Hey Blake,
I haven't bee nto this site in quite a while and just happened to see your post and question.
Is your addiction mostly psycholigical? Well despite what all the quit smoking experts want you to believe, the answer is YES.
Nicotine is a fast acting Alkoloid. Within 72 hours most of it is out of your system. All of it is out of your bloodstream. This is when withdrawal usually peaks and starts to decline. Within 10 to 14 days all withdrawal usuallu stops, but it is really the first few days when it is most noticeable.
When you smoked again, it wasn't because you physically needed nicotine. Cold turkey didn't fail you. It was simply a mistake that a lot of people make when quitting...They smoked one. To quit smoking you have to do just that...quit all together. That means not one puff.
So you have to ask yourself. Why did you smoke after you quit? Was it nostalgia, alcohol, stress? Were you with your smoking firends and thought just one was OK to have?
These are the psychological triggers that people quitting must overcome.
What makes quitting so hard is not the strangle hold that nicotine has over us. It is the belief that we hold in the cigarette, because after years of smoking the physical addiction created a psychological belief
Check out my post Believing in the cigarette and it will show you a brief description of some of the beliefs that smokers have.
A lot of people have to deal with fear and believe it or not, a lot of the times when quitting,people's fear is the fear of success, because they feel that they are giving up something. Smokers are giving up nothing. They are getting rid of an absurd useless addiction.
Smokers don't get to smoke. They HAVE to smoke. Smoking doesn't relieve stress. It creates it. Smoking doesn't make people calm, it is a stimulant.
The only thing that a cigarette can really do is relieve the anxiety feeling that the previous cigarette kept creating. An anxiety that should have never been there in the first place.
That's not pleasure. That is a prison. To have a poison ( yes nicotine is drop for drop more deadlier than strychnine by 2x than arsenic by 3x and the diamond back rattlesnake's poison by almost 2x) hamper the smokers own natural neurotransmitters only to be tricked into thinking that we feel better when we administer the poison that created the void in the first place.
If you want my opinion. Read Allen Carr's book and watch Joel Spitzer's free video's and PDF book. You can google both.
Education is key and you can smoke your last cigarette.
Eric
I freed myself on 7/7/04
