Dealing with Stress when Quitting Smoking

It was through a workshop that I quit smoking and 3 months later I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had been quit for 5 months and I relapsed while I was going through chemotherapy.
Most smokers in a very short period of time feel like a non-smoker and think that they will never smoke again until they have to handle a tremendous amount of stress, like I did with having to go through cancer treatment. A woman told me that she thought she had been through the worse when her mother died but it wasn't until all the relatives started fighting about the estate that she relapsed.
We don't smoke that cigarette thinking that we are going to go back to full time smoking, we kid ourselves that it's "just one" to get us through the stress that we are experiencing. Yet that one will always lead to another one because of the effect that nicotine has on the brain, it is a physiological effect that we can't control with willpower.
It is often in times of high stress that smokers will relapse because they are lulled into a false sense of security because they were able to resist smoking for months at a time but without a method for dealing with those times of high stress, a smoker will often turn to the one thing that they have been turning to their whole adult life--a cigarette. at some level, what ever age you started smoking was when you stop develoing new ways of dealing with high levels of stress because smoking worked so well. The time to develop new strategies is before you quit. think of the last time of intense stress and then think of different ways that you could have handle the stress, taking care of yourself phsyically, mentally and emotionally.