one day at a time
I can’t do one day at a time. I don’t even do one hour or minute at a time.
Never could, don’t expect I ever will. I don’t have whatever it takes to
hang in or hang on. As soon as things start to get a bit rough, I start
looking at all my rationalizations why today isn’t the time to do ‘one day’
and why hanging in or on isn’t going to get me anywhere except
exhausted. I’m sure that perspective and lack of ‘whatever it takes’ has a
lot to do with why I smoked for 35 years.
Cognitivequitting evolved out of my quit experience. Because of my
inability and unwillingness to ‘hang’ I had to find a different way to
quit. What I found was that physical sensations were connected to urges to
smoke. Some were the physical sensations that come from being too long
without a cigarette. Everyone knows that antsy irritable nicotine fit state
of being. We all rushed to smoke just as quickly as possible and as soon as
we sucked in that first couple of drags felt immediate relief. The
condition of being nicotine deprived is characterized by general muscle
tension and changes in breathing.
I remember being angry and racing off just to smoke and calm down. Anger is
also defined in terms of physical sensations. Doesn’t your body ‘clench’
when you are angry? Isn’t your breathing rapid? Didn’t a couple of deep
drags on a cigarette relieve that? And then there is boredom, fatigue,
hunger, and all the others that are normal events in life and really have
nothing to do with a sagging nicotine level and every one of them can be
defined in basic body terms.
For me, quitting meant either live with all the normal experiences of life
and just try to hang on through the physical sensations or examine just
what those physical sensations were and try to deal directly with them. It
didn’t take a lot of time or effort to begin to understand what my body
needed when it was angry or hungry or tired. And as soon as I began to take
care of those basic needs, urges to smoke disappeared. They were replaced
by thoughts of “what do I do for the knotted muscles in my neck and
shoulders? what do I do to relieve this sensation in my stomach? what do I
need to do to get some air into my lungs?”
Don’t get me wrong, I was the most angry piece of work around for a very
long time after I quit. And I got just as bored and tired and hungry as I
ever did as a smoker. But it was clear to me what I needed to do and it
wasn’t ‘take it one day at a time’. What I really needed was to immediately
deal with my body.
For those of you who are like me and have no will power or desire to hang
on for even one day/hour/minute at a time, you don’t have to. Set a timer,
learn what your body is telling you at any moment during the day, and start
to take some very simple basic steps to take care of yourself. You’ll find
a remarkable quit comfort that results from knowing what you’re doing.