Effective Advice from Dan 1

RE: Slipped Up... Don't want to go further
From danl1 on 9/9/2004 11:34:02 AM

Here's a surprose - you do know how to handle anger. You always have, and cigarettes didn't have a thing to do with it.

Get away, at least mentally. Physically removing yourself from the situation (aka "going for a smoke") is even better. Go get a drink, step outside for some (honestly, this time) fresh air.

Distract yourself. Think about something else - no matter how minor - for a few moments to break the chain of angry thoughts. (In the past, this was fiddling with getting one out of the pack, fumbling with the lighter, and so on.) It can be anything at all - I fiddled with the change in my pocket, twiddled a pen, assembled a glass of ice water, etc.

Breathe deeply and slowly. It's a very powerful stress-buster for a variety of real, powerful physical and mental reasons. Smokers tend only to breathe truly deeply when they are poisoning themselves. It truly works better to address the situation when there's no smoke involved.

Bring yourself some small enjoyment to help change your mood. It need be nothing more than a breath mint, life saver, petting the dog, or even looking at a picture of a loved one (tho the hubby may not be the choice in this particular instance.) The ironic truth is that you never even enjoyed the smoking all that much, but because of the addictive mythology we allow to build up around it, we come to accept that we do it because we enjoy it. Like you said, it tasted like crap. Guess what? They always did, since the very first one.

See? You've always had everything you need - you simply didn't realize it. In essence, because cigarettes were always around, you gave them credit for things that you were actually doing all by itself. In truth it's only slightly more complicated. Nicotine interacted with your brain, not in a way that brought any sort of positive outcome, but in a way that made it easy to believe that it had just 'done' something. It artificially triggered your brain's reward mechanism, convincing you to remember that 'this just worked' - even though the smoke had nothing at all to do with the improvement.

Addiction Not Permanent

I remember sitting in health class learning all about drugs. I remember thinking that a psychological addiction would be much better than a physical one because I could talk myself out of it, but there was nothing I could do about the physical thing.

Uhh, can I change my answer?

The physical addiction to nicotine is pretty easy - just wait it out, or take something to help with the transition. And really, it`s not all that bad. Most of what we go through in quitting is NOT nicotine withdrawal. Most of it is a stress reaction. The withdrawal triggers a stress response, since our normal method of dealing with it is not available. But since withdrawal and stress feel exactly the same (it`s the same brain chemistry for both) a downward spiral starts. Recognition of this and a bunch of relaxation techniques are the ticket out.

Psychological addiction is the bugger. That`s the one that hurts us down the road, those thoughts of desire that sometimes get past the defences when we’re stressed, or tired, or lonely, or drunk, or bored. But I never found an adequate explanation of what exactly it was until recently. Addiction seems to be accepted simply as something that `is`, with nothing that can be done about it. Often, we hear some talk about `rewiring`, and `forever`. That is not necessary. That belief in itself is another symptom of the addiction.

So what is addiction? It`s a mistake, an error, a self-deception that gets repeated to the point of seeming like the truth. In this case, we come to believe that smoking is something special, that we enjoy it a great deal, that we need it to cope. All those thoughts are errors. The first ones we smoked may have been enjoyable. If that`s all it was, we would have grown bored with them long ago - they aren`t that damn special. But look again at the `times` - it`s easy to see how we began to give them added importance as we tried to escape the very things they were causing. Add that stress and withdrawal feel exactly the same, and soon we were smoking whenever we felt that way, even if it wasn`t smoking that did it, and even if it didn`t help the condition. Every little change in life causes a measure of stress - every little thing was a chance to misunderstand and smoke. A chance to reinforce the error.

Not too long after we quit, we almost always recognize most of the lie; we know that living clean feels much better than living in the chains of active addiction. The thing that trips us up is that we remember cigarettes as giving us great improvements; we remember the flush of release as we got our fix. We don`t always connect that to the notion that it only made us feel better because it had first made us feel so lousy. We don`t always recognize that mostly, we were shutting up that impatient two year old. Smoking wasn`t `flying`, smoking was a desperate attempt to swim to somewhere near the surface, only to be handed another rock. Once you recognize the mistake, the false memories of desire can begin to dissolve.

It also explains why subsequent attempts to quit after a relapse seem so much more difficult. Especially if the relapse was because of a painful `craving` episode. It reinforces the thought that smoking makes things much, much better. In truth, the nicotine didn`t help much at all - it probably wasn`t enough to get past our built-up tolerance. It was the resolution of the internal struggle (will I? won`t I?) that eased the stress we were feeling and so made us feel better. Resolving that smoking was simply not a possibility would have worked as well, and helped to destroy the addiction. Instead, that one little smoke magnified it - and nicotine was almost completely irrelevant.

I suppose it`s a long way of saying - Remember? You quit because you don`t want to smoke; no matter how you choose to word it or what reasons you give. Anything else you think or hear is junk.

RE: See you at a later date
From danl1 on 11/5/2004 9:02:23 AM

I did the exact same thing. Several times, in fact.

Then I tossed that pack, joined up here, and got on with things.

That was 487 days ago.

It's not about strength, ultimately. It's certainly not about being worthy. It's about understanding that they really don't have anything to offer you. If you will listen to you heart, you will see that you've just learned a big hunk of that. You simply need to pay attention to your higher angels.

Yes, there are the times when it seems that we 'just want to.' That is not about being weak, or stupid, or anything like that. It is simply about being confused - on a level and in a way that makes it seem that you don't have control, because it's a non-verbal part of you that feels that way.

Maybe you are not in a place to be here for a while. But still, be quit. If things go the wrong way, don't be disappointed, be constructive. A diet group I sat in on once had a phrase:

"There is no failure, only feedback."

It's a tough way to find things out, and I don't believe that it's necessary to smoke in order to learn how not to, but while you are in that place, you may as well look around and see what there is to see.

-didn't do much for you, did it?
-made you feel pretty crappy physically, didn't it?
-didn't make you feel all that great about yourself, either.

And so on. Bottom line, smoking simply isn't worth it. There is not a single thing to be had from smoking that can't be had better, simpler, safer, faster, and cheaper in another way. There are just a few parts of our brains that take a little more convincing than others. All it takes is patience.

It doesn't take strength, willpower or perseverance. In fact, those are the exact qualities that find you back smoking after you have already decided to quit. The amount of energy we expend fighting with ourselves to smoke after we have quit is simply amazing. That's right - you haven't been fighting to quit these past weeks - that, you had already done. You've been fighting to smoke. Stop that. Be kind to yourself, and pay attention to what's really going on in and around you. There's no bit of life that smoking can improve. You know it, now you need to work on believing it.

Nicotine Acting On Brain
It`s about Time! (200 day ramble)

20 minutes. That’s the amount of time that it takes for a smoker to return to baseline after smoking a cigarette. After twenty minutes, the dip back into withdrawal begins. If you can avoid smoking for the next 20 minutes, you will be more comfortable than if you had smoked.

0.87 seconds. That`s the amount of time it takes from hitting your thumb with a hammer until your brain recognizes the pain. Here’s the interesting part - if you hit it again, the clock starts over. So, if you screw up and hit your thumb, keep on hitting it again and again and again - as long as it`s within 0.87 seconds, you won`t feel a thing. Hitting your thumb with a hammer will become a good thing, because it will keep you from feeling the discomfort that hitting your thumb with a hammer causes. Yeah, I know, stupid idea. So why did we think it made sense when it comes to smoking?

A few seconds. Nicotine doesn’t do a single thing to our brain that doesn’t happen naturally. The trick is that it does what it does some few seconds faster and with a tiny bit more gusto than the natural way. Over time, the `habit` part of our being learned that telling us to smoke worked just a mite faster than talking to the gland. That’s why we got so edgy so quickly when we couldn’t smoke - that little piece of us is like a two year old; it has no concept of `later. ` Once we’ve given the body a chance to regain control, those few seconds becomes meaningless. The normal, natural human state is far above what smoking could sustain. And the calmness that comes from skipping the whipsaw of addiction/withdrawal is its own benefit.

A few days or weeks. The time from when we first started to smoke consistently until we had built up a enough nicotine and other toxic crap to start having withdrawals, even if only little ones. At this point, we started to notice that smoking made us feel `good`. The slope down to this point was gradual enough that we didn’t notice that `good` was not as good as `normal` was just a few weeks ago.

As long as we’ve smoked. That’s the time we’ve allotted to ingraining these errors of thought, working them into nearly every situation in our lives. Happily, it doesn’t take nearly that long to do the sweeping up, as long as we’re willing to work at it. Or, we can simply not smoke and hope for the best. Nothing better to do, gimme a broom.

Between 3 weeks and 3 months. That’s the time it takes for a habit to change. During that time, there will be reminders of the things we used to do. As long as we recognize them as memories rather than as commands or desires, all will be well. If we think they are something that must be fought against, we’re in for trouble.

I WAS WRONG!

From danl1 on 3/12/2004 10:21:00 AM

That does it.


That is the secret to quitting this nasty thing forever. Park the egos at the door, and be willing to recognize that nicotine's effects on our brains duped us. Played us for the fool. Made us the rubes. Smoking did not ever help us, never gave us a single good thing. All it ever did was flip the 'ooh, that was good' switch deep inside our brains, without ever bothering to actually give us anything good. Our goofball minds just connected the dots in the wrong way, and gave smokes credit for things they didn't do.

Once we understand that we've been had, we've got the tools needed to make this thing really start to happen. If there's a 'craving', it suddenly breaks in half. Half is a minor physical or mental discomfort that will be gone in a few moments. Sucks, but oh well. The other half is a thought that smoking would somehow improve the situation that smoking had caused. Oops! Error in the brain! We know it's an error, just toss it aside. Have an 'urge', thinking, "gee, a smoke would be nice" Bzrzrzrzrttt! Wrong! Another small wiring problem - hang on - there, it's fixed. In no time, it gets funny, totaling up all the screw-ups the brain has accumulated.

See? There's nothing to fear. Nothing to fear, so nothing to fight. Nothing to fight, so much less stress. Less stress, so greatly reduced symptoms. Less symptoms, so less cravings. Less cravings, so less deal with. And as we build our success, we start firing off that 'reward' switch honestly, and the brain begins to learn proper lessons. The lies are erased.

We get to decide if this thing spirals up, or spirals down. The only difference is the willingness to acknowledge...

I was wrong. About everything I ever believed about the 'good' parts of smoking, and about their power over me.

And strength, and willpower, and fighting? Not a thing to do with success. For most folks, they get in the way of success, by having them believe there is something to fight, by causing 'battle-stress' and a sort of fatigue that only leaves folks 'craving' all the more. Once I stopped fighting long enough to realize that the craving was only a lie I was telling myself, a tiny error in my brain, there was suddenly nothing left to fight.