Smoking
Yes, I’m still a smoker. I previously said that I had successfully quit, but I purposefully failed to mention that I had started back up again about a week after I wrote that post.
This post is not for the smokers. I don’t have any new advice about quitting smoking, except to remind you that it is hard, but it is worth it. It is also worth sticking with… well past two weeks, and well past twenty years. Of course, you don’t need me to tell you that.
Rather, this post is for the non-smokers who are wondering what the big deal about smoking is. Hopefully, some teen will see this post before he decides to light his first cigarette, and he’ll at least know what he’s in for.
We have all seen the commercials that tell us that if we smoke, we will die painful, brutal deaths. We have all seen the blackened lungs from smokers. We all know that smokers face an amazingly high risk of heart disease. We also know that is smells and tastes nasty. Yet, so many people smoke, and we see so few people actually dying, so there must be something good about smoking, right? If nothing else, then we can at least show that we’re independent of our parents, and can make our own choices. That’s why I started smoking, at least.
In fact, when I started smoking, my father already had a heart attack. My father had been smoking for over thirty years, and told my sisters and I just how terrible it was for our bodies over the long term.
If I knew the short term causes, though, things might have been different.
You see, when I started smoking, the idea of getting a heart attack or stroke in thirty years was literally over two lifetimes away. I knew what death was, but I couldn’t imagine myself dying. The long term effects of smoking just didn’t enter into my mind. All that I knew was that it was “bad.” Bad things are appealing… especially when so many people do this bad thing, and nothing bad happens to them.
Knowing the short term effects, though, would have made me stop and think hard. Yes, I knew that the first cigarette would make me cough. I also knew that if I kept on smoking, that I would eventually be able to smoke without coughing.
I didn’t know how to properly inhale the smoke from a cigarette, though. I just puffed at my first pack like they were cigars. When I was finally shown how to truly smoke, though, I had my first real cigarette. It made me want to puke… I got dizzy, my vision blurred, and I broke out into a sweat.
Of course, anyone will tell you that these bad cigarette rushes go away after you have truly smoked a pack. It’s only twenty cigarettes, more than a week’s worth for a first time smoker… It’s not that hard to get past them.
The problem is, you are hooked when you smoke your second cigarette. You become addicted for life once you light the second one up.
Here’s how it works… The nicotine stimulates certain types of brain cells, making them work very quickly and efficiently. (Sorry, they aren’t brain cells that help with memory, logic, imagination, or anything else useful. The only thing these brain cells do is make you happy.) The first time, the brain doesn’t know what caused the increased efficiency. The second time, though, the brain figures it out, and decides that it likes being more efficient.
Besides the increased risk of disease later on in life and the increasing social stigma behind smoking, there is another problem. When you aren’t taking in more nicotine, that good feeling goes away. Also, the brain stops producing some of the chemicals that make you happy, sort of like a thermostat turning off a heater when it is too hot, when there is nicotine in your system.
Another problem is that nicotine can not make you more than mildly happy… If you have a garden hose, you can only get about four gallons of water out of it per minute, even if you try to push a swimming pool through it.
So, us smokers go around with artificial mood swings all day long. After a cigarette, we’re feeling as good as we possibly can without sex. The problem is, we can’t feel all that good, because we aren’t creating all of the chemicals that make us happy. As time goes on, fewer and fewer of the other happy chemicals are being made, so instead of smoking to be happy, we end up smoking to feel normal. Eventually it gets to the point where we smoke to stop from feeling miserable.
That’s bad enough… Another short term effect of smoking is the cravings.
Craving a cigarette is exactly the same as craving chocolate, which is exactly the same as craving a soda, which is exactly the same as craving any food. When we crave, we are hungry. The only way that we know that what we’re craving is actually a cigarette is if our cravings go away after that cigarette. Now, since cigarette cravings tend to come on about once per hour, and food cravings tend to wait about five hours, whenever we are hungry, we assume that we want a cigarette, and we just eat on our normal schedules, or we eat if the cigarette doesn’t satisfy the craving. We assume that every craving is a cigarette craving because we have cravings all the time.
A craving is real, true physical discomfort… just like being hungry is real, true physical discomfort. The only difference is that nobody has died from lack of nicotine, when plenty of people have died from lack of food. Also, unlike cravings for food, cravings for cigarettes are the worst on the third day. Cravings for food just keep on getting worse and worse until you die.
So, if you want to be hungry and unhappy for the rest of your life, follow my example and start smoking. You might get lucky and get in a fatal car accident, so you won’t have to worry about your lungs slowly filling up with puss, or your blood turning into a pasty sludge. (By the way, yes, I’m bitter about having started smoking in the first place. Yes, I’m bitter that I can’t bring myself to quit. Like any addict says, I’ll quit someday, just not today.)
Thanks, for writing this. I am going to forward it to my neice to show to my sister who has been trying to quit for several years. She has reached the place in her life where the doctors have told her that if she doesn’t quit, she will die. She has something wrong with her brain and smoking makes it much, much worse. She knows this and still has not been successful at quiting for more than a few weeks at a time. I watched her once during one of her weeks without smoking. She has no idea how to fill the hours that she spends smoking with other activities.
Addictions are hard to quit. You just have to persevere and get with it. Best of Luck!
Adam,
My experience with smoking has been completely different to yours.
In summary, I have never considered myself a smoker, but at times I have smoked cigarettes - usually only while partying, and only really over a couple of years.
The amount I smoked resembled a bell curve… hardly at all to start, then a bit more (never more than a pack a week), and then less and less.
I did experience cravings when I was in the specific situations where I allowed myself to smoke - i.e. hanging out with my girlfriends drinking wine type thing.
Yet the whole time I smoked, I never considered myself addicted, and I always paid strong attention to the effects on my body. After all - I only smoked for the short-lived high, not to feed a habit.
And now I don’t. Can’t stand the taste, or the feel, or what it does to my body.
So how does this help you? Maybe it doesn’t.
But first and foremost, the language we use to describe our experience in essence creates what we experience. Hence I NEVER said I was addicted - this would give the humble cigarette power over me. I saw it as something I chose to do in a limited way for enjoyment.
Can the language we use to describe our experience conquer the cravings?
Perhaps. I ceased to smoke in the same way I started - gradually. I paid attention when I was out and felt like a cigarette, and sometimes chose not to have one. Eventually, I never chose to have one.
I would suggest treating your smoking like a scientific experiment. Note when you smoke, why you smoke, how much you smoke… gather as much info as possible.
Then start to prune away at it. Cut out the cigarettes you really don’t need. Maybe you smoke 10 a day right now. Maybe two of those you can beat the cravings. So do it. Become an 8 a day smoker.
It might take 6 months to gradually stop, but it gives your body and mind time to readjust, plus it means you don’t repeatedly set yourself up for ‘failure’.
Nothing is static in life - we’re either moving toward a something or away from it. Applying this to smoking means that you’re either smoking more or smoking less.
And if you’re smoking less… eventually you won’t be smoking at all.
Much love and joy,
KL
KL, a thousand apologies for not seeing your comments sooner. I installed a new spam filtering plugin, since Akismet was letting more and more spam through and it was getting tedious manually deleting these, and the new filter doesn’t seem to like non-U.S. IP addresses.
I should have checked my junk bucket sooner to make sure that nothing important had been filtered, like your comments had.
I’ll respond to both posts when I have more time…
It’s very unfortunate that you started in the first place, it’s awesome that you quit, and again unfortunate that you started again, but if you keep things positive in your life you’ll be able to quit again. Stay positive and true to yourself and you can do it again. Good luck.
Terry
[Unrelated advertisement removed. The curious will click the name and see the site. The rest will be annoyed at a gratuitous, unrelated plug. -ed]
I’ve come to terms with it and more or less accepted that I will always be a smoker. But I don’t smoke much, maybe just 2 cigarretes/week. Maybe it’s a bad decision but it’s a compromise. Is that bad?
I hardly think 2 cigarettes/week will harm you too much.
Wow, 2 cigarettes per week is amazing.
All things considered, we inhale more pollutants from car and factory exhaust each week than two cigarettes provide… Considering that most of the people dieing of lung cancer and heart failure who are also smokers smoke an average of 20 cigarettes per day, I’d say you have outstanding odds.
At the same time, though, it sounds like you’re smoking once every 3 days… The third day, in my experience, is the hardest day to get past. If you can make it to the third day without smoking, then perhaps you could smoke only every fourth day… It will probably start getting easier to resist the cigarettes if you can consistently make it that far.
2 cigarettes per week is definitely not bad at all. The only real danger that I can see from it is getting comfortable, then becoming a 3 per week smoker, then 4, on up to once a day. If you can stop yourself from smoking more than you are now, then you’re doing better than any other smoker I know.