Day 5

Still haven't smoked. My advice, if anyone is reading this who is thinking about quitting smoking, is give it a shot.

This turned out not to be nearly as bad as I had anticipated. I had read so many things by people who said that quitting smoking was the hardest thing they had ever done in their entire lives. I think that's why I avoided even trying for so long -- I thought it would be a completely unbearable ordeal. And then when I finally did try, while it did turn out to be difficult and unpleasant, it certainly wasn't the most difficult or the most unpleasant thing I've ever done.

And I figure that even if I don't make it any further than this, even if I start smoking again in the next ten seconds, at least I've had four-and-a-half days of non-smoking, which has got to be a nice little break for my body, and now that I've seen that it's not THAT bad to stop, I won't be so scared to try it again -- it won't take me another 30 years to give it a shot.

I'd also recommend to any smoker contemplating quitting to try using the patch. That's been a big help for me. Took about a day to kick in, but by the second day the physical intensity of the cravings was way down.

Also, the cravings weren't qualitatively different from the cravings I had already experienced a million times before, every time I went without a cigarette for more than a couple of hours. I thought the post-quit cravings were going to be an entirely new experience, something so new and awful that I couldn't even imagine, in advance, what they were going to feel like, what strange new horrors were in store for me. But they turned out to be the same old thing that I felt a million times before -- just regular ol' cravings. The only difference was that post-quit I felt them more frequently, especially during the first day. So quantitatively there was a difference, but not qualitatively. I wish I had known that in advance. The fear of the unknown was another big reason I put off trying for so long -- and then it turned out to be something I already knew, and knew well.

I haven't been using most of the toys in my big sack of quit-smoking toys, though I've been web-surfing a lot of stop-smoking, as well as stop-other-addictions sites. What I'm trying to figure out now is how best to conceptualize the conflict that's raging in my head, with one part saying "I want a cigarette!" and another part saying "I don't want to be a smoker." The conflict seems to be universal among recent quitters, but people resolve it in different ways.

Some people call the part that keeps on saying it wants a cigarette the "Nicodemon," and they resolve to crush, destroy, and kill it. But I don't want all that violence going on inside my head. And I also believe that when you deny a part of yourself that strongly, it comes back to haunt you. The return of the repressed is how someone (Freud?) put it.

At cognitive quitting they take a gentler approach. The voice calling for a cigarette comes from a character they dub "Warren." Warren is not eeeeevil, like the Nicodemon. He's just not that bright. He's doing his job as best as he can. His job is to keep an eye out for physical discomfort and then propose a solution. And he's been trained -- millions of times, every time we've taken a puff on a cigarette we've reinforced his training -- to propose smoking as the solution for a whole range of discomforts. Now we just need to retrain him. The retraining needs to be done with persistence and patience, taking into account that Warren doesn't learn all that quickly and that he needs to be reminded often of what he should be doing, until the day comes when he finally catches on for good and can again do his job on his own.

I stumbled on another approach last night while web surfing, called Rational Recovery. It's designed for problem drinkers and hard-drug users, but I think the approach would work for smokers as well. Rational Recovery frames the conflict as being between one's rational, higher-brain self, and one's primitive, instinctive, brain-stem self (dubbed "the Beast"). There is some reliance on violent imagery here, on the notion of killing the Beast, but where it improves on the "kill the Nicodemon" idea is that it acknowledges that the Beast is seeking pleasure. The Beast isn't totally eeeeevil -- it's not an alien force that invades our bodies the way the Nicodemon does, that ONLY does harm and must be completely expelled or exorcised. The Beast is the instinctive part of ourselves, and of all animals, that helps ensure our survival. It pushes us to seek the pleasure of eating, which keeps us alive, and the pleasure of sex, which keeps the species alive, etc. It does tend to mistake addictive behavior for survival behavior, because all it understands is pleasure, and it's too dumb to distinguish between pleasures that help us survive, and pleasures that threaten our survival.

In any case, we can use the smarter, more developed parts of our brains to override the dumber, more instinctive parts, and we can refuse to follow the instinctive promptings when they're not in our own best interests. That's because it's our conscious, thinking minds that have ultimate control over our muscles. The Beast can't force us to light a cigarette, any more than it can force us to eat when hungry, because it doesn't have control over our hands. It can't on its own put the food or the cigarette into our mouths. It has to use persuasion. It has to talk the higher mind into agreeing with it, in order for the higher mind to move the muscles that will carry out the actions the Beast wants to see happen.

There's a lot of what I think is gratuitous Alcoholics-Anonymous bashing on the Rational Recovery site, but aside from that their ideas about dealing with addictions are worth reading. They have what they call an Internet Crash Course which can be read in about ten minutes, and which gets the points across well. It's really quite simple and logical. The conflict is resolved by calling the voice that urges smoking a cigarette "It," and the voice which urges not smoking, "I." Then it just becomes a matter of being aware of any impulses that will lead toward smoking, and recognizing those impulses or thoughts as being what "It" (the Beast) wants, not what "I" want.

I do like this approach, but the difficulty for me is that it involves making a firm commitment to never smoke again, something I still feel reluctant to do. (The Rational Recovery people would say that the reluctance is the Beast talking, trying to keep a future opening for itself.)