed a little more challenging? And that is true for a couple of specific situations this past week, but for the most part, the things that have been happening would have happened whether I would have quit smoking or not.

So I guess I can say, just expect that bad or negative will happen during your quitting time and be prepared to be challenged excessively...it's just the way that life itself seems to work out.

Another thing I want to mention is that now that I'm in my second week of quitting, things are much easier. Time really has gone fast and I think if you set your mind to get through the small blocks of time, before you know it, you will have quite a bit of time behind you and will be happy about what you did.

ALSO, I think as time passes, you always want to respect the power of the habit. I was feeling very good going into Day 5 of quitting and feeling very confident that I had everything under control. And then when unexpected turmoil began in my life, I felt like I was set back to about Day 2.

It would have been very easy to cave. In fact, my mind was even playing a few tricks on me trying to justify a smoke that day. I was telling myself, "I've gone a week and even if I started smoking again, I've gone a week without smoking and that has helped my body."

I also thought, "I have quit for a week and if I smoke for today that will only be considered a one-day relapse and I can pick up quitting again tomorrow."

It was then that I had to remind myself of why I was quitting. I had to pull out the reasons that were most important to me...my kids, my family, my own life...and then I had to focus on the smaller blocks of time like I mentioned earlier.

So I guess what I'm saying is I realized very quickly that no matter how good I thought I was doing, I was still suseptible to the habit and I needed to be very careful with over-confidence.

But AT THE END OF THE DAY, I didn't quit quitting. I didn't smoke. I am now very thankful today that I didn't cave. I know if I would have, it would have been ok and not been the end of the world, but that's what makes this so hard...because smoking is so easy to do.  DON'T FALL FOR THE MENTAL TRICKS!!

So I'm going to go now. Again I would like to thank everyone that has encouraged me and said all of the nice things on HubPages. You all have been great! I also want to thank the supporters that I have in my life around me too. Thank you ALL!! You all have made this easier for me.

For now, I'm going to go, I hope you've enjoyed reading. It's 8:58pm EST on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 and I am STILL an non-smoker! Always moving forward...week two, I'm going to win. Have a great night. ~ Scott