Unexpected Experiences of an Ex-smoker

Two years ago, after smoking for 31 years, I quit. Before I did, I swore I would never become one of those smug, obnoxious ex-smokers who act holier than thou, who appear shocked - shocked, I say! - if anyone lights up a cigarette anywhere within their field of vision, who pantomime exaggerated expressions of disgust. They are worse, more puritanical in their anti-smoking fervor, than people who had never smoked at all. I hated them while I was smoking, and I vowed that I would never join their ranks, that I would be better than that. And yet, here I am, unable to resist writing a response to Wayne McDonald's article, Why I Smoke: Smokers Are Underappreciated by Society.

So why am I breaking my promise to myself and becoming the type of anti-smoking jerk who tries to get people to quit, even when they say they don't want to? It's because in Wayne's voice, I recognize my own. I had many of the same attitudes, many of the same beliefs, and I relied on a similar sense of humor and bravado. But some of the things I believed turned out to be false, and that's what I want to write about here.

Strange experience # 1: I felt calmer after I stopped smoking than I did while I was smoking.

I never would have expected this, not in a million years. I counted on my cigarettes to regulate my moods. For that, I loved my cigarettes as if they were my best friend. They would calm me down if I was angry or upset, they would wake me up and give me energy when I was drowsy, and they would add a little something extra to my best moments. They seemed like a magic drug, endlessly adaptable, responsive to my changing moods, giving me exactly what I needed at any particular moment. I thought it would be impossible for me to function without them. I thought my moods would go haywire, swinging from one unpleasant extreme to the other.

I was wrong. What I felt - and what I never expected to feel! - after I quit, was an unexpected sense of calm and well-being. Not all the time, but enough that I now consider it my baseline emotion.

My theory is that out of the hundreds of chemicals that are in cigarettes, at least one of them must have acted as an irritant in my system. While other chemicals in the cigarettes made me feel good, I think the irritant was also always there. It was subtle enough that I wasn't directly aware of it at the time, and am only aware of it now by the contrast in the way I feel in its absence.

It's been a significant change, and a visible one. People have told me that my expression is different, that my face has lit up since I quit.

Strange experience # 2: The cravings were nasty, but I discovered they differed only in intensity, not in kind, from what I had experienced as a smoker every single day for decades.

I thought by quitting I would be experiencing a brand new, inconceivable kind of hell that was not only beyond my past experience, but beyond even my ability to imagine. That scared me more than anything. But instead, what I experienced was just a variation of what I had felt 20 to 30 times every day, day in and day out, for all the time I had been a smoker.

Every time a smoker stubs out a cigarette, the nicotine withdrawal process starts right away, the pangs growing in intensity until they are extinguished by smoking the next cigarette. But stubbing out that next cigarette starts the cycle all over again. So a smoker's life consists of being in a state of withdrawal around the clock, punctuated only with ten-minute periods of relief.

The cravings that I experienced after quitting were like the ones I had experienced in the withdrawal that occurred in-between cigarettes while I smoked. True, the post-quit cravings were more intense, especially during the first few days, but they were not fundamentally different. I knew I could survive them, because I had survived the daily cravings as a matter of course while smoking.

The post-quit cravings were different in two ways, though. First, each individual craving would eventually fade away. While I smoked, the only way I knew to extinguish a craving was to light another cigarette, but after quitting I discovered that a craving would go away on its own after a few minutes if it was not fed a dose of nicotine.

The second difference is that unlike the daily cravings I had as a smoker, which never ended, the post-smoking withdrawal did eventually come to an end. Once I got through it, I was free.

Strange experience # 3: The more I paid attention to the cravings, the easier they were to deal with.

Or as the new-agey expression goes, what you resist will persist.

Here's how it works: Picture yourself as a Zen master or, if you prefer, a martial arts champion. Or as Yoda! Imagine you have great powers of meditation and detachment. When you get a craving, allow yourself to feel it fully. It is unpleasant, but you know that it will arise and then fall away, and you can observe and feel its unpleasantness, while it lasts, from a place of calmness.

Another good trick is to imagine you are a scientist. When a craving arises, observe it intently, but calmly, as if you were trying to learn as much as you could about what a craving feels like, but without getting emotionally invested in what you were observing. Just focus on being a good thorough observer.

These tricks work because each individual craving subsides on its own after a few minutes, and if you don't make it harder for yourself, if you don't panic and tell yourself omigodthisisawfulicantstandit, then you only have the misery of the craving itself to deal with, which is manageable, and not the added misery of the self-created panic, which is not.

Also, I found the patch helped a lot! Plus it gave me wonderfully vivid dreams.

Not-so-strange observation # 1: Scare tactics don't work

On this, I agree with Wayne. When I was smoking, I found that when people tried to scare me, that actually made me want to smoke MORE. What did feeling afraid make me want to do? Take a deep drag on a cigarette! Duh. Why did the fear-mongers never realize this? Show me a picture of a disgusting diseased lung, and my first impulse was to reach for a cigarette to distract myself and calm myself down.

Shaming was also counterproductive. It made me want to smoke just to prove that nobody could use shame to push me around, that I was able to resist such tactics. I think that on some level I must have always associated cigarettes with rebellion, because smoking started out for me as a way to assert myself as a teenager by doing something that was forbidden. And I think that at least subconsciously that association between smoking and independence stuck.

What did work for me was to think about what I was gaining by not smoking. Instead of thinking about scary diseases that might be averted in the future, I thought about what I was actually gaining in the present, focusing on the newly vivid flavors of my food, on the way I could run for a bus without gasping, on the freedom of getting on a cross-country flight without being terrified I would have a massive nicotine fit somewhere over Montana, on the money that I wasn't handing over to the lying tobacco companies.

Life became easier, rather than harder, after I quit. That was the most unexpected experience of all.