My father is 88. He quit smoking when he was 50. He says there are still times when he craves a Pall Mall.
I’ve “only” been off them for like 5 or 6 years and I feel like I could start again any time. I still picture myself smoking a lot. I miss it, I really do.
I consider myself “a smoker who doesn’t smoke” which I think is how alcoholics (ex) think of themselves too.
Marijuana plain and simple for me. We used to smoke (weed) and a friend would always have a pack of smokes. He’d offer up a butt after we’d get high, saying “it intensifies the effect”. He was right. Being that our bodies had no real defenses against nicotine and tobacco yet, that smoke would hit you like a ton of bricks and bump your high up quite a bit. So we’d end up doing that regularly with him until one day, you kind of want one of your own and then one more day, you kinda want a cigarette when you aren’t high…and there it is and how it goes. Took me 12 years to quit. It was hard to break down the habits more so than ditching the nicotine.
It was a hellish obsession. And it took forever. I thought about smoking all the time.
There was a commercial a while back. Guy sitting on a bench on a pier. He is saying to himself ‘Cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes…’.
A Great White Shark jumps out of the water and on to the pier, grabs him by the arm and starts to shake it like a dog with a chew toy. Still the guy keeps saying to himself ‘Cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes…’.
That’s what it was like. It faded over a while (months) and would flare up every so often before subsiding again.
[QUOTE=MichaelEmouse]
To people who stopped smoking (if only for a while), can you describe how withdrawal feels over time? How long until you’re mainly past the withdrawal?
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REALLY bad at first but, of course, it subsides over time. For me it was about three or four weeks of misery and that psychological tap on the shoulder telling me to go smoke. I was such a miserable soul that my wife told me that I should just go back to smoking…and she is the one who begged me to quit. I think I cried that night.
It took a good three months to fully get over the cravings and get to a point where i felt normal. After about six months I was fairly confident that I could be in a smoke-filled room without giving in to temptation. Probably two years before I was confident I’d never smoke again.
Peer pressure, times a million. When I was in school, smoking was an essential part of projecting a cool, tough and worldly image. There was even a smoking section set aside for these people (I wasn’t one of them, thank god).
Stuff like this did NOT help.
We had not one but two smoking areas at my high school. They were the basement entrances on either side of the building and included the vestibules. The nonsmokers learned quickly to use the side and front entrances.
Nonsense, nicotine is a great drug. Or so says Holman Jenkins in an op-ed in today’s Wall St. Journal, assailing FDA regulation of e-cigarettes.
“Nicotine is more like caffeine or aspirin—an excellent drug, with few serious side effects (though mildly addictive) and many fine properties: It relieves bad feelings, improves concentration, calms the nerves.”
See, it’s great stuff, nicotine. And only mildly addictive, like coffee.
There’s only one accurate answer: pure stupidity. These days, people know what smoking tobacco (or anything else for that matter) will do to their lungs and heart. Doing it anyway is just stupid, and we all know what Ron White says about that.
I used to smoke but I quit last Nov. I liked smoking and I miss it but my health were taking a hit so I stopped cold turkey.
I’ve quit drinking and pot with no problem. Quitting tobacco was the hardest because it’s so gratifying.
Congrats! That takes real effort. I bow in your direction.
Thank you. It was a bitch I tell ya.
I worked with some people in Narcotics Anonymous , and they said it was harder than quitting Heroin. A lot of that was due to the fact that ciggies and the temptation are everywhere.
That’s right. It’s the exposure. My nephew still smoke but outside and smelling him reminds me how disgusting it is.