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Share your quitting journey

A FRESH START

JonesCarpeDiem
0 10 14
  
   
    
     
      
       When I quit, I had no previous experience or expectations. Being a very inquisitive soul, I had a lot of questions. I was looking at quitting from all angles my first 100 days especially, and, asking some serious questions of myself.     
      

The biggest question of all became "what might draw me back to smoking?"

     
When I heard of the pleasure receptors in our brains being sensitized to nicotine, it became the biggest hurdle for me to jump. As I researched and asked questions, I learned that although our pleasure systems had been hijacked to pretty much respond only to nicotine, these receptors die off during the first year after last ingesting nicotine and are replaced with new ones that had never known nicotine.   
   
   

That meant my major fear of starting back had been removed.

  
Nicotine keeps us coming back while we are using it but, once those pleasure receptors have been replaced, we are not bound to nicotine for life. (unless we choose to use nicotine again and sensitize our new pleasure receptors to it.)

A FRESH START! YAY!

10 Comments
About the Author
Hello, My name is Dale. I was quit 18 months before joining this site and had participated on another site during that time. I learned a lot there and brought it with me. I joined this site the first week of August 2008. I didn't pressure myself to quit. HOW I QUIT I didn't count, I didn't deny myself to get started. When I considered quitting (at a friends request to influence his brother to quit), I simply told myself to wait a little longer. No denial, nothing painful. After 4 weeks I was down to 5 cigarettes from a pack a day. The strength came from proving to myself, I didn't need to smoke because I normally would have smoked. Simple yes? I bought the patch. I forgot to put one on on the 4th day. I needed it the next day but the following week I forgot two days in a row I put one in my wallet with a promise to myself that I would slap it on and wait an hour rather than smoke. It rode in my wallet my first year.There's nothing keeping any of you from doing this. It doesn't cost a dime. This is about unlearning something you've done for a long time. The nicotine isn't the hard part. Disconnecting from the psychological pull, the memories and connected emotions is. :-) Time is the healer.