Well, I’m finally doing it!!! & my rambling LOL
Hi All,
I have made it over my problem hump time I think. I did quit earlier, would last
2-3 days and slip. Then I would have one or two cigarettes, and try again. This
was a hard and continious cycle. The kicker was that even though I didn’t have
many cigarettes when I slipped, I still went through this heavy craving cycle at
day 3. I had tried (again!) and did good for the first 24 hours, then I got
sick! Caught a chest cold no less. That of course has brought me past my 3rd day
point because frankly, there’s no smoking when your hacking your lungs out. I
know my family has been sick, but I’m the only one with a chest cold. I can’t
help but wonder if I would have not even gotten sick if I didn’t smoke.
I told my husband that I can not put myself through this again. I can not keep
putting myself through the up and down of quitting, then getting all whacky,
then doing it again! It’s like putting your hand on a hot stove and when it
heals, doing it again!
I have been practicing my breathing, started Yoga for stress relief, bought the
strength training DVD’s I wanted, so I am set once this cold is gone. I am
withdrawing from school. I had to. I just couldn’t do it anymore with the kids,
keeping my business going, etc. I really laid it down for myself on what I want
to do, and I want my jewelry business, so I am finishing my classes that I
currently have (no point in paying for nothing!), and that will be it until the
kids are older. That alone has taken a big burden that I felt on myself.
I am proud to say that I am going on day 5 of being smoke-free! I am feeling
better today somewhat, not coughing as much, etc and I was craving, but I don’t
want to go through this again. I was thinking too the one night and was telling
my husband, “I find it really scary to think of the chemicals in those
cigarettes. Here I am, struggling to make it past the excessive craving point, I
was not a heavy smoker, and yet it still had this hold on me. I don’t want
anything to have that kind of hold on me!!”. I don’t either. It was just one of
those realizations in the middle of the night LOL
I am proud that even though I’ve had more stress lately than I would think to
have, I have and am keeping to being smoke-free. I’ve working on my jewelry,
I’ve crocheted more (2 more scarves LOL), visited message boards to keep myself
busy as much as I can with a cold. The kids alone have kept me jumping too.
So there is my rambling and my very happy self saying going into day 5 and
keeping it that way!
Heather
July 19th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Hi Heather,
Congrats on your 5 days.
Sounds like you’ve got a lot of stress in your life with or without
classes. All of that stress comes with specific body cues. Have you
identified them? Have you worked on the timer exercise? Have you
written out any timer notes??
As for exercise and yoga, they’re excellent for reducing stress but
only marginally effective for reducing urges. And it’s urges that are
the real problem… where do they come from? what are their
components? how are you ‘programmed’ to respond to them?
There’s a time factor involved in smoking and urges that too many
quitters don’t understand. That’s that inhaled nicotine creates
‘relief’ within 8-12 seconds. You get an urge, you light up, and the
urge is gone within seconds. However, from the time you get an urge
to the time you start to do your yoga routines, how much time passes?
I’m guessing that at the very best it’s several minutes if not longer
before you’re into your yoga. The point I’m trying to make is that
any response that will be really effective for dealing with urges
must produce an effect within a similar time frame as that of a
cigarette, seconds. Ask anyone who has done the timer exercise and
started deep breathing and stretching and they’ll tell you that it
works as fast and as well as a cigarette.
By all means stay with the yoga and strength training and any other
exercise or diversions that interest you. It’s just that if you
expect or hope that they will be effective quit tools, I’m concerned
you may be disappointed. Quitting may initially be about hanging on
and getting past withdrawal. But staying quit is about changing
established responses. If the tools you’re using aren’t accurate, the
changes won’t happen. Look to your own past experience and I think
you’ll agree.
Soooo… what about a timer and some notes?
Steve
July 20th, 2007 at 3:12 am
Steve,
I do believe I have identified a few cues. One being my kids fighting, that
sends as immediate craving attack. There is my husband which all he does is get
angry over anything, that send immediate craving to me. The stress itself I can
work through, breathe through, but I can see for me it’s the anger that sets me
over. Every one of those situations can get me into a rage (partly a bipolar
thing), and I crave. I don’t crave in boredom really. I’ve made it very hard to
smoke in my quitting times. So much so that I only did it when I couldn’t “take
it” in my house anymore.
I am not good at writing anything. I just have no ambition for it whatsoever. I
couldn’t do it for calories, or evening writing down my exercises I’ve done.
Just have no ambition there.
I don’t use exercising as a response to a craving. I use it as a goal that I an
obtaining (better health and stamina) because I no longer am smoking. I haven’t
found my instant relief, replacement for smoking yet. So far in the anger
situations, I literally just got up and walked away. I just walked to another
room and would/will breathe.
Right now I am just hanging in there to get past the withdrawal. I am trying to
find what effectively diffuses me and my anger/rages that I feel. I do see a Dr
and there has been no medication that has worked for me. I am allergic to most
medications, including most of the allergy meds too! LOL I had talked to my Dr
this past month about it all and he is looking into it more of what can be done
to help. I know many people who find just the breathing and stretching works for
them, but mine really hits with anger and these rages. I can diffuse anger with
breathing. I can’t diffuse the rages quite as easily. Right now because of this
cold, I don’t have the energy and the whole coughing thing. I look forward to my
exercising goals and being healthy. I did it before (but I did start up again),
but I want to be done with this for good. I’m not interested in being a
life-long smoker. It is getting harder to quit each time I start again, so I
definitely want this to be it. I do know that when feeling withdrawal, I do ask
myself, HOW many times am I going to put myself through this. Now that I’ve made
it as far as I have (I know it’s not very long yet, but it’s a good start), I
want to keep my future smoke-free forever.
I do appreciate everything from you Steve, I really do. I don’t think I would
have gotten even this far without your exercises and boosts.
Heather
There’s a time factor involved in smoking and urges that too many
quitters don’t understand. That’s that inhaled nicotine creates
‘relief’ within 8-12 seconds. You get an urge, you light up, and the
urge is gone within seconds. However, from the time you get an urge
to the time you start to do your yoga routines, how much time passes?
I’m guessing that at the very best it’s several minutes if not longer
before you’re into your yoga. The point I’m trying to make is that
any response that will be really effective for dealing with urges
must produce an effect within a similar time frame as that of a
cigarette, seconds. Ask anyone who has done the timer exercise and
started deep breathing and stretching and they’ll tell you that it
works as fast and as well as a cigarette.
By all means stay with the yoga and strength training and any other
exercise or diversions that interest you. It’s just that if you
expect or hope that they will be effective quit tools, I’m concerned
you may be disappointed. Quitting may initially be about hanging on
and getting past withdrawal. But staying quit is about changing
established responses. If the tools you’re using aren’t accurate, the
changes won’t happen. Look to your own past experience and I think
you’ll agree.
Soooo… what about a timer and some notes?
Steve
July 20th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Hi Heather,
This may seem a bit confusing at first and may
even anger you slightly. But bear with me and
I’ll explain… those cues you mentioned, your
kids fighting and your husband getting
angry, are not cues. They’re situations. And
they are pretty much interchangable and come under the heading of ’stress’.
When your kids fight you ‘clench’. Muscles
tighten, your breathing probably goes to rapid
and shallow, your thinking falls into a narrow
focus (”Oh great! Here they go again.”), and your
mood likely shifts from where ever it was to
something bordering on ‘negative’. All of those
are the cues that are associated for you with a
cigarette. Your kids fighting are just a situation.
When your husband gets angry, again, you
‘clench’. Muscles tighten, your breathing
probably goes to rapid and shallow, your thinking
falls into a narrow focus (”Oh great! Here he
goes again.”), and your mood likely shifts from
where ever it was to something bordering on
‘negative’. Those are cues that, for you, are
associated with ‘relief by cigarette’.
Those associations between what your body is
doing and a cigarette are NOT made by the ‘you’
who is reading this. They are made by that part
of you that is in charge of the things you’ve
relegated to the realm of automatic behavior.
Behavior like driving, tasks that no longer
require your conscious attention, and smoking.
Those behaviors are managed by your autopilot.
You taught your autopilot to connect smoking with
those body cues and you can retrain it fairly
easily IF you start to recognize your cues.
It may seem like I’m creating arbitrary
definitions of ‘cues’ and ’situations’ and to an
extent I am. But it’s only so that we can
communicate accurately. I’ve attached a ‘word
list’ at the end of this reply. They are words we
use often when talking about quitting smoking. We
need to share a common understanding of them in
order to avoid confusion because I’m trying to
point you toward an area of yourself that is
normally and naturally below your radar… the
subtle physical and mental cues that create your urges to smoke.
As for you having “no ambition” for writing
anything down, with all due respect… that’s
just an excuse. I know it’s an excuse because I’m
the same way. That said, I’m asking you to do
this for one day only. If it produces the change
that most people experience, you may be inclined
to do it for a second day. Either way, it’ll open
a window to that area within you that you must
access if you want to become comfortably quit.
I can probably help you ease into it if you’d
like to meet me in the chat room one evening.
Heather, the reason I’m pushing this is because
it’s the way you’ll defuse your anger and your
rages. It’s the way to deal immediately and
effectively with all your stresses. How angry or
stressed can you be if your body is relaxed? The answer is ‘not very’.
Steve
Here’s the ‘Common Vocabulary’:
From the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary
Addiction - dependence on or commitment to a
habit, practice, or habit-forming substance to the extent that
it’s cessation causes trauma.
and..
Habit - 1. an acquired pattern of behavior that
has become almost involuntary as a result of frequent repetition.
2. customary practice or use.
3. a particular practice , custom, or
usage: the habit of shaking hands.
4. a dominant or regular character or
tendency: a habit of criticizing everyone.
5. addiction, esp. to narcotics
These definitions are very similar. It’s easy to
see how addiction and habit might be used
interchangeably. If we’re going to talk about the
basics of smoking, we need to agree on certain
definitions. I’m not suggesting that mine are the
only correct definitions, only that if within the
context of this material we agree to certain
distinctions and consistencies we will communicate more successfully.
Our word list is:
1- Nicotine Addiction
2- Smoking Habit
3- Situations
4- Body Cues
5- Rational Response
6- Urge
7- Craving
1- ‘Nicotine addiction’ - a physiological
dependence on nicotine to relieve reoccurring
nicotine withdrawal symptoms. Immediately after a
smoker finishes a cigarette, their nicotine level
begins to drop. At some point the first signs of
nicotine withdrawal will appear and become
increasingly uncomfortable until they are dealt
with. The most effective way for a smoker to deal
with withdrawal is to raise their nicotine level
by lighting up another cigarette. That is the
basis of the need/feed nature of ‘nicotine
addiction’. A smoker’s addiction is entirely about nicotine.
2- the ‘Smoking habit’ - smoking for any reason
other than a fluctuating nicotine level. Some
examples are hunger, anger, loneliness, boredom,
and fatigue. The important point here is that
most quitters continue to feel urges to smoke
long after they’ve dealt with the chemical
addiction. Those ongoing urges to smoke occur
because of an established connection between
certain ‘cues’ and a specific effective response.
For a smoker, that response is invariably a
cigarette and usually has little or no direct connection to nicotine addiction.
3- ‘Situations’ - internal or external events
that we encounter in an average day. They include
places we go, people we meet, conditions and
states of being that we experience. A partial list of ’situations’ is:
- a cup of coffee
- driving
- being tired, hungry, angry, lonely, bored, hot, cold, relaxed
- on the phone, at the computer, taking the garbage to the curb
- getting up in the morning, taking breaks, meeting with family
- nicotine withdrawal because it’s been
‘too long’ since the last cigarette.
4- ‘Body Cues’ - one or a set of specific
physical sensations. Think of them as little
flags that go up on a map of your body. The most common body cues are:
- tension in identifiable muscles or areas
- changes in breathing
- abdominal and chest sensations.
- a shift in mental clarity, usually
toward foggy. May also result from a shift in focus related to topic or task.
- a shift in mood or emotion usually toward increased intensity.
Mental ‘clarity’ (the ability to concentrate or
think) and shifts in emotion or mood are included
as body cues because they are often
physiologically rooted. Additionally, every mood
or emotion can be defined in physical terms.
Example 1: When we’re angry we generally
experience muscle tension (in our back,
shoulders, neck, jaw, and stomach) and our breathing becomes rapid and shallow.
Example 2: Fatigue, whether due to insufficient
sleep, extended time at a particular task, or
improper eating will result in a reduced ability
to think or concentrate. Difficulty thinking is
often also accompanied by an increase in frustration.
5- Rational Response - an action that’s taken
based on a rational evaluation of current
existing conditions and not on established beliefs or automatic assumptions.
6- Urge - a desire for something or to do
something. Urges result when a particular action
is believed to be an effective response to a
specific need. We are generally unaware of the
association of a response to a need. That’s why
many smokers feel that their urges to smoke come ‘out of the blue’.
7- Craving - the same as an urge.
To Recap
Addiction is a physiological dependence on
nicotine to relieve reoccurring withdrawal symptoms.
Habit is behavior involving cigarettes and the
ways in which they are connected to daily life.
Situations are external and/or internal occurrences.
Body cues are specific physical sensations.
Mental acuity and shifts in emotion are included as body cues.
Rational Responses are actions based on an evaluation of current conditions.
Urges and cravings result when a response is associated with a particular need.