Any advice on how to stop Smoking Cigarettes?
I have quit smoking 3 times with the same system. And I mean quitting smoking and going about 5-7 years without smoking, then for some reason going back to smoking 6-12 months and again I quit.
The system is the same as a doctor would use if he had prescribed you an addictive drug when it comes to withdrawing it: gradual reduction of the doses. It is also useful to stop or reduce coffee consumption: if you drink 5 coffees a day and you want to quit, if you do it all at once you will get a terrible headache, extreme lack of energy, etc. If you reduce 1 coffee every 5 days, you will not even notice it.
In the case of nicotine, the gradual reduction is difficult to do with cigarettes, because they are more addictive as nicotine rises quickly in the brain. That is why it is better to use chewing gum, but to use chewing gum you have to use the initial dose that leaves you as satiated as cigarettes. Let's say you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. Then, 10-12 nicotine gums should be enough to feel satiated. If you start with 12, go down by 1 gum each week. When you go for about 3 gum a day, you will be able to quit at once because the nicotine dependence will be so low that you won't even notice it.
The physical nicotine dependence will be gone within four weeks. It's barely noticeable, with withdraw symptoms just like an empty stomach feeling, nothing more. That's why it's easy to quit. The fear factor that the neurotoxin introduces, is the greatest barrier to quit. Before you even light your last cigarette, you start to fear what's happening after the last one. In reality, there are only good things happening, getting back taste and appetite, energy, lung volume, better heart rate and blood pressure, losing the withdrawal stress (which makes up the "relaxation" effect of the "next cigarette").
Psychologically, the dependence is similar to heroin. It goes on for years, in the very back of your head. As soon as you touch it, your body chemistry remembers it and you instantly become physically dependent again. Once you're over the four weeks again, you naturally don't want to touch it UNLESS there is psychical co-dependence.
Example:
My mother's neighbor smoked 4 packs a day for decades, lies in bed after his fourth (!) stroke, unable to quit. He's down to one pack a day now, though he tried everything. He's a very cool type of guy. Turned out he doesn't feel cool without a smoke between his lips. And there's that. He should have worked on feeling cool without the damn stick in his mouth, then he would have been able to quit easily.
Basically you have two choices when you try your first smoke: Leave it forever as the disgusting thing it really is, or discover some "benefit" and stay hooked for a lifetime, unless you discover that the "benefit" was total bullshit.
For me, it was the "rebel" in me at the age of 15 that got me going with smoking. I discovered that i could be a rebel without tobacco about 15 years later, was able to give it up after three tries, five years later. God bless vaporizers, by the way.
In the end, it's irrelevant HOW you leave it, as long as you don't think you gave something up that is of some value. It really isn't. It's just ugly shit to get you hooked, so you can feed the tobacco industry and pay taxes on it for a lifetime. Pretty clever...
