This is in the pit because 1) I’m using profanity and 2) I’m essentially pitting myself, but I would value any advice from ex- smokers. (No offense, but advice from people who haven’t ever smoked [or who smoked three cigarettes twenty years ago and consider themselves reformed smokers frankly doesn’t mean jack.)
I know every reason to quit smoking from the excellent (cancer, heart disease [my family is blessed in that there’s never been a case of cancer {not to say there couldn’t be} but heart-disease has shortend the lives of more men in the family than the women in my family have shortened) to the vain (worsens lines and wrinkles) to the practical (it’s $100 per month I could use elsewhere) to the social (increasing social unacceptability and limited smoking places) to the considerate (many people just don’t like the smell) to the hygienic (you smell like a fucking chimney if the wind blows the smoke back on your or- sometimes you just do, never have understood why sometimes you absorb the odor worse than others). I can think of no reasons TO continue (well… it’s a great ice-breaker for meeting new people, but usually there are better ways). I see how it’s ruined my mother’s health (I’ve literally seen her light up while a tracheotomy scar is still visible and when she had pneumonia- she’s 70 and in nowhere near as good-a-shape as her 83 year old sister {who quit smoking on her 60th birthday}).
BUT I CAN’T FUCKING STOP!
I’ve worn the patches- they make me itch like crazy and the nicotine attacks still come. (Actually, I quit smoking for 3 1/2 years the first time I used them, but then stupidly started back thinking I could handle “just one”.) I hate the gum with a passion. Cold turkey works fine for about three or four days but then I’m climbing the walls unable to sleep and looking for a fight and doing a one-man show of The Lost Weekend. I really and truly WANT to quit, but for some reason I can’t endure the cravings (and while I don’t have spots on my lungs or anything major, it’s definitely already affected my health in terms of stamina, chest tightness occasionally, etc.). Does anybody have ANY advice, cause to quote the great Barry Corbin from WAR GAMES, “I"d piss on a spark plug if I thought it’d do any good?”
I am now without cigs for four days now, and the patches are working well for me. I put a new patch on every 12 hours.
Once or twice a day, I get a really intense craving, and I’ll chew a piece of Nicorette - not recommended, but hey, it works for me.
It’s still way to early to say I’ve quit, but so far, I’m managing.
Good luck, Sampiro. This is a wicked tough habit to break.
I’ve got no advice, but I almost wrote this same damn rant the other day.
Patches: allergic reaction, although they helped when I wore them - or they at least took the edge off a bit.
The gum? Does nothing but give me heartburn.
I’m 31, and I realized recently that I smoked my first cigarette at 13 - that’s 18 years ago.
And my father had surgery recently for a recurrence of throat cancer - brought on by a combination of smoking and acid reflux - but the smoking was the bigger factor, I’m sure (and he is - and he went cold turkey when before the biopsy when he was originally diagnosed about 2.5 years ago.
I’m at the same place you are, I think. I suck, at least when it comes to cigarettes and quitting.
I want to quit. I need to quit. I wish I could quit, but I am terrified. I quit once, 20-some years ago, and have never been so sick in my life. It was like the worst flu ever, times ten. It’s possible that I got the flu just as I was going cold turkey, but if not, I am petrified to go through that again. If there was some way to do it without that happening, I’d be all for it. Does Wellbutrin work to stave off the cravings? Sometimes I wish I could do what Keith Richards is rumored to have done to kick heroin once - go to a clinic in Switzerland and have my blood exchanged. I like smoking. I hate being addicted to narcotics and I hate what it’s doing to my body.
Zyban – an antidepressant, also known as WellButribin – did it for me.
I smoked – a lot – for over 20 years, never even came close to quitting even though I didn’t even like smoking any more. My spouse, my sister, and my doctor finally guilted me into trying the Zyban + Nicorette. I was very skeptical that it would work.
Imagine my surprise when it did. After 3 weeks of taking the Zyban, I suddenly hated smokes. They tasted terrible!! I smoked a couple of cigs in the AM, a couple before bed, and chewed the gum all day. After a week of this, I finally ran out of smokes, and just chewed the gum. It’s been 16 months, and I haven’t had a cigarette since.
Firts of all, don’t use any aids like patches or gum. All you’re doing with those is changing the delivery system and retaining the addiction. Go cold turkey all the way.
The physical cravings are at their worst on about the third or fourth day. If you just nut it out. I believe that successfully quitting or not really boils down to just willing yourself to endure that very worst part - that 72 hours or so of wall climbing hell. Once you get past that it’s pretty much down hill. It’s not over but it’s managable.
Some of how I got through the shittiest part was eating a lot. I know they tell you not to do that but I decided I’d rather be fat that be a smoker. I was really skinny when I smoked and after I quit I gained about 50 pounds over the next several months. I made hughe bowls of popcorn and just munched and munched and munched. I also drank a ton of liquids.
Do NOT drink alcohol. If you are a smoker then I don’t need to tell you what alcohol does both in terms of craving and lowering will power.
Keep your eye on the ball. I can guarantee you that it WILL get better. Keep reminding yourself that the hell is temporary. It won’t last forever. The cravings WILL subside. The first time you realize that you went a whole day without thinking about a smoke will come before you know it.
I used one other bit on mental juijitsu that helped me. I promised myself that if I made it an entire year without smoking that I would reward myself with a single cigarette on the anniversary. For some reason it helped me to think that I would still get one more cigarette before I died.
Of course when the year came around, I had absolutely no more desire for it but it did help get through the worst time.
Good luck, man. And don’t let anyone tell you not to eat. It’s worth a few pounds to kill that fucking monkey, believe me.
I would have said the patch. It worked for me. Plus a lot of mental game. I think a lot about how bad smokers smell to me when I’m not smoking and how I feel like I have some kind of unfair advantage because I know all about their dirty little habit while my dirty little habits stay private thanks to the fact that they don’t produce a lingering odor (most of the time!)
The other thing is that deep down, you really do know that smoking isn’t that great. When you’re craving, you can fantasize that it will be the ultimate scratch to that deep itch, but you know when you do it it’s just going to be one more headache. The first time I quit and started again it was such a letdown. I never forget that starting again is not like starting the first time was.
The final thing I think about is that I don’t want to be some old hag with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth. Maybe if I could be 22 again it would work for me but I’m 33 and I don’t want to be Selma/Patty. I want to be Marge!
There are quite a few people that advocate cold turkey, and the NRT (nicotine replacement therapy) is flawed. I don’t know who’s right, but I’ll note that gum and patches won’t kill you, and cigarettes will. If you come out the other end addicted to gum or patches, you have an expensive habit (probably as expensive as smokes) but one that doesn’t stink, make you an outcast, and all the other disadvantages of cigs. This doesn’t make it a ‘good’ addiction, just (overwhelmingly) ‘less bad’
I’ll have to go ahead and disagree with you on this, DtC. It seems to me that the addiction is made of two components, one physical, the other psycological. YMMV, but I find it helpful to defeat each component separately - get used to not lighting up, not having a pack/lighter in your pocket, etc., then a week or two later, start on the physical addiction by weening away from the nicotine by reducing dosage.
I know that cold turkey is the best way for some, but that seems brutal to me.
Again, YMMV, but this worked for me the last time I quit…
[sub](…quit for two years - then I started again. I am an idiot)
[/sub]
Getting off the patch wasn’t that easy for me but I guess the thing is that there wasn’t that impulse to run and throw 6 patches on and just enjoy some relief from the withdrawl. The idea doesn’t come to your mind because you don’t get your patch nicotine in a “hit” so you don’t feel a direct connection. With withdrawl from cigarettes, it makes sense to think of the cigarette as an end to the misery. After 6 weeks of fiddling with patches, I didn’t associate the withdrawl with cigarettes. I just felt like I was sort of sick and crybabyish. But by then I hadn’t smoked in a while and I didn’t feel in any way that my withdrawl symptoms could be cured by a sweet sweet cigarette. Logically I knew that stepping up a higher patch would probably help, but there’s no feeling compelled to run to the drugstore and do it.
What I would love to do- I’m coming into a little bit of money soon and I’ve never been to Europe. I want to open a savings account with perhaps $500 or so that’s explicitly a “Send Jon* to England Fund” and each day count out the $3.00 that I would spend on cigarettes and put it aside to add to this fund. At the end of a year I would have enough for this and it would be an “eye on the prize” sort of thing- I’d rather go to England than to light up.
I do know from when I quit before that you do not really notice the money you’re saving- it just gets reabsorbed into day-to-day expenses- but if I made a conscious choice and could actually pick it up and do the whole “rolling around nekkid INDECENT EXPOSURE thing” with it that might help.
Stephen King, who quit drinking (alcoholic), cocaine and other narcotics says that cigarettes were the hardest to quit and the only drug he still misses.
*My name when it’s not Sampiro
One thing that helped me the last time I quit was being able to run. This really flushed out the crap pretty quickly.
Can you engage in intense aerobic exercise?
It worries me that I’m not nearly as fit as I was before, and I haven’t yet done any serious exercise, but I know I’m gonna need to.
I went the Wellbutrin route also. I was only on it for 2 weeks though, had to quit the Wellbutrin for other reasons. By then, I’d been off the smokes for a week.
To this day, I don’t know if it helped. On the one hand, the cravings seemed just as bad. On the other hand, I did manage to quit. Maybe that was psychological though, thinking “I’ve been taking this stuff for a week, time to quit”.
I am now 3 days short of 9 months, if I can do it, anyone can.
I used the patch for three weeks (IIRC) and then went cold turkey. I remembered a recovering alcoholic once telling me that he quit drinking ten minutes at a time—he would tell himself he was going to wait ten minutes and then have a drink. When the ten minutes was up, he would busy himself with some task and postpone the drink for another ten and so on. I did that with smoking and it worked although it was very hard. But, it got less and less dificult as time went by and now, nine years later, I think it was worth it. I was 55 when I stopped and 14 when I started so I had a deeply ingrained habit. It is very easy to convince yourself that you CAN’T stop, but your self-esteem takes a big boost when you DO stop and you CAN stop. I am sure pulling for you as is every reformed smoker on the SDMB.
I tried Zyban back in about 2001; it had no noticeable effect.
When I finally quit, I just did it cold turkey. I promised myself ahead of time that I wouldn’t go around bitching about the cravings, and I reminded myself that plenty of other people have quit before, and so on.
Also here’s a rather strange mental trick that helped me: I tell myself that cigarettes are not actually addictive; the evil tobacco industry has in fact been funding all the studies that say it’s addictive, in order to get people to believe that they can’t quit.
Don’t want to be a sap to the tobacco industry, do you? Don’t believe the hype! Fight the Power! 911 is a JOKE! (OK, that last one isn’t really applicable.)
Anyway, I know it’s probably not true, but getting into that tough, paranoid mindset helps me externalize the cravings a bit, if that makes sense.
6 years (one month & 26 days) out of a 1.5 to 3 pack a day (depending on whether I went out or not) habit. I quit with the patch, so I am sorry that does not work for you. While I agree with the not drinking aspect, I did not avoid bars. I was such a bar fly at the time, I knew I had to test pretty much immediately if I could sit in a bar and still not smoke, so I spent 1/1/1999 sat in my local watching football.
A good friend of mine quit a 2 pack a day, 20 year habit overnight with hypnosis. I think it only worked for him because he wanted it to work so badly, but he has not smoked since (and that is about 15 years ago).
I think I’m going to try Fritz’s suggestion of applying a new patch every 12 hours; while expensive, at the rate cigarettes are rising in price it’s not that much moreso than cigarettes. (I don’t want to go cold turkey in part because of the extra-eating- I really didn’t gain weight when I quit before but I feel if I go cold I’ll definitely put on the poundage and I’m already 50 pounds heavier than I should be.)
Thanks Fritz (and to all others for encouragement).
On the subject of patches- I don’t remember them being as prone to falling off the last time I used them, but I have a major problem with them slipping off during the day. (I wonder if it’s the fact that they’re transparent now whereas before they were beige.) Any suggestions as to where to put them? (I’ve been wearing them on my forearms and upper arms, but I’m thinking of shaving my legs [since it’s not shorts weather yet] and wearing them there; my understanding is that pretty much anyplace is fine though they shouldn’t be worn on the chest or stomach.)
Clean skin, upper arm next to shoulder, make sure you hold the patch in place for 10 seconds with your hand flat against the patch. I haven’t had any problem with patches falling off or loosening up.