After 40 years of smoking, 2 packs/day (on weekends; slightly less on weekdays) my Beloved Spouse has quit. She’s on Day 9, staggering from day to day with the help of Commit lozenges.
I think she’s doing great, and I’m really proud of her. What’s depressing, though, is that she says each day is harder than the one before.
Can any ex-smokers help out, here? At what point does it begin to get easier?
Any tips & pointers?
Dearest Mrs. JSC1953,
I quit as a New Year’s Resolution a mere 16 days ago, so I’m only a week ahead of you. Plus, I’m only 25, so 40 years of smoking is an impossibility, unless you read a lot of Sci-Fi, which I don’t. Anyway, tell me if this sounds familiar: horrible headache at the bottom of the skull? Kinda ties around to the top sometimes like a Russian-peasant scarf? Yeah? No good. I had a constant headache for 4 days. Then the physical pain subsided. Not completely, but more and more each day. Today, I expect my headache around 9 p.m. I’m setting my watch.
The question, of course, is why exactly is quitting getting harder? Is it the physical thing or is it a mental thing? Because if it’s physical, that goes against my personal experience, other ex-smokers I know, and everything I’ve read. If it’s mental: hey. I’ve been there. Everything is a trigger. THe walk to work? I used to smoke. Talking with my sister? Used to smoke. Typing about smoking? Making me want a cigarette pretty bad. I’ve been taking “smoke-breaks” with an iPod or my boss, just to have a break and relax and to change the whole smoking = freedom thing I had going. That certainly helped. My goal is to try and take everything you enjoyed about smoking and transfer that to a similar task. Now, I just have a coffee when I’m chatting with my sister.
I’m sure more hard-core ex-smokers will be of some assistance. But let it be said: I’m clean after 16 days. I don’t know when it will get easier though. Honestly, it should’ve by now.
One of my quits was after reading Allen Carr’s book, Allen Carr’s Easyway to Quit Smoking. It was easy from the first hour, and stayed easy. Quit for three years.
Another quit was after hypnosis. That was easy right away too. Quit for ten years.
Sometimes one tool isn’t enough. Would she consider hypnosis, or maybe drug therapy – Wellbutrin/Zyban, or the new drug, Chantix? A support group?
The nicotine is out of her system if she hasn’t smoked in 9 days. It’s all psychological now, and that’s the hard part.
Has she rewarded herself? That might help her feel the benefit of quitting, instead of focusing on what she’s “lost”.
Exactly, everyday shouldn’t be harder and harder for her; it should be easier and easier. If it is getting more difficult for her to resist smoking, it is because she wants to smoke. A smoker will/can only really quit when they want to, not before.
I smoked a pack a day for six years. One day I got out of bed and said, I’m not going to smoke anymore and meant it. I told everyone I knew. I haven’t smoked since.*
*I’ve had less than a dozen in the five years since I quit. Ten of those were due to inebriation. The remaining two due to women.
Remind her that it’s not her who wants her to smoke again, that’s the nicotine addiction talking. I assume Commit lozenges are a nicotine source? If so, she’ll never shake the addiction while she’s taking them; she’s just moved off one source onto another (like going from heroin to methadone).
The only long-term succesful quitters I’ve known are those who went cold-turkey; stopped dead one day and simply never indulged the nicotine addiction in any way again.
What AuntiePam and Spezza said.
I did the Allen Carr + Paul McKenna route. After the first few days, it gets easier, not harder. If it’s getting harder, it probably means your wife doesn’t really want to quit smoking.
In several neurolinguistic programming books I’ve read (which both Carr and McKenna employ in their methods), every behavior has a positive intention. For smokers, it’s usually a feeling of calmness or fullness after a cigarette that is the positive intention of smoking. So perhaps your wife isn’t missing the actual nicotine at this point, but has found nothing to replace the calmness or fullness she once felt with every drag.
Execirsing helped me. Long runs that I could never do before. I quit cold turkey and kinda got crazy. After 6 months though I was good. From then on smoking was simply something I didn’t do anymore.
Mr. Legend is at five and a half weeks now, and he had the same experience for about two weeks (and one odd day when he hadn’t smoked for three weeks). He said the cravings were as strong or stronger every day, but then it started getting better. He’s still using nicotine patches and the occasional Commit, and I must disagree strongly with Askance on this point - addiction to smoking is far more than just a nicotine addiction, and using nicotine replacement (not trying to “cut down”, mind you) can ease a new ex-smoker over the initial rough patches. Once the habit has been extinguished, it’s not too difficult to taper off of the nicotine in lozenge or patch form.
I quit smoking twenty years ago, after being a three-pack-a-day smoker for more than ten years. I quit cold turkey, and I remember the first two or three weeks were hellacious, and then it slowly got better. After the first couple of weeks, you start really feeling the health benefits of not smoking. Before that, you’re too wrapped up in the withdrawal symptoms to really appreciate anything but how crappy you feel. It does get better.
My parents, both in their 60s, quit smoking over the last 2 years. Dad quit cold turkey after a bad cold in 2005. Mom quit last year with a combination of the artificial cigarette and nicotine gum. She still chews the gum, but she hasn’t needed the artificial cigarette for several months.
Here’s where I bought the cigarette. I also got her a 6-pack of cartridge refills, but I’m not sure she ever needed them.
Any tips on how to ease someone through the physical detox of the first week or so of quitting nicotine? My boyfriend is going to quit soon and says he thinks, if he can just get through those first horrendous 72 hours, he can do it. He’s going to try to do it at my house on a 3 day weekend and I’d like to make it as easy for him as possible.
Here’s the main thing: you have to WANT to quit. I don’t mean you think it’s time to quit or you should quit. You have to really WANT to quit. Otherwise, you’re at heightened risk of smoking again, I believe.
I smoked for 17 1/2 years, about a pack a day, and was a militant smoker. By that I mean anytime someone said something bad about smoking or even suggested I quit or even cut down, I lit up immediately, just to shut them up. But one day, for reasons I won’t go into here (and no, I had no medical problems whatsoever), I started WANTING to quit, became serious about it. So I tried the nicotine gum, and that really worked for me. I did not fall back even once. This May will mark 15 years without even a single puff. And I don’t mind being around others who are smoking, it does not make me want a cigarette.
One other thing that might have helped, I selected a certain day as D-Day. May 27 it was, in 1992. I swore I would not smoke beginning that day, starting from midnight. So at 11:30pm the night before, I was puffing away, looking at my watch. Ah, 25 more minutes. Another cigarette. Puff puff puff. Ah, 22 more minutes. Another cigarette. Puff puff puff. Right up to midnight. So I ended up making myself pretty sick. That might have helped.
Even with the gum, it got a little touch-and-go there, but I’d say after about, oh, 4-6 weeks I was feeling a lot better. Two months for sure.
When I went through SmokEnders, they recommended drinking lots of water (but not too much), and taking extra vitamin C.
Some people get the jitters. I don’t know if that’s a physical symptom, or if it’s because there are all those minutes in the day that used to be spent smoking, and now there’s nothing.
Take a walk, go to a movie, eat out at non-smoking restaurants, stock up on carrot and celery sticks for chomping.
My husband quit several times, but the last time he used nicotine patches. He’s been smoke free for some years now. This last time, he put three or four dollars a day in a little plastic tub, so that he could SEE the money he was not burning. Recently, I asked him if he missed it. He says no, he doesn’t miss smoking, and he certainly doesn’t miss burning money.
I did NOT bother him about the money he used on nicotine patches. I wouldn’t have bothered him about it even if this last attempt was not successful. Sometimes, it takes several tries to quit. I hope the OP’s wife manages to quit this time, nine days is very good.
I was not at all a heavy smoker. I smoked 3-5 cigarettes a day. Then one day I just got bored with it and stopped. Hardly noticed.
That may not seem like much help, but I present it to suggest that the mental addiction is far stronger than the physical.
I tried to quit for over 5 years with patches, gums, lozenges, etc. None of those worked in the least way. One time I quit cold turkey for a little over two months, and the cravings never subsided at all. Powering through day 60 was just as hard as day 1 and every day in between so I finally got discouraged and someone offered me a cigarette and I accepted. Of course I bought a pack the next day and was smoking full-time again.
Then, about 5 months and 10 days ago, I read Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop Smoking and I am 100% free from cigarettes now and loving it.
I would suggest nothing else to anyone who couldn’t quit, and I would suggest reading it fast (I read it in 2 days.) The few people who don’t quit from it seem to be the ones who read a page or two a day over the course of several weeks or months, or don’t finish it at all. I actually had a guy tell me that the book sucks and doesn’t work, and he didn’t even make it halfway through.
Read it. Read it fast. Be free.
Have to agree strongly with everything Cisco said.
I quit 7 and a half years ago after reading the Carr book (over several weeks, FTR). Before reading it, I figured I would never quit because I simply didn’t have sufficient willpower. The book promises you can quit without it, which sounds hard to believe when you are a smoker but I know its possible because I did it. I can’t recommend too highly the purchase of the Carr Easyway book to anyone considering quitting. It totally changed my life.
And that’s it really.
If your wife doesn’t quit this time, accept it and be supportive.
I’m on my 3rd serious quit attempt at the moment. The first two attempts I wanted to quit, but I really liked smoking. No matter how hard I told my brain I wanted to quit I wasn’t fooling myself.
The first attempt I quit for about a month or two. I was having a surgery which required about a week of bed rest and pain killers. Perfect for getting over the first, bad, 72 hours of cravings. I used a patch to take the edge off.
The second attempt I was back in for another surgery with another week of bed rest and pain killers. Once again, I used the patch. This time I was quit for longer.
Both times I failed because I never got over the habit of smoking. This is different from the nicotine cravings. My work cycle revolved around taking smoke breaks (8 hour shift, one break 2 hours in and one 6 hours in). Without the need to smoke I worked straight through the day. I often didn’t take lunch. My job requires problem solving and my brain was getting tired. One day I was at a dead end on what to do with a problem. I went and bought cigarettes, sat and smoked one, and the solution came to me in a few minutes.
You see, that was my problem with quitting. I used the cigarette time to sit for ten minutes alone and think about things. Without a replacement for this habit I was always wanting to smoke even though it wasn’t nicotine I was wanting.
Both times I also didn’t smoke after my quit date. Let me rephrase that. I wasn’t supposed to smoke after my quit date. The few times I did smoke I felt like a failure.
This time around I’m taking a different angle. For one, I’m getting tired of smoking. I still like to smoke but I’m tired of having a hard time finding a place to smoke. I’m sick of paying $7+ a pack.
I’m using a patch but allowing myself to smoke if I really want to with one rule - I will not smoke an entire cigarette. If I crave one, I’ll put off smoking for 5 minutes. If after that I still want to smoke I’ll go outside, light up, take a drag or two and put it out. (I’ll light the same cigarette up later. Sometimes relighting it 3-4 times) I will also try to not smoke more cigarettes than I did the day before. If I do or I smoke the same amount, I’m not going to beat myself up about it.
The point of this process is to reduce my habit of smoking as well as reduce the nicotine intake.
So, here I am a week later and without any effort I went from smoking a pack of regulars a day (the day before I quit) to only smoking 3 light cigarettes today. I’m not craving them like I used to and am even suprised when I realize I’ve gone hours without even thinking of smoking.
I’m a few cigarette into a new pack. At this rate I fully expect this to be the last pack I ever buy.
Also, the difference between this quit and the other two quits - I feel good about this one. I feel like it is something I really want to do and not just telling myself I should do it. I’m going at my own pace designed after problems I had in the past. I think this time I’ll really quit for good.
My wife (a non-smoker) has supported me and never given me a hard time about failing or quiting. She wants me to quit and will help any way I ask but she won’t pester me about it. This has REALLY helped me. Honestly, if she did give me a hard time when I started smoking again I just might have left her. I was really bummed about failing and the last thing I wanted to hear was someone giving me shit about it.
I guess what I’m saying is support her and let her fail if she does. If she does fail, help her overcome the issues that caused her to fail the next time around.
[QUOTE=Spezza]
I told everyone I knew. I haven’t smoked since.QUOTE]
Counter a psychological effect with another one. The brain part that wants you to smoke needs to be fighting another brain part that wants you to stop. So lay it on the line: Tell everyone! Make your brain feel sorta icky for stepping up to the plate, then having to slink away in defeat. “I can’t have this cigarette…I’d have to tell my mom, my sister, my yadayadayada…” And then everytime she sees people she has told, then she can say “I haven’t had a smoke in X weeks!” And they will all give her warm fuzzy feelings of support.
For the fiddling of the fingers and having something to do, I suggest stick cinnamon. You can play with it, nibble on it, carry it around, etc.
-Tcat
I third (fourth?) the recommendation for Allen Carr. Just go to any bookstore nearby, and buy that cheap paperback. Read it from cover to cover. It’s an easy read, doable in a few hours.
The Dutch government, eager to subsidize the most efficient way to help people quit smoking, has done some research. The Allan Carr method (which means just reading the book) has a permanent successrate of 20 %, which is far better then any other method, including willpower or patches.
Good luck !