If you’ve ended up here because it’s New Year and you think you’ve made a (possibly) rash decision on New Year’s Eve just read a few lines…
The trick to quitting tobacco is to understand why we use tobacco. Trying to quit smoking if you still want to smoke can be a challenging task. Learn WHY you smoke and it makes stopping easier.
Smokers smoke because of cravings or triggers, but cravings are nothing to do with nicotine or any other part of the smoke. They are NOT withdrawal symptoms.
A craving is simply a mental prompt to repeat habitual behaviour, triggered by the brain, but experienced as a physical, compulsive urge that seems to the smoker like a real bodily need. The craving disappears long before the cigarette is smoked.
1. Nicotine withdrawal.
It'll be gone from your system over a couple of days and you'll feel like you're coming down with a cold. If you want to avoid those minor feelings at a time when you're dealing with the mental side then take some NRT and withdraw over whatever timescale you're comfortable with. Cravings are not withdrawal symptoms. Don't confuse the two. If you subscribe to NRT you will still want to smoke regardless of what the TV, nurse or NHS tell you.
2. Stopping Smoking (physical)
Not inhaling smoke increases the oxygen levels in your blood making you feel odd, intoxicated and spaced out. Many report insomnia and weird dreams. Taking NRT, particularly 24hr stuff can intensify this. The resulting repair of your body throws up all manner of things like ulcers, acne, lethargy and so on.
3. Stopping Smoking (mental) This is your actual quit.
Every time a smoking opportunity arrives your subconscious will prompt you to smoke. It doesn't make the blindest bit of difference whether you're sucking on an inhalator or whether you've sprayed something under your tongue. You will be prompted continually until you decide to light up. You don't even have to smoke, just lighting up will kill the prompt. The prompt isn't a need for nicotine, it's purely a need to smoke.
If you can out-stare a mental prompt that manifests itself as a physical need you're laughing and each little battle gives you better ammunition for the next one.
The craves come thick and fast in the early days but slow down due to the prompts being less regular. For example you get the morning prompt every morning whereas the lying on a beach in the sun prompt is a little less frequent!
If you didn’t know why holiday season was the cause of so many relapses well now you do.
Never forget that it was YOU who forced your subconscious to allow your lungs to admit smoke into them when the natural reaction is dramatically the opposite and it is YOU who has to put a stop to it.
It's Official: Two Years Today
Day 5- New Years Quitter
