On 17th November 2007, the day I stopped smoking, I tossed a butt out of the car window and said to myself, “I’m sick and tired of this.” Seeking solace on the internet that morning I came across Allen Carr’s ‘Scandal’, his literary attack on the nicotine replacement industry and the sycophants that prescribe it at every opportunity. Weirdly, despite recommending that people read it, I’ve yet to read his “Easyway” although I did like the review, “He simply bored me into quitting.”
I suppose in many ways it was his book ‘Scandal’ that cemented my quit and got me over that initial quitting hump and for that I’m grateful to him. The biggest problem I ever had with Allen Carr was that he was wrong. Sure, many say religion is wrong and plenty believe in that but my focus was on smoking not religion and Mr Carr left me with a load of questions unanswered, or simply answered in an unsatisfactory manner such that my ‘faith’ was getting shaky. Luckily his approach didn’t mean you had to believe it all and the questions I asked were questions maybe he'd never really thought about - obvious ones like;
Why do I need to smoke to relax and my wife doesn’t?
Am I more relaxed than her?
Is she always stressed then?
If I was the addict he said I was then why was I not troubled by long-haul flights?
Why did I jump in my car and find fags late at night despite having some left in my packet and I could have simply picked up more in the morning?
Why did I turn around and drive back home if I’d forgotten my fags in the morning?
Why was it so hard to switch from fags to rollies and so easy to slip back on to fags again?
Why did I light one off the other lying on a Greek beach?
Why didn’t I wake up in the middle of the night just to smoke?
Why could I drive from A to F with my family and not smoke but if alone I smoked at B, C, D and E?
Why does my mother in law only smoke at parties?
Why does Steve only smoke at the weekend?
Just how is this possible if I was supposed to be an addict and I was smoking to get my fix?
All these simple questions had relatively simple answers but none of the answers were, “because you’re a nicotine addict and you smoke to get the drug nicotine from a cigarette to avoid withdrawal from that drug.” That answer doesn’t fit, it doesn’t even come close.
No matter how big a crowbar you buy you cannot persuade ‘nicotine addiction’ to be the answer. That’s when you realise that despite a good attempt he hadn’t quite got it right.
All he had to do (I think) was to do a search and replace of nicotine with smoking and he may have solved it. It even sorts out the unanswered questions!
Having exhausted Mr Carr I ended up at whyquit.com. Now these guys are really intense, obsessive even and they too blame everything on our friend nicotine. Sadly they work on the “nicotine is the answer, now what’s the question” method and go to fascinating and convoluted lengths to manipulate the question to fit the answer.
These are the sort of chaps that thrive on anti-nicotine with a vengeance. These are the shoe-bombers in the nicotine-patch factories who evict you from their forum if you have a slip or a blip. They may even come round in the night and vandalize your car or flower-beds too just to make sure you know that they mean business.
They do not like nicotine, but, their mantra, “keep nicotine on the outside”, will undoubtedly keep you from smoking.
So where did the nicotine persecution come from?
Why is nicotine blamed for tar staining. Why is nicotine brown a recognised colour!
Ask for an elephant flavoured ice-cream and people would laugh you out of the shop. Nicotine has simply become part of our very psyche- so much in fact that even non-smokers know all about it.
They forget to mention that your body, well your brain, is a lying, cheating, scumbag. It’s not something I gave a lot of thought to before I gave up smoking but sometimes you need something like quitting to focus your mind. Your brain will introduce fear of quitting concepts even before you’ve quit. You can smoke your “last” cigarette and less than five minutes after finishing it start feeling the effects of withdrawal: achy muscles, anxiety, shaky hands, panic. That’s just after five minutes. While the nicotine (that you’re addicted to) from the last fag was still meandering around your bloodstream and ambling its way towards your brain.
People who happily sleep smoke-free for eight hours have trouble consciously not smoking for an hour. Real physical withdrawal symptoms manifest themselves without the body being deprived of the drug. It’s no wonder that quitting smoking can be difficult.
I often wonder if fear of quitting is like fear of falling? How high do we have to climb before fear kicks in?
If I’m feeling adventurous at work I can spend the afternoon climbing between desks without much fear of terminal demise. Similarly I can let junior leap between beds in the Travelodge without being considered a poor parent. However, start to raise them from the ground and there becomes a point where leaping four feet between desks becomes a most daring proposition. The relative positions of the desks hasn’t changed but the brain, working on some automated self-preservation setting, decides that eight feet high is just ok, eighty feet is totally out of the question.
My point being that the urge to smoke is a real physical need created in the head in response to the right stimulus.
That urge can make people do awful things. It also makes us smoke.
It’s these cravings that make us smoke. They’re often called triggers.
They’re the very foundations of gamblers, chocolate and sex addicts – pure mental dependency.
Lighting up the fag silenced the inner klaxon of the subconscious mind.
If you don't respond to the initial beep of a craving then the signal gets stronger and more insistent and it makes you irritable and distracted. It's just like a drug addict desperate for a fix – so much in fact that it’s been confused for that very thing.
The longer you ignore the alarm the louder the klaxon becomes until you finally light up a smoke and feel that relief, peace and relaxation as quietness is restored and you can finally concentrate on whatever you were trying to do.
Many people, some of them quite knowledgeable, will try to argue that this was your body craving nicotine and administering it by smoking will restore the calm.
What they don’t explain is that the quitter dosed up on nicotine still wants to smoke.
When ex-smokers are wandering around totally dosed up on nicotine and it’s leaking out of every pore and pooling around their ankles yet they’re still gagging to smoke it’s a little bizarre to tell them that they only want to smoke because they clearly are craving more nicotine!
In reality just lighting up the cigarette turned off the alarm, nothing in the smoke played a part.
Quitting is often regarded as a struggle, a challenge and a heap of grief but in reality it’s a doddle with the right tools, the first of which is an open mind and a little understanding.
Jump in, the water's lovely.
Congrats on 11 years, 9 years behind ya!!
Three years and one month
3 Years today
1st Year and counting!
2 years wow who would have thought it
