Heh, I’ll bet there are previous threads on this, but I’m not Jesus, so resurrect a zombie? No way!
Anyway, here’s the situation. I’ve been a smoker for 15 years. Smoking more and more heavily, till I’m almost up to a pack a day.
You would think that watching my stepfather die of throat cancer, and my stepmom trying to live with emphysema, would make me throw those cigs right out, wouldn’t you?
Well, I’ve tried several times, and I can manage the cravings, but every time, about 2 weeks into it, I get really depressed. Not “I want to cry all the time” depressed, but “Everything sucks, life is just a big black hole, it’s all pointless, why am I even alive” depressed. (Not suicidal, though!)
I get to this point where I’m scared the depression will never end, I can’t take feeling that way, and I start smoking again because I just can’t deal with it.
I’m sure I’m not the only person to get depressed after quitting smoking, but what I need to know is: Is there an end to it? Can I tough it out for another week or two, or will it take months to go away? How do I deal with it while it’s happening?
FLL this is how it went for me. I quit in September of 2014 and was cruising along with little issue until early November when the depression kicked in. And it was hard to get out of bed some days. Then by late November it was mostly gone. But it did come back in January in the form where everything remotely sad would make me cry. But by April it was all gone and life has been so much as a non-smoker than it ever was as a smoker.
I am not telling you my story to scare you, just to say that, yes, there is a light at the end of the tunnel and before you know it you will look back and hardly even remember what life as a smoker was like.
I took Chantix to help me quit and one of the side effects of that is depression. It kind of stomps the life out of you so you don’t want to do anything - smoke, eat, laugh, get out of bed, etc.
So I can’t say if the act of quitting made me depressed, because I was sort of deliberately doing it to myself by taking the drug.
But you gotta assume that the act of reducing your stimulant intake will definitely leave you unstimulated and depressed. Not fun at all! But I think you will be capable of “righting the ship” and replacing your loss of stimulant with some other stimulant. Something healthier this time like exercise or video games.
The idea of saving money, no longer being smelly and adding years to your life and whatever other personal reasons for not smoking you have should be sufficient to drag you through the dark times and get you on the road to complete success!
I actually felt good while I was quitting. I had just had a heart attack and stopped cold turkey. Obviously I survived but while I was quitting I felt really much better than I had in months.
I had been smoking something over a pack a day for maybe 12 years. For about 10 or 15 years I still had a fantasy that I had been diagnosed with something fatal that meant I might was well start again, but I haven’t had that feeling for decades and I hate the smell of cigarettes.