So you want to quit smoking? Help abounds in the region

Trying to break a nicotine habit for the New Year — or at any time — can just break you down.

If you’ve ever tried to quit smoking, you know the feeling. That tightness in your chest. Your nerves, on high alert for a sweet puff of relief while your brain agonizes: “It’s not coming. It’s not coming.”

It’s hard to concentrate at work. It’s hard to even get through the first 10 minutes of being awake. How are you going to have your morning cup of coffee without that cigarette, too?

If someone ever tells you that it’ll be easy to quit smoking, don’t be fooled. It isn’t. It takes a determination, or, as Tom Black likes to call it, a “pigheadedness” not to give in.

Black, 29, who lives in Hermitage, Pa., and works in Harley-Davidson’s parts department in Austintown, hasn’t smoked in 10 months. He quit in sympathy with his wife in February when they learned she was pregnant. He had smoked for 14 years, working his way up to between one and two packs a day.

He put those butts down — he has the date noted on his calendar — Feb. 16, and he didn’t pick them up again. They lay on his dresser for two weeks, along with his lighter. That was, he said, a kind of reminder for him that he was determined to go through with it. Oh, and if he decided he couldn’t do it, it would save him an emergency trip to the store.

Read the full story Sunday in The Vindicator and on Vindy.com.