For various reasons, some smokers become more physically addicted to cigarettes than others. If you smoke within 30 minutes of waking, that’s a sign of a powerful addiction. Even “light” smokers can be addicted to nicotine and struggle mightily to go from five cigarettes a day to zero. But no matter where you fall on the nicotine-dependence spectrum, you can undo the wiring that years of addiction have put in place, and the strategies in this book will show you how. Before long you’ll be able to comfortably sit through a feature film, as well as enjoy all the other pleasures that come from a smoke-free life.
Smoking Without Thinking
Wheezing with every deep breath, Andrew Van Ness went to his college health center assuming he had a chest cold or an allergy flare-up. As it turned out, he’d developed a lung infection related to smoking. Twenty years old and otherwise healthy, Van Ness wasn’t convinced he needed to quit, but he did decide to cut back. “I told myself I would only smoke at specific times,” he says, “like when others were smoking or only when I was drinking.”
But instead of smoking less, Van Ness simply drank more to justify more smoking. And instead of waiting to smoke until he was around other smokers, he sought them out. His smoking patterns had become so ingrained, he says, that he couldn’t seem to disrupt them. “I’d get out of class and light up without thinking about it,” he says. “I’d finish homework and light up. After dinner, I’d light up. If someone else lit up, I’d light up.”
So much of what we do in life is controlled by habit rather than conscious decision-making. The half-decaf you order, the dollar you tip, the way you load the dishwasher, the brand of shampoo you buy — when you make these “choices,” you’re operating largely on autopilot. And so it is with smoking. The rituals you use to open a cigarette pack or hold and light a cigarette also reinforce these habits. Over time, you’ve made an unconscious connection between smoking and the activity, location, or feeling that came before it, whether it’s having a beer, sitting on your deck, or feeling stressed out. These become your triggers, your cues to smoke.
Your smoking habit is far more strongly rooted than, say, your shampoo-buying habit, because you’ve done it thousands, if not millions, of times and because the payoff linked to this habit is so pleasing and immediate. This connection may be so powerful that you become convinced you can’t pay your bills, start your car, or talk to your mom on the phone without a cigarette in hand. Even if you make a deliberate decision to stop smoking, you’re going to run up against a force that can defy common sense and your best intentions.
Habits like smoking are literally imprinted in your brain almost like a tattoo. As with a tattoo, this imprint can be removed, but only with serious effort and some discomfort. To quit tobacco for good, you need to dismantle your old routines and construct new ones. Andrew Van Ness did it, and so did Christine Burke. You can, too. Unlikely as it might seem now, you will find ways to drive, pay bills, celebrate, relax, collect your thoughts, and get through the day that are less destructive and more rewarding than smoking.
The Ties That Bind You to Cigarettes
Nearly a pack-a-day smoker, Van Ness was no doubt addicted to nicotine, and he smoked largely out of habit. But five or so times a day, he estimates, he’d pull out a cigarette simply to connect to good memories related to smoking. “When I’d smoke, I would think about parties I’d been to or hanging out with certain friends,” he says. “Smoking also gave me time alone to think about my future. I felt like: No one’s going to bother me now. My favorite cigarettes were the ones I smoked by myself.”
Emotional attachment to cigarettes can take many forms. You may, consciously or not, consider smoking integral to your identity — as a member of your family or your work crew or your part of town, as a rebel of sorts, as a young person at heart. Maybe cigarettes are the bond between you and your spouse. Maybe they’re your reward for tolerating a job that bores or exhausts you.
We all develop ties to places and people that don’t serve us well. Maybe you’ve resisted leaving a town that offers no opportunity because it’s a familiar place. Surely you’ve clung to an unhealthy relationship because the alternative — being alone — seems too sad and daunting. Ties just as strong and irrational can bind you to cigarettes. Nicotine addiction is the obvious reason so many smokers struggle in vain to quit, but don’t underestimate your emotional bonds with cigarettes.
You’re Addicted, But You’re Not Helpless
With more insight into your addiction, you might be feeling empowered to take it on. We hope so! But we also recognize you might be feeling more discouraged. Maybe you’re figuring the tobacco companies have rigged the game against you or that you’re hopelessly hooked. Maybe you’re thinking: I’m a goner.
Don’t believe it. Quitting probably won’t be a breeze, but becoming a nonsmoker is absolutely within your control. “There was a time when I declared quitting to be impossible,” recalls Burke. “Addiction is so complex that even an addict has trouble understanding it. I did and still do. But in hindsight I can see the biggest obstacle to ending an addictive behavior is fear.” In the next chapter, we explore common fears related to giving up cigarettes and help you overcome any anxieties that may be holding you back.
One morning when Amanda Abou-Zaki was 23, she looked in the bathroom mirror and recoiled at what she saw: “a soulless pod person, a zombie,” with pale skin, black eyes, and a bleak future. Having lost herself to cocaine, ecstasy, and methamphetamine, she’d hit bottom. That day she quit drugs for good and re-enrolled in college.
She also shifted her cigarette addiction into overdrive.
“I associated cigarettes with healing,” says Abou-Zaki, now 28 and a graduate student in psychology. “I told myself: I can quit drugs if I smoke.” So she did — more than a pack a day, sometimes a whole pack in an evening.
It took Abou-Zaki a year to realize that cigarettes were holding her back from achieving her dream at the time: recording an R&B album. “My range had changed. I couldn’t hold notes anymore,” she says. “After singing for an hour, I’d be exhausted, and my throat would get tired. People would say, ‘Have you been smoking?’”
Having quit cocaine and meth, Abou-Zaki figured she could fairly easily kick cigarettes. She couldn’t. “I realized I was super-emotionally attached to my cigarettes. I associated drugs with one emotion: wanting to escape. But cigarettes I associated with all emotions. When I wanted to celebrate, I smoked. When I was stressed or angry, I smoked.”
She smoked out of sheer habit, too. She’d done drugs once a day, in one or two places; she’d smoked twenty to 30 times a day, everywhere. “You start to associate smoking with everything: You wake up; you smoke. You eat a heavy meal; you smoke. You get into your car; you smoke.”
Adding to the challenge, smoking seemed to have no obvious, immediate downside. “When you’re coming off coke, your head hurts, you get hot flashes, your palms are clammy, you have a migraine. You feel like crap all day. But with a cigarette, you never say, ‘I smoked too much.’ There’s no comedown. It’s more subtle. You’re stressed out and irritable, but to fix that, you just go smoke.”
The first two weeks after she quit, Abou-Zaki was cranky and impatient. “I’d yell, ‘You’re in my chair — get out’ like a kid screaming, ‘Don’t play in my sandbox.’” To mark a fresh start, she splurged and got her car detailed. To sort through her emotions, she started journaling. To ease her stress and build stamina, she took up jogging. “Pretty soon, I could sing longer and hold notes longer,” she says.
One afternoon three months after she quit, Abou-Zaki jogged her