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On Smoking

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Re: On Smoking

#141

Post by bigyikes »

I think I’m fortunate that I find cigarettes fairly easy to pick up and put back down. Don’t get me wrong, I get hooked like the rest of us, but I seem to naturally fall off the hook after some time.

I usually pick them up to cope with intense emotions. Not healthy, I know. After a few weeks of smoking 2 packs per week (not per day, thankfully), I begin to feel intense anxiety from smoking. The longer I continue the habit, the worse the anxiety gets. It escalates to the point where thinking of a cigarette makes me sweaty and nauseous, and actually smoking one will trigger a panic attack. After a few of those attacks I can drop the cigs with minimal fuss.

Anxiety feels like a curse, but in this case it acts as a restoration force against my tobacco addiction. Life is strange.

(No, anxiety is not a good thing, and no, you should not smoke cigarettes)

Re: On Smoking

#142

Post by m0rti »

shoto_io wrote: post #57

I quit about a hundred times 20 yrs ago. I don’t why, but after that I finally grabbed this damn book by Allen Carr. I would have never that it would work. But for me it did. Been smoke free ever since. Maybe just pure luck. Maybe it was the goddamn book.

I quit with Allen Carr too, but with the subscription based online portal, not with the book or the documentary.

I forgot when I quit smoking exactly. 1 year, 2 years? I was smoking around 1.5 packs a day. Allan Carr definitely helped, I found out that it is not perfect for everyone though. But still, it is the first thing I recommend to people who want to quit.

I rarely need to remind myself why I don’t smoke anymore and the mentality I gained from Allan Carr makes that justification quick and easy.

Re: On Smoking

#143

Post by simondotau »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #125
deesep wrote: post #86

I started smoking when i went to study in China. Someone gifted me an expensive brand of cigarette, and I kept it hidden in a drawer for two weeks as I didn't smoke. One very cold day with no where to go and nothing to do, I took the pack out and lit one stick. My did it have a lovely scent. The heat it created inside me was also soothing. It took me about a week and half to finish the pack of 21 cigs. I couldn't aff…

Related to this, a lot of the reason smokers around me smoke is to just go outside. It’s an excuse to hang out on the porch. You might think that such a societal excuse isn’t needed, but it’s a powerful force.

I've never smoked, but in my cubicle days I often tag along with a colleague who did smoke. They'd have a puff, I'd get coffee, and we'd hang out and chat for five or ten minutes outside.

Re: On Smoking

#144

Post by hallway_monitor »

hayst4ck wrote: post #113
unixhero wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quit smoking, and it was very very hard. I don't agree with you that the addiction, need and nicotine + other triggers will remain with me until the end of time. Deprogramming is part of the process of quitting to smoke. I do now never want to smoke. It is not attractive to me as a way to relax or focus. I can stand in a tobacco section of an airport taxfree shop holding a 5 cartons in my hands with absolutely no d…

Have you had any major stress events in your life since quitting? I quit something myself and have felt much the same way, but I eventually had a string of very stressful events in my life that resulted in me seeking comfort in my old addiction.

I quit for nine years. After a stressful event four years ago I started again. I think that, for me, the habit of going outside once an hour is the part that's hard to change.

Re: On Smoking

#145

Post by muststopmyths »

The main things that keeps me from relapsing are that California makes it really hard to smoke in public and that none of my friends smoke.

I occasionally relapse when with some specific friends from a point in my past. Luckily we live far away from each other so the meetings are rare.

The one other reason I don't just pick smoking back up by myself is how nasty my clothes (no hair left any more !) smell after a cigarette. It's very easy to not notice that when you smoke, but impossible to miss when you don't. I certainly don't want my apartment smelling like that either.

If they ever made cigarettes that don't smell bad (not weenie vape pens, come on :) ), I'd probably be dead of lung cancer in a decade.

It is a tough addiction.

Re: On Smoking

#146

Post by RobertKerans »

defaultname wrote: post #103
TchoBeer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alcohol is also addictive expensive and bad for you, and yet no one asks why anyone would drink alcohol

Smoking is magnitudes more addictive than alcohol. Regardless, a lot of people do ask why anyone would drink alcohol, given that it offers up an enormous array of detrimental health effects, the possibility of addiction and social troubles (DUI, violence, etc), and as a mental "holiday" altered state is an incredibly poor mechanism. Alcohol hangs around because it was accessible in earlier eras. There will come a tim…

> Alcohol hangs around because it was accessible in earlier eras. There will come a time, I suspect in the very near future, when it will look ridiculous. Where having a `drink' will be an anachronism

Why do you think this? It seems an extremely puritan outlook, I'm a bit sceptical that puritanism is saleable without enforcement of society-wide religious norms. Smoking, sure, but smoking is not at all like alcohol consumption.

Re: On Smoking

#147

Post by fnord77 »

pengaru wrote: post #5
jessriedel wrote: post #2

> too embarrassed of chewing-gums In case others don't know, there are nicotine lozenges that are smaller than the gum and require no chewing. And if you happen to swallow them nothing happens, the nicotine is destroyed by your stomachs without being absorbed. They are really very discreet to use. (Even the gum isn't actually chewed like regular gum; you just chew it for a few seconds and let it sit on your gum.)

It's also worth noting nicotine has interesting "nootropic" properties. You don't really have to quit your addiction to quit smoking, and there can be some advantages to continuing if you can afford it in safer forms.

it is quite possible that nicotine is a carcinogen itself and there is no safe form

Re: On Smoking

#148

Post by hellbannedguy »

unixhero wrote: post #24
murat131 wrote: post #3

The thing about smoking is that when you quit smoking you quit it every day. Imagine a light switch on the wall. You turn it off by quitting smoking and you can always go back at a desperate time for instance and turn it on. And some time later off again. Smoking your first cigarette implants that light switch on your mind and you can't make it go away. Since you know how it makes you feel good when the switch is on,…

I quit smoking, and it was very very hard. I don't agree with you that the addiction, need and nicotine + other triggers will remain with me until the end of time. Deprogramming is part of the process of quitting to smoke. I do now never want to smoke. It is not attractive to me as a way to relax or focus. I can stand in a tobacco section of an airport taxfree shop holding a 5 cartons in my hands with absolutely no d…

To those that have tried this, I found something a bit different, and I'm not even sure if I should say anything.

Again--to those that tried to stop completely, and failed, maybe cut way back?

I have never been successful at quitting anything.

Diets have failed. Drinking abstinance has failed.

What worked though is drastically cutting back.

Ok, I was never a two pack a day smoker. I couldn't even imagine it.

I did smoke though.

That said, I cut way back.

Cut back to a few cigarettes a week.

I use rolling papers, and only buy one pack of cigarettes every few weeks. (probally 6 week interval, but I don't like to think about it). I roll tiny bits of tobacco into a paper, and smoke it, when I get that urge. Only when I get the urge.

I can't recommend it because the research on smoking a little bit of tobacco is fuzzy.

What I feel is wrong with most methods of stopping any substance, including food, and booze, is telling the brain you will never have this again.

As my grandfather told me so many times, moderation my son.

(I am not very successful in any part of my life, but smoke no more than three packs a year.)

Re: On Smoking

#149

Post by alethiophile »

TchoBeer wrote: post #138
strken wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's already been tried before, and it resulted in the US government deliberately poisoning people, widespread organised crime, and a lot of methanol poisoning. Turns out it's really hard to ban something you can make in a 20 gallon drum from yeast and sugar.

We wouldn't have to ban it any more than we had to ban cigarettes

The decline in smoking has absolutely been accompanied and/or caused by a massive array of state coercion, from requiring all their advertising to prominently state "THIS WILL KILL YOU" to limiting who's allowed to sell it to banning it in almost all public spaces. (Which isn't even mentioning the "softer" approaches of massive state-funded PR campaigns against it.)

It seems quite likely that absent all of these, smoking would still be as popular as it ever was.

Re: On Smoking

#150

Post by simondotau »

becquerel wrote: post #36
Jhsto wrote: post #7

Has anyone else tried writing under some arbitrary restrictions? In case you did not notice, the blog subtitle is 11 sentence essays. The post as well, unsurprisingly, is 11 sentences (... I guess, but it has a number of complicated ones).

I used to write short stories that didn't contain the letter 'e', inspired by George Perec's book La Disparition (cracking novel, highly recommended -- all the translations from French keep it up as well). It's challenging, obviously, but also forces you to employ very unusual and unique language.

I concur. It's difficult, impractical and making my brain hurt. A grasp of (and availability of) synonym information is vitally important.
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