What quitting smoking was like for me.

This is a brief history of my thoughts and feelings as I decided to stop smoking. It is broken up into sections, but really is intended to be read from beginning to the end.

I Set a First Quit date

I quit smoking weeks before I actually stopped. :-)

What I mean is this: I set a date a few weeks (I think about 3) in the future and made it into my First Quit Day. In my case it was Hallowe'en as my last day and November 1st as my First Quit Day.

So, Step 1 was to set a date in the future. Some considerations I had when setting my quit date:

I Observed Triggers

In the weeks before the First Quit Day, I kept track of the times I lit up a cigarette. I didn't change any behaviour, I just kept an eye on what it was I was doing at the time. Obvious ones were:

But there were other times that weren't obvious until I started keeping track:

And, sad to say, there were some that I totally missed until I actually did quit:

The thing is, the ones that I spotted before I quit were not so bad after I quit because the cravings that accompanied these events didn't creep up on me by surprise. But the ones I didn't think of before I quit positively broadsided me. It was the times when the "emotional" or "psychological" cravings overcame me that I felt the worst.

For example, I knew that I would have nic fits when I got in my car in the mornings. But by being ready for them, I didn't experience them so acutely. On the other hand, the unanticipated craving that happened when I got into my car after dinner at my parents' house nearly drove me crazy; I thought my chest was going to explode with yearning and want of a cigarette (but I survived).

Method of Quitting

Cold turkey. I am certain it is the only way to quit.

I know that there are lozenges, gums, patches, inhalers, and all kinds of other crap ... in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there are soon implants under the skin and needles. Well, I think all of it is total crap. I think that companies came up with all these "Nicotine Replacement Therapies" (NRTs) purely as a new method to sell an addictive drug in such a way that people would accept. It's an addictive drug, but if they sell it as part of the solution to smoking (even when it is just another nicotine delivery device) they can get away with legally selling it, and appearing morally responsible at the same time. I think that all those quit-smoking aids are not that at all ... I think they are just ways to the prolong the misery of withdrawal symptoms. I mean, if this were alcoholism, would we tell people to have a shot of beer every once in a while to compensate for their withdrawal symptoms? Nope. So why should we do that with nicotine? It makes no sense to me.

Stop the nicotine cold, deal with the withdrawal symptoms, and move on. After all, the physical addiction part only lasted about three days for me anyhow (see graph below) so what would the point be of getting almost dried out and then feeding the addiction again so that I have to dry out all over again? I think all these SCTs make stopping harder, not easier.

First Quit Day ... The Worst Damned Day of my Life

The non-smokers who count as my friends would jump on that, thinking they were being clever (which they weren't), and say, "No, Brian! It was the best day of your life! It was the day you quit smoking!" I was so grumpy, that my brain screamed something like this:

Yeah? Well what do you know? It was a terrible terrible day, and trying to change my mind about how I felt that day is offensive and Not Helpful. Let me educate your puny little thoughts: You don't quit smoking by ignoring or trying to change how you feel. No, you live through it, like feeling the slime as you swim through it. You let the grime get between the toes, and though you hate it and want nothing more than to smoke to make it go away, you still revel in it and savour it like a fine wine. Why? Because this is as bloody awful as it gets ... and if you can wade through this day without smoking, or killing one of your dough-headed friends, your chances go up exponentially. So step back, and keep your brain-dead opinions to yourself.

OK. So that's pretty much what I felt like on my First Quit Day. Everything was physical withdrawal. The emotional was there, too, I am sure, but it was the physical cravings that were absolutely the worst.

Time Impairment

There was another effect--a very strange effect--that I hadn't heard anything about previously (but I've heard a lot about since then). It was a change in my perception of time. Time seemed to move much more slowly (mostly) or sometimes seemed ... well, it's hard to explain, but it seemed somehow elastic. As though normal time was a string one would follow, but time on that day was like an elastic band that vibrated. It's a hard one to describe. I've only ever experienced anything similar when I was -er- younger and ingesting the kind of substances I shouldn't have been! :-)

When Will it Ever End?

On Day Four things changed pretty dramatically. The big thing is that my physical cravings were clearly a small fraction of what they were in the the three days before. I would say that the physical cravings followed a pattern something like this:

This is what it was like

...It really was that dramatic. Of course, there still were the emotional and intellectual cravings, but my body itself stopped showing withdrawal symptoms after about three days. After a week I never once felt a craving for a cigarette that originated with my body. After a week, all cravings were associative with the activity I was performing.

Week One

I remember going out shopping with my wife in the evening of Day Three. We were in the produce section of the supermarket when I realised that I was talking very quickly. She, of course, had noticed this since I got home from work (and, I suppose, people at work may have noticed this also), but she said nothing. She knew this was the result of not smoking. My fast talking was the result of an elevated metabolism, I am sure. Something like when people are buzzed on cocaine, and the world just seems to be moving a little too slowly and inefficiently for your liking. Everything seems to get in your way, you know?

Actually, my wife earns top marks for putting up with me all of that first week. I mean, I am a somewhat grumpy man to start with, but there was an intensity behind the normal grumpiness in those first few days that usually isn't there. I was nasty as well. It only lasted until Day Five or Day Six, but the problem for her was that she never knew when I would launch into a nasty streak, or be friendly and happy.

Which brings me to another set of feelings that were pretty faint at first but started to grow as the days wore on into a full week: An overall good feeling, like I get after my second beer (except this one was a natural high). It wasn't just a withdrawal or chemical-related phenomenon. I felt good, really good about myself for not smoking that length of time. Rome wasn't built in a day, so a small amount of time--even four or five days--without smoking is a small but very satisfying step. Now, I don't want to overstate this: Most of that first week I was miserable, and made the people around me pretty miserable too ... but every once in a while that good feeling popped up as well. And it grew in intensity and frequency as Week One blended into Week Two.

The most dangerous times in Week One were when I said things to myself like, "Well, Porter, you'd better get used to never smoking again when you do this ..." (whatever "this" happened to be). So I stopped thinking in those terms and just thought things like, "Don't smoke for the next day ... the next hour ... the next five minutes ..."

I read on a web site that cravings lasted 1 to 3 minutes. Well, that may be true for most people, but my cravings lasted a little longer: About 5 minutes, usually. Sometimes they were a pretty miserable five minutes, too ... but knowing how long the cravings were going to last was very helpful. I would just take a look at my watch and know that in x minutes and y seconds I could expect to not be so desperate to smoke.

Week Two

It was the emotional/situational cravings that started to hit me in this week. There were times when my body couldn't care less whether or not I smoked, but my brain was screaming out for a cigarette. This would become the pattern of fighting the addiction from now on. It never disappeared, though it certainly faded over time.

In short, what would happen would be that I found myself in one of those situations with which I associated smoking. For example, I'd hop in my car, or I'd sit down to watch TV. I'd feel a craving come over me, like a tightness in my chest, or a buzz in my ears, and have to stop and think to myself, "This is a known association; this craving will pass in no more than 4 minutes and 30 seconds."

If it was an unknown association (such as the above-mentioned driving home from my parents' house) then the craving was much more severe because it was much less expected. In those cases, I had to do so quick deconstruction: "I am dying for a smoke right now because I always smoke when I drive away from my parents' house. I forgot about that one! So now my mind is habitually expecting to start up a cigarette, since that is what it always used to get in this situation." By the way, even these unexpected cravings lasted only about five minutes!

And once I could concentrate on other things as the urge to smoke passed, I was always able to conjure up that "feel-good-about-myself" feeling that I mention above.

One rather unpleasant thing that started happening to me around this time was that I started gaining a little weight ... and the worst part of it was that my face was getting rounder and pudgier; I wasn't really growing fat, I was just getting a bigger double-chin. But that was bad enough. (It has since more-or-less rectified itself thanks to a bout of stomach 'flu; however, I do not recommend that as a way of losing weight.)


Week Three

I was about to write that Week Three didn't differ much from Week Two, except that the cravings weren't so acute, and I'd gone through all the unanticipated times my mind would expect to smoke ... except that I realise now there was a subtle change around the third week. There were periods, hours at a time, and even a full day here and there, where I didn't even think about smoking.

I only noticed these times afterwards when I suddenly found myself reaching for a non-existent lighter or a phantom package of cigarettes. When my hands closed around thin air, or I fumbled around until I realised what I was doing, only at that moment did I realise that I hadn't wanted or thought about smoking for x number of hours. It was a pleasant realisation, and I started to think that I might actually get through this whole process of quitting smoking.

Those were dangerous times! I could very easily have started smoking again in those times where I started thinking "long term". I cannot state emphatically enough that the fastest way for me to start smoking again was to start thinking long-term. And it was dangerous to have thoughts like, "Wow, I just spent a whole day not even thinking about smoking ... for 24 hours I have even thought like a non-smoker! Excellent! I must be well on the way to being permanently a non-smoker ... yup, no smoking anymore ... forever ... like a cage I can't get out of ... like living on a Hutterite farm ... help me! I'm drowning! I need a smoke!"

Well, that really is a decent description of how the feelings went, maybe not my actual thought process. It would have been so easy to run up to the store and buy a pack a cigarettes than to face the possibility that I might never smoke again in my life. And those times where I really started to dry out were a danger time for me.

So I had to quickly put those thoughts out of my mind. Living right at the very moment was the only way to keep myself from starting again ... even in Week Three when my body was long clear of any physical cravings! I just had to start thinking things like, "Wow, I didn't even think about smoking for 24 full hours! But, sadly, right now I am dying for a cigarette ... I won't do it, but there is nothing I want more right now than to spark one up."

You know, I guess that's sort of the key in life to a lot more than just quitting smoking. If you feel a certain way about things, acknowledge how you feel ... even if you plan to do nothing about it. Ignoring the feeling won't do any good. Acknowledge that I am about ready to commit homicide for a cigarette, and be honest about how I feel. I think that not being honest about how I felt is how I stayed smoking in the past.

Anyhow, that realisation got me through Week Three.

End of Month One

When I came to the end of the first month, the little quit smoking program I had installed on my computer at work popped up and told me I was a member of the Green Club. It seemed so small and otherwise silly, but I really was proud of myself for quitting smoking for a whole month. If nothing else, I saved myself a few bucks ... but apart from that, I also came to a milestone of sorts. One month is not a very long time, but it represented what was for me a major period of time.

And after a month is when the cravings really started to diminish. Smoking suddenly became such a non-issue for me. After a month I would have one or two cravings a week (not 10 or 15 per day as at the start), though I should point out that those few cravings a week were every bit as powerful as the cravings I had during my first week or so.

And I think that may be the pattern for the rest of my life: I will crave cigarettes occasionally, here and there, for the rest of my life. Sadly, that damage is permanent, and although I can feel my body getting healthier and healthier, I know for certain that when I am an old man and cigarettes might not even exist any more, I will still have the occasional acute 4 or 5 minutes of yearning and desire for a cigarette ... even if I didn't have a craving for weeks or months previously.

It is not the jail cell that it sounds like, though ... the moments of craving are not as uncomfortable as the feelings about myself I used to have after smoking all day. And the cravings don't have to be so unpleasant that I can't bear them ... I just walk through them, savouring them, getting a feel for what they are like. If nothing else, they seem to move a little faster when I do that.

Some other thoughts

And finally (added many months later)

I made a calculation at the 15 month point: 8200 cigarettes. $3500 (give or take). And an immeasurable number of coughs, hacks, throat-clearings and sneezes. I no longer experienced cravings on the order that I talked about above ... but there remain some oddities that I expect will always be with me for the rest of my life.

Like those blasted dreams. I will be sitting around doing nothing special: Watching TV, reading, playing piano or guitar, etc. and then I will casually light up a smoke. I will continue smoking for a little while longer until I suddenly realise what I'm doing. I'll look around to see who noticed, or maybe I'll hunch over a bit in defensiveness, but I will feel alarm and disgust at myself in equal quantities. I've just ruined all that work by sparking up a smog! (Though, interestingly, I finish the cigarette anyway out of the idea that since I've just blown it, I might as well finish blowing it thoroughly ... just the kind of addictive rationale that addicts' minds employ.)

Then I wake up in a panic that immediately starts to retreat. I realise that:

  1. No, I did not blow it,
  2. I am not having withdrawal symptoms, but
  3. I sure started smoking in my dream pretty casually and easily, didn't I?

That last point is not an easy one to digest. It scares me a little, puts me onto my toes again as it were. On the other hand, last November at my 20-year high-school reunion a woman offered me a cigarette and I refused. I didn't even think about it. And if ever there was a crowd I would want to smoke around (like, every single peer pressure from high-school revisited and together in one concentrated roomful!) that was it. So my waking hours seem so safe that I tend to forget smoking is like drinking to an alcoholic: It only takes one to completely fall off the wagon. There is no grey area. Either you smoke or you don't (and if you don't, you are in some form of withdrawal for the rest of your life, except the effects of withdrawal are nearly always below your conscious threshold after about three months).

I mean, there are still occasions where the desire kicks up and announces itself, of course. But though I may pass people standing on the street and having a cigarette, or I might be sitting watching a hockey game on TV or driving my car and feel a craving coming on, I am not going to find the nearest supply of cigarettes and light up.

I tend to mention my cravings out loud to people who are around me. The sentient among them have little to say, though I still get the occasional panicky words from some people: "No! Don't do it! Death! Rape! Poison! Taxes! You'll ruin everything!" I can't seem to impress upon those people that expressing my desire to smoke out loud by no means indicates that I will carry through on the urge. It just means that I have the feelings and would be foolish to try and ignore them. It's humanity 101, but I still have to explain it to people sometimes.

Actually, I have friends who wax all self-righteous when it comes to discussions of smoking (and their not smoking). I guess that's fine by me, but they should observe I don't walk around all self-righteous at the fact I didn't get addicted to heroin, crystal meth, peyote (is that even possible?), or crack cocaine. No, and they should also please note that I am not feeling all warm and fuzzy that I never committed murder, wrapped a car around a power pole in a drunken stupor, got into a fistfight, or busted into someone's home with larceny in my mind and danger in my heart. No, I don't want a medal pinned to my chest for the bad things that I didn't do ... and that says something about me that it doesn't say about them.

I only dredged all this up because I had had another dream in which I was smoking. I woke up in panic again, and I let the feelings drain away again. But it got me wondering why, after all that time, I still had those dreams. I took a look out on the Internet and discovered, somewhat to my surprise and chagrin, that there are people who smoked for ten years and have quit for 30 years, and they still dream of smoking as vividly as the first few days after they quit.

Wow, you may quit for life, but the addiction will always be there, I guess.

Or maybe it was just my mind's strange way of reminding me of why I quit ...

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