On Quitting: Anger to Pavlovian Conditioning

Quitting isn’t a single stage process. There is the social aspect that can conflict with the quitter’s objective. If colleagues smoke, it can be difficult and this difficulty doesn’t involve the actual nicotine but the very people. Outside work, smoking friends can create complications that elongate the process. Stop. Start. Stop. Start.
Quitting can resemble the on and off diet. You start on Monday to cave in mid-week. A few more years of this and starting on Monday means falling off the wagon on the same day. Such failure leads to feelings of shame and guilt.
Voila! A vicious circle is created and, if you ask me, it's insane. But that is how it is. It's similar to dieting. Dieters will be familiar with the guilt and frustration that follows indulgence. Relapsing smokers/ex smokers feel the same way. They don’t really want to continue smoking but once they fall off the bandwagon, they embrace what they know - the tobacco propaganda. It's tremendously easy to slip into the stream of excuses.
It's as though there are two personalities struggling for supremacy. There is the logical self, the one who recognises the folly of nicotine, the tobacco industry and cigarettes. Then there is the equivalent of the little red devil or bad conscience, that little voice that creates excuses for everything. People may differ, but smokers have similar excuses. Long term smokers have used cigarettes for things other than relaxation. Relaxation is like an umbrella term for things like anxiety, frustration and anger.
My personal weak point is anger/frustration. This duo really pushes me on the edge. Six months after quitting, and I still have to take time out. Even if it means removing myself from social situations that include a few smokers, I'll do it.
After numerous attempts at quitting, the longest taking place in 2000, when I quit for 8 months, I know the triggers and if the individual looks deep inside, the triggers are there. My triggers:

• Frustration situations that leave me short tempered. These can be anything ranging from incompetent co-workers/managers to a pain in the butt bureaucrat. A recent example: entering a work recruitment agency to sign up and having to wait for the two receptionists to end their non-work related conversation before I could fill in all the paperwork.
  
• Going shopping for clothes, to find that a) I need to lose (even more) a few more pounds to fit into something. Right now, I'm down to a size 14, and the Australian women's sizing standard is in the toilet. It also doesn't help if 99.5% of clothes are made in China, where women's sizing tends to be smaller. After struggling in fitting rooms, it can take me two hours to get over frustration - I go home, go to my room and take a nap.
• The fact that my landlord is taking ages to repair a few things that need repairing before winter.

It doesn't matter what it is. There is no real valid excuse. But the emotional response is a lot like the conditioned response in Pavlovian conditioning. Frustration/Anger ---> the conditioned response of lighting up a cigarette. That's all it is. Many behavioral outcomes can be fit into Pavlovian Theory.

More simply:

1. Smokers teach themselves how to smoke or how to perform the 'neat tricks' of drawing in smoke, exhaling smoke (One of my first tricks as a ten year old was to exhale smoke rings). And if they don't teach themselves at first, no problem, they've already spent hours watching either their parents or other people smoke.

2. Logic follows that if smokers can teach themselves to smoke, they can teach themselves to quit.