Urges to smoke - a repost
Hi all,
I was hunting through some old mailboxes and came across this. Thought it
might be worth reading for some of our newer cog quitters.
repost -
I was talking to one of our quitters yesterday about a family gathering
she’d been to where there were more smokers than nonsmokers. She mentioned
that she’d felt some urges to smoke and that while she had her cog tools
and used them well, still it was a bit disappointing and
frustrating that there were urges at all.
It’s not uncommon in a situation like that to experience ‘urges’ to
smoke. Many who are new to cognitive quitting may feel they’re somehow
missing something or that they’re not ‘doing it right’ if they experience
smoking urges. I know we talk about not having to deal with recurring urges
to smoke when we use cognitive techniques to quit and that it’s a
‘comfortable quit’, but that’s a state we get to after working the program
for a while.
Being in a group of smokers within weeks of quitting is an anxious
situation. We’re so very aware of ‘them’ and ‘us’. They’re doing what we
did as smokers…. they’re smoking. We’ve quit. We’ve changed. We’ve
stepped outside of that pattern of behavior and suddenly we’re observing
them and us. And through it all, our body is experiencing the muscle
tension, the breathing changes, the awareness that this situation is
‘different’ and that we’re not comfortable. All of that is still being
instantly associated to relief by smoking. So we bring in our Foundation
Statements and we remind ourselves that we really don’t want to be smokers.
We remember our timer notes and we look at the body cues we’re feeling and
connect them to the non smoking responses that we know will provid relief.
We recall any ABCs we’ve done for situations like this. We do the work.
From an historic perspective, urges have always been something to
fear. They often welled up out of us without warning and usually meant we’d
have to hang on tight until they went away. For a cog quitter, an urge is
NOT an indication of failure in using this program. If you find yourself
experiencing urges to smoke, think of them as nothing more than indicators
that in ‘this particular situation’ there was an association between body
cues and a cigarette. Take that awareness, apply your cog tools and move
on. That’s how we retrain ourselves… patience, repetition, awareness.