This post which I put on May Quit Days seems to be really helpful to people so I am moving it over to the main board. Having blown my April date, I am reset for May 5th. Here are some ideas I have been recording for myself. Hope they are helpful - blessings on our freedom!
What a terrible trap drug addiction is: part of my brain wants me to smoke more, and whenever I do the other part wants me to smoke less.
My blood fills with nicotine and carries it to the receptor sites. Then, after the smoke, my blood starts carrying it away to clean it up. Then the receptor sites start activating, creating a mild discomfort and thoughts that lead to getting more nicotine. The thought triggers a learned response that associates lighting up with feeling more comfortable. I light a smoke. My blood fill with nicotine . . . on and on, over and over. A vicous cycle!
Isn’t this addiction: when I wish I was free but I don’t have the power to exercise my choice? Once I discover the power, I enjoy exercising my choice immediately and permanently.
It never seems to occur to me that there will never be a right time to stop. This is one of the ingenuities of drug addiction: it is designed to keep me trapped for life.
I have learned to recognize that feeling of needing to do something with my hands and interpret it as, “I want or need a cigarette,.†I can learn to interpret that feeling differently.
I close my eyes and imagine how I will feel three weeks after extinguishing my final cigarette. Physically strong, full of energy, confident, complete.
The empty insecure feeling of nicotine craving is so slight I’m usually not even aware of it. It is an empty, insecure feeling, almost identical to hunger for food. If I light another cigarette the nicotine will be replaced, the empty, insecure feeling will ease and I will feel exactly the same as I did before I lit that first cigarette. Each cigarette creates the need for the next. The only reason I continues to smoke is to scratch that itch.
It is the psychological state of the individual addict that counts and not the substance itself.
I am excited and grateful that I am in the process of escaping from the genuine misery of being a smoker.
Craving for nicotine cannot actually be satisfied by smoking a cigarette. This means that a smoker is permanently craving. The only way to satisfy it is to stop feeding it.
The beautiful truth is that the physical withdrawal from nicotine is discomforting but not actually painful, and it gets no worse after you extinguish your final cigarette.
The only pleasure in smoking is ending the aggravation of the body craving nicotine.
Smoking is a lifetime’s chain of nicotine leaving the body and creating that empty, insecure feeling.
The more I smoke, the less I want to smoke. The less I smoke, the more I want to smoke. Smokers can never win. Being addicted is spending my whole life in an uphill battle.
It is a strange pastime that, when I am allowed to do it, I cannot understand what pleasure I am receiving and wish I didn’t have to do it. Only when I’m not allowed to do it, does it appear to be pleasurable.
Don’t even try to stop thinking about smoking. Use you mind to control what you think about smoking.
The feeling “I want or need a cigarette†is a cruel, subtle confidence trick. It is telling me that I want or need a powerful poison that will gradually destroy me mentally and physically and will provide me with absolutely no pleasure whatsoever.
Remember, any difficulties I go through when quitting are caused because I fell into the trap in the first place; they are not caused because I’m trying to stop.
The beautiful truth: I am giving up nothing, that far from being deprived of some pleasure, I am merely being cured of a lifetime of misery, penury, slavery and disease.
Most of the grunge will leave my body within a few days of quitting. My body will restore itself.
Get it clear in my mind: it is not nicotine that addicts me. What addicts me is the lie that some pleasure can be got from feeding the addiction. All that I get is continued enslavement and only momentary relief from the feeling of being incomplete.
On starting again: that feeling of relief is always tempered by a feeling of failure and foreboding, and the first few cigarettes taste weird.
Sure I’m physically addicted to the drug, but I am also addicted to the illusion that without cigarettes I am not whole.
A cigarette will only offer temporary relief and, worse still, it will start the whole process off again. The itch is only partially satisfied when we light up.
Being a smoker can never get better, only worse.
Nicotine created that imbalance, and will continue to recreate it all the while I find an excuse to light just one more cigarette.
There are no advantages whatsoever to being a smoker.
Missing smoking? What’s to miss? smell, ashes, bad taste, morning mucous, dishonesty, fear of disease . . .
Whenever I think about smoking from now on and for the rest of my life, I will quietly give thanks that I am free.
This is the correct decision. Never doubt it.
Any difficulties I experience are not caused by quitting, they are caused by starting in the first place!
