So I'm quitting smoking. It's no biggee, I've done it before...
No seriously, I smoked my last one at lunch. I smoked it carefully, attentively, then I crushed it out and looked at the expended butt. There it is, I thought, the last one.
Yesterday, I was pretty stressed and my brain tried to convince me that quitting under stress would only make matters worse. Today things have actually taken a decent upturn, and now my brain has commented that a celebratory cigarette would be just the thing. It's like having my own propaganda machine, churning out reason after irrational reason for giving it what it wants.
Last time I quit (for all of three days) I experienced my fingers feeling like they were floating off my hands. That was pretty cool. Then that subsided, and it became more of an annoying -- but ignorable -- hunger.
The breaking point for me was when all that stopped, and I simply had to look out over the vast plain of the rest of my life and know that cigarettes wouldn't be a part of it. That thought -- no cigarettes again, ever -- was just too much. I lit one as a "reward" for getting through three days -- and I was back in flavor country.
So this time there will be no reward puffs. There may be some nicotine replacements; Commit lozenges were recommended by a coworker. But the biggest difference is this time I am going to analyze the thoughts my brain is generating about smoking. It's actually quite entertaining, watching all the hoops it's willing to jump through to get what it wants.
We'll see, eh?
Dave