Well, after 3 years of smoking a pack a day, today is the day to quit. I had a dream that made me decide to quit (my dream). Smoked my last cigarette at 5:30 P.M., Feb. 26 2008. I’ll be keeping this thread as a blog for the next couple of weeks as a way to vent…hopefully this will help. Quitting cold turkey, in my opinion the only way to do it. All those nicotine quit smoking aids don’t cut the real addiction, leaving you still wanting the nicotine.
Well, I am about 15 minutes in, and feeling good about this. Wish me luck.
I had a bit of trouble to quit at first, then I started to smoke again and had a bit of trouble again, and now I’m free. It’s great to be free. There’s a topic, I don’t know if in the Lounge or Gathering, of members quitting smoking, it was a good topic, you should do a forum search for it.
I quitted for like a year then got hooked again (working in an all smokers place)… If you like i can give you an advice (it helped me to quit)… When you smoke a cigarette you do it for stopping the crave of a cigarette… so basically to feel like those times before your first cigarettes… If you quit you’ll soon find yourself in that state normally instead of feeling the crave…
and DON’T think like "AHHH now that I quitted I can smoke a cigarette… just one to see if it’s real now I don’t lke them any more… " the answer is that yes… you don’t like them any more… and you are going to a tobacconist soon
Well…I’m two hours in and starting to feel a little panicky. I typically smoke once an hour, and I can feel the anxiety starting just after the first hour. I sit nervously awaiting the many withdrawal symptoms that will inevitably drive me insane.
What I can expect from previous quitting attempts:
Ok so cold turkey just won’t work. They have this new nicotine hand gel that you just rub in and I think I am going to try it. Why is this so damn hard?
wait, why dont you just throw out any ciggaretes you have, and if you find yourself walking in to buy some just be aware and say “no, i am now quitting.” and walk back out. i think rather than just trying once and giving up and trying to find a gel or w/e isnt the best.
ok, after reading that i can see how that could come off very mean. Sorry if you got that impression at all
Like DayLight uses to say, an addicted tends to rationalise their addiction: you will catch yourself thinking “but if I go there and buy another pack… I could buy another pack just to feel safe, because it’s killing me not to have one around. That’s right, I’ll buy a pack to have with me, but I won’t open it”. I know.
That sounds infantile. It is, really. But you really do think like that, you can’t control that. “Just another one and I’ll quit after that.” Not to mention you lighting a cigarrette and feeling terribly guilty, but not being able to put it off anyway. It happens to everyone; addiction is a bi.
Exactly. My mind thinks differently when I start to crave a cigarette. Someone in the process of quitting seems EXTREMELY irrational, but to that person they are being perfectly rational.
“Just one more” is the killer for me. My addictive personality is making this as hard as it can be for me.
Stick with it, my step mother used to go through 3-4 packs a day.
She got the NICORETTE® Inhalator, so while she was still satiating the addiction she was at least not killing the rest of the house off and the smell finally went away (after 3months of not smoking)
She did go through a lot of inhalators to start with and to be fair, it took two years to stop using those as well. With cigs part of the problem is, you will smoke them till they are done, where as an inhalator you can puff on to kill the desire for nicotine and then save the rest for the next craving.
Over time the craving will become less and you won’t need those either. She does under certain stressful conditions have a quick puff on the inhalator from time to time, but it’s still better than lighting up. Just.
Going cold turkey is a bad idea, for one most people just can’t do it as they are in situations all the time where they keep thinking “I would normally have a cig now” and it wears you down. Not to mention going cold turkey with anything, is unwise from a health stand point as it is also a shock to the system.
My grandad tried that, it never worked for him. He had all sorts of ailments, he lost a lung to tuberculosis, pneumonia and pretty much everything under the sun. The doctor’s told him he would die if he didn’t stop smoking, so he tried everything. Nothing worked. Granted he ended up living 15yrs longer than they said he would.
The problem with craving is that in the first days you end up craving it or like 5 minutes, forgetting it for 1, then another 5 minutes of craving then another 1 of forgetting… You don’t even get to notice the time you are not craving… I did quit coldturkeylike once and relized something… In the exact moment you notice you are not craving you’ll start to… It sucks, but I think you can’t quit nicotine using nicotine in the process (i.e. Inhalators, gels, gum… ) because it won’t wear off.
just remember what Bhagwan Dass told Ram Dass, who at the time was known as Richard Alpert;
Emotions and sense excitement is not permanent. Maybe when you woke up this morning you were very tired. Perhaps hung over even. Your eyes are crusty, your body feels like lead, and your mom/significant other is yelling at you to get up and it just feels like you cant move and it sucks. At that moment your discomfort was center stage, but where is it now?
For the next few days your withdrawal will be center stage, and then for a very long time your cigarette craving will be center stage, but they will be gone, and when they are gone they may as well never have happened.
As for stop smoking aides, you really do need a crutch, but most of these are nicotine products. I know several people who are addicted to nicotine gum. Go through like a pack a day of the stuff. What you really want is Indian Tobacco, Lobelia inflata. It tastes similar to tobacco when smoked, and it also increases the flow of saliva, just like cigs do. The bioactive chemical in lobelia is Lobeline, and it affects the body in a very similar way to nicotine. This plant is potentially toxic if used over the recommended dose, so read up and know your stuff. It cant be any more dangerous than tobacco.
I am taking a ride within a similiar boat. Had a tooth pulled last Friday and couldn’t smoke for the first 48 hours. It absolutely killed me. Then after that I found myself going right back to smoking, but only 1-4 a day. Now I am realizing that if I could make it 48 hours I should try to go for longer, especially since my mouth is still healing…
Thanks alot for the responses. I have been working on slowing down quite a bit, and am going to use the nicotine patch, because I found out they can greatly help with lucid dreaming. I am still going to be smoking through tomorrow because I have to get 3 cavities filled, and after all that I will be wanting a cigarette more than ever.
its hard to get to sleep with the patches on, but if you manage to drift off, OH MY GOD. I have never had dreams more intense or real. I don’t think it would help in getting lucid, the dreams feel so real that it would be hard to realize you are dreaming, and certain aspects of nicotine dreams are similar to delirious fever dreams(while simultaneously being very real! far out!).
but WOW. best night of dreaming i ever had was with a nicotine patch on.
I know.
