This is very smart, and has to do with actually changing the life-style to make it really possible to stop on a prolonged and perhaps permanent basis. It needs to be something which will allow not continually thinking about the substance, which is an abstaining form of the addiction, one might say.

It's also important to remember that in the first stages of taking on a challenge, there is even a certain excitement and enthusiasm about the very stopping itself. THIS WILL GO--as it is already a kind of 'high' itself for awhile--and you are once again involved with the day-to-day, which is not exciting and is even often very boring. In other words, the stopping the substance abuse of whatever is still understood as necessary and desirable, but it is no longer especially 'inspiring' or even interesting, and has nothing whatever do with 'fun'; and yet those are the real test periods for getting anything accomplished. This is why I agree with Phil that other activities need to replace it--going to live performance of whatever sort, taking another sensual pleasure and becoming very enthusiastic about it such as dining out or cooking (I know alcoholics who have done this one in particular, and they even have held on to a certain form of their old habit without having to give it up completely by concentrating on wine cookery, in which only the flavour remains and the alcoholic content is gone). It is good to think of projects to give up destructive habits as on the same level as more obviously positive projects, whether artistic or personal or political, etc., so that they are both seen as forms of building something viable.

Such stoic and Spartan disciplines usually don't last for those who were already not very disciplined (or whatever they weren't) in terms of the addictive behaviour. And it's not a matter of proving how 'tough' one can be, but rather getting away from behaviour that is not doing one's life any good. If you're used to working this way with all kinds of habits, including thought habits, and many, many of them (breaking even good habits can be good practice, even if you find that you go back to them with a little variation on the old thing--this gets rid of the tendency to get rutted in something), it's easier to do on your own.

But if there are a number of things that seem to be detrimental to one's life, it's usually the practice to seek out support in institutions like AA, etc., if the problem seems insurmountable with only a few supportive close friends, a therapist, etc. Everybody deals with these things differently, and it perhaps is useful to realize that there all all sorts of destructive habits that would include almost everyone to some extent, not just substances. In other words, useful to think of habits and other addictions that are not specifically physical so that the real mental problem is addressed, because behind every physical addiction there is a mental addiction. I know AA has helped people I know, and they don't see any other alternative. It works if that is a kind of group you can believe in, and it won't if you don't. Frankly, LPSG is the only support group I've ever used, and sometimes it is surprisingly supportive, despite being full of various moments of meanness--but what isn't?