New Insights Regarding the Phenomenon of Quitting

Intrigued by the cover page of a special section of The New York Times (2020, February 2) titled “I Quit,” with the subtitle “19 People Who Walked Away from Their Relationships, Their Jobs, Their Religion and Even This Assignment,” I was fascinated by the candid personal stories included in the section. Of course, as a psychiatric–mental health nurse, I have often been concerned about a client who needed to quit something: alcohol or drug misuse, self-mutilating behavior, hoarding, cigarettes, and the list goes on. Even when a client is truly motivated to change, actually quitting usually requires multiple and varied interventions, such as individual counseling, group therapy, and pharmacological modalities. Many exacerbations of the addictive behavior are likely, despite delivery of these professional interventions (see Worley, 2017, regarding preference for the term exacerbation rather than relapse).

What was striking about the stories published in the newspaper was the absence of the above-described professional interventions. These were stories of people who quit something on their own—some even quitting “cold turkey.” The account of Lisa Wells, who recovered from smartphone addiction, was especially interesting in view of recent media publicity about this new form of addictive behavior. Wells admits being one of the people who “stroke their screens about 2,600 times a day” (2020, p. 9). Her decision to quit was prompted by the realization that she was having a hard time reading, writing, or listening to her husband because “my mind returned me to the small computer in my pocket, to an unanswered email, to a “like” or a retweet…I went away. In giving my attention to the device, I withheld it from the person I value most” (Wells, 2020, p. 8). She describes her struggle to reduce smartphone use by leaving the phone off at intervals, but she was uneasy, worried about missing “phantom emergencies.” Ultimately, she just quit—no smartphone! She reports that “it took about 72 hours to teach my body that we had gone back to the old ways [i.e., dumbphone, asking people for directions]…but when the device is gone there is nothing to resist. I can read a book for hours in a sitting, and when my loved ones speak I hear the story they’re telling” (Wells, 2020, p. 9).

Equally compelling was the narrative of a woman who gave up chewing gum after her pack-a-day habit cost her $5,500 over the past decade (Jacobs, 2020). Although it is usually considered a harmless habit, her use of gum was excessive and increasingly displeasing to her. She acknowledged that her jaws ached and she was embarrassed by “gorging” on the free gum made available by a coworker in her office. The immediate stimulus to her quitting was advice from a dermatologist that the muscles of her face could eventually make her face “look like a peanut,” for which the remedy was either Botox or simply quitting the repetitive gum chewing. She quit.

The newspaper stories made me long for more narratives about volitional emancipation from a substance or behavior in our professional literature. For example, I wonder whether anyone will submit a paper about quitting gambling for our upcoming special journal issue on gambling disorder (slated for December 2020). A quick foray into the PsycINFO database to glance at empirical articles published in the last year revealed a predominant focus on smoking (including e-cigarettes) in Great Britain, Norway, USA, and China, along with articles about a few other addictive substances such ecstasy and areca nuts. Telephone apps and other technological interventions appear to be in vogue among clinicians. Yet I did not encounter anything as striking as the personal stories shared in The New York Times. I would welcome submissions to Issues in Mental Health Nursing about the phenomenon of quitting.