Boy was he right. I can't count the number of times I've put out a cigarette, and said to myself "okay, that's it. Never again. I'm done." Only to light one up again a few hours later. The longest I have ever gone without smoking since I started was five days. And that still astounds me, because since then, every other quit attempt has lasted about five hours or less. I wonder what I did during those five days to convince myself to stick to it? And then after I'm done wondering that, I wonder why the hell I didn't keep sticking to it. After all, it only takes 72 hours for all of the nicotine to be out of your system. That's a measly three days, and I had made it five, I should have been in the clear!
You non-smokers have no idea how horrible those 72 hours are. I would prefer heroin withdrawal - not that I have ever experienced that, but if you are a heroin addict who comes forward saying "I want to give up this habit, detox, and stay clean," people clap you on the back with congrats, and set you up with a nice peaceful room in a rehab center with nurses round the clock, a bed, a barf bucket, and even sometimes let you wean off with methadone. When you're a smoker who says (and probably for the 80th time) "I want to give up this habit, detox, and stay clean!" nobody gives you a nice padded room in a four star rehab hotel. Nobody sends you a nurse. You still have to get up and get dressed and go to work or take care of your kids or go to school and do whatever else you would have to do during any other day. And you're not getting any sympathy. You can't be waiting a table and throw a Caesar salad in the face of some dickwad customer and say "oh, sorry, I'm quitting smoking." You're still gonna lose your job, and insurance doesn't cover this kind of sobriety. I don't think unemployment has a clause for that either.
I'm not one to give advice on quitting, but I can tell you how I managed to stay smoke free for those five days, and how I intend to stay smoke free for the rest of my life. The rest of my life. The rest of my life. The rest of - oh, sorry, got caught in some weird internal echo loop thing. As I was saying...
Get the facts.
Here's a fantastic website that offers support, software, a forum, and enough horrifying pictures of cancer patients and medical information to scare you away from smoking for good! (Or at least for five days.) http://whyquit.com/ also offers a small downloadable file that keeps track of how many days, hours, minutes, and seconds you've spent NOT smoking, how much money you've saved, and how many hours of your life you didn't give to tobacco. Its an excellent encouragement device, not just because it shows your progress, but because if you relapse and smoke even ONE puff of a cigarette at any time, you have to click the reset button and watch all that progress disappear in the blink of an eye.
Remind
yourself of these facts. Do a better job than I did. I'm thinking I
may write them out and tape them in various places around my house:
20
minutes after quitting
Your heart rate and blood pressure
drop.
(Effect of smoking on arterial stiffness and pulse pressure
amplification, Mahmud A, Feely J. Hypertension.2003:41:183)
12
hours after quitting
The carbon monoxide level in your
blood drops to normal.
(US Surgeon General’s Report,
1988, p. 202)
2
weeks to 3 months after quitting
Your circulation improves and your
lung function increases.
(US Surgeon General’s Report,
1990, pp.193, 194,196, 285, 323)
1
to 9 months after quitting
Coughing and shortness of breath
decrease; cilia (tiny hair-like structures that move mucus out of the lungs)
start to regain normal function in the lungs, increasing the ability to handle
mucus, clean the lungs, and reduce the risk of infection.
(US Surgeon General’s Report,
1990, pp. 285-287, 304)
1
year after quitting
The excess risk of coronary heart
disease is half that of a continuing smoker’s.
(US Surgeon General’s Report,
2010, p. 359)
And we're not even talking about a
year. We're still on the first 72 hours! 20 minutes afterward, your
blood pressure returns to normal. Then just what was it doing to your
blood pressure before? Never mind the 12 hour mark....the carbon monoxide
level in your blood drops to - wait just a darn minute...carbon monoxide level?
In my blood?
If you have a carbon monoxide leak in your house, the fire department and the
electric company rush out to evacuate you and fix the problem. Because it
could kill you. Excuse me while I evacuate my carbon monoxide filled
home, and smoke a cigarette. I wouldn't want to breathe any of that dangerous
shit.
Ask yourself why:
So you've decided to quit. Why are you doing
this? Why am I doing this? I don't fucking know, I want a
cigarette! Wait, no. I'm doing this to restore the natural order of
my body. I'm doing this so I can see my kids and maybe even their kids
graduate from high school, or go to college, or get married and have their own
babies. I'm doing this for the sake of vanity, because cigarettes are
gross, they stain your teeth and make you look old, they smell bad, and hell,
I'm almost 30. I don't want to look like this next year:
I mean, she's pretty sexy and all, but I'll pass.
Also, killing yourself is expensive! One of my favorite things anyone has ever said to me was "you're not addicted if you can afford it." When you can just go out and buy a pack of smokes and it doesn't hurt your bank account or your overall quality of life, its easy to not think twice about it. On the other hand, when you're pawning your old VHS movies, scraping up quarters from the couch, and blowing crackheads in alleys for cigarette money...well.
Make a plan.
I've identified everything that is a trigger for me. Its a great first step. Lets see. Waking up. Having coffee. Eating. Drinking. Pooping. Getting up off the couch. Accomplishing anything at all. Getting irritated. Getting in the car. Getting bored. Getting hungry. Getting out of the car. Watching movies where people smoke. Sex. Realizing its been a while since my last cigarette. Going to bed. Being outside. Being inside. Breathing. Thinking. Scratching my knee. Brushing my teeth. Blinking my eyes. Writing a blog.
Wow, that's a lot of triggers. And, in order to break the overall smoking habit, I'm going to have to rearrange my life. Clearly I can't stop driving. (Or breathing or blinking or pooping.) I can't stop a lot of those things, and its my own stupid fault for attaching an association with smoking to just about every single life activity. But I do find that I want to smoke significantly less when I do the things I normally do, but do them differently. For example, make your coffee differently. I have stopped using sugar and started using milk. The lack of sweet taste doesn't make me want to supplement it with a cigarette. My mouth will already taste like an asshole, and there's no need to add to it.
In the car? Take a different route. Or go to a different store. When you're not on autopilot, your mind is thinking way more about where you're going and how you're going to get there, and way less about filling the time it takes to get there with a gross smoking stick of death. Mmmm...deathstick.
Remind yourself of why you feel like complete shit. Did you know that nicotine takes over the regulation of your blood sugar? Your body stops doing it on its own because the nicotine is doing it for you. Here's a fantastic article about the whys and hows.
This gives us a clue though, on how to understand ourselves and stay quit. It is the same with deep breathing. Half of what makes us so calm when smoking a cigarette is that we're using it to regulate our breath. This article explains why we start to experience tiredness, irritability, headache, anxiety, and inability to concentrate....on...um...here is a picture of a puppy wearing a hat.
Don't trust your brain for at least 72 hours.
No, seriously. Because even though your logical mind knows you want to give up a bad habit for the overall health and betterment of yourself and everyone around you, the rest of your mind, the predominant part, and really, the much, much louder part, is doing this:
Its lying to you!!! Because when you follow it like a dog to the smell of pork chop and light one up, it turns into this:
Every. Time.
Write a letter to your addiction.
So, a couple weeks ago, my friend got me into this show called "My Strange Addiction." These are people who are addicted to furry conventions, blow up dolls, eating couch cushions, sleeping with their blow dryer...kind of makes me feel better about just being a smoker. There was even one guy who routinely ate champagne glasses and live ammunition. Don't let this lead you to the rationalization, however, that if people are surviving the consumption of couches, glass, and bullets, your smoking habit isn't so bad. I refer you to the previous paragraph.
Anyway, the blow dryer lady went to see a shrink, who recommended that she write a farewell letter to her addiction. And while it was certainly humerus to read "dear blow dryer addiction", I think there may just be some truth and usefulness to that idea. I'm going to do just that, right now, so you, the reader, can witness my adieu to addiction.
Dear Cigarette Addiction:
I'm grateful for the time you spent in my life. I feel that the added action of socially holding a smoking stick in my hand along with other people really brought some conversations together. But, you smell pretty bad, and could quite possibly end me.
I'm ready to say goodbye. It's been nice knowing you, but as Charles Lamb wrote in his Farewell to Tobacco, "For thy sake, tobacco, I would do anything but die."
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