I'm quitting smoking...

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Hey, I've been smoking for almost three years, I am 17 now and I am ready to quit,
upto now I've smoked at least 10 a day and I need some advice and support please.

The reasons I want to quit is to be healthier (obviously), but I want to look healthier too, a more fresh and even complexion and I don't want this addiction to continue into my adulthood, I think whislt I'm still growing the long terms effects won't be severe and my body will be able to recover more effectively from it.

The longest I have been without a ciggasrette is one day, I'm currently looking for a job and wanting to kee busy to help me control my cravings, I also find that eating healthy and drinking water helps too (I'm not sure why).

Any other advice would be appreciated, preferably from ex-smokers?

Thanks

Oh and does a rollup contain as much nicotine and harmful stuff as a standard cigarette?

I wish you the best of luck!

I quit for six years using nicotine patches.

Then, I went back to smoking and quit twice for two months going cold turkey.

Then, I cut back 2 cigs a day (I kept a chart) and stayed quit for 8 months.

I plan to use that method again, as I will quit soon too.

That's great, you have more motivation than I have lol,
starting from tomorrow I'm going to take this seriously, I try to tink to myself 'it is possible to quit, you can physically control your hand and not touch the ciggarette packet'.

Every night I'm goigng to post my progress on here until I start to feel the benefits, it might not interest anyone on here but keeping a kind of diary that I can ead back on will help me alot.

i've never smoked nor do I have any advice but I'd like to wish you good luck!

I just wanted to wish you the best of luck! My Mum used to smoke 5 packs a day and she hasn't smoked for 25 years. Even after all these years, she doesn't call herself a "non-smoker", she just says she doesn't smoke. It's a psychological thing.

For her to quite, she took up eating carrots. Every time she got a craving, she would eat a carrot. The problem was that with all of that beta carotine (she ate A LOT of them), she skin went orange.

Best wishes with your plans to quit. If you want online support, we've got your back. Here's another nice site, too:

http://www.becomeanex.org/#learn_overview

good luck. i ues to smoke. i do not smoke now.
i like not smoking.

Thankyou guys!

Go cold turkey, after the third day the nicotein is no longer in your system so you're not addicted, it's just habit after that.

Do not deceive yourself. Smoking does great damage at any age. Stay away from tobacco (especially cigarettes) if you value your life.

ruveyn

All the best!! !! !!

Good luck -x-x-ANONYMOUS-x-x- you can do it!!

Think of all the nice things you can spend your cigarette money on instead.

It's possibly even worse than that - if I remember right, there's more mutagenic harm done to the rapidly-dividing tissues of a young 'un than there is to an old fogey like me who has stopped physically growing. But at least you haven't had enough time to accumulate much damage.

I stopped smoking very recently - this is Day 4 for me - after about 46 years. So I'm heavily addicted in theory Luckily I found nicotine gum helped me to cut down to 5 cigs a day (and they were only small hand-rolled ones), and now after a couple of years of low consumption I've switched to a hot-nicotine delivery system ("electronic cigarette") which is a much stronger thing, and feels a lot more like really smoking. It's taken a lot of the withdrawal symptoms away. The downside is that it's probably just as addictive as real smoking, and the health effects are still unknown, though I can't believe they're anything like as bad as cigarettes. If I were you I'd try cold nicotine first (if you can't do cold turkey), and keep hot nicotine as a doomsday option. For one thing, in spite of the manufacturer's claims, it might not save you any money, and it's possible to take in a lot more nicotine from the e-cigarette than you would from ordinary cigs, because it's so clean and easy to use, and then your physical addiction could increase.

For some reason I find the taste of hummus is quite helpful in staving off the cravings, also soft cheese with garlic.....I don't know whether that's because the taste somehow mimics the taste of smoke, or whether it's just that I like those foods. It's definitely worth surrounding yourself with whatever comforts you can.


When I first read that, I thought it must be incorrect, because the addiction is said to continue for 3 months on average (longer than for heroin!) - but on reflection I recall giving up on holiday and the cravings did get a lot less after about 3 days. Indeed, I felt extremely ratty on Day 2 of my current abstinence, especially during the evening, but it's somewhat better now.

One thing I've always noticed it that the temptation to smoke is worst at the times of day when I used to smoke (lunchtime and evenings), and in the places where I used to smoke (at home). I don't seem to crave smoking at work because I haven't smoked at work for many years. This weekend is therefore likely to be a very testing time for me. If I get through this weekend without smoking, I expect it won't be as difficult next weekend. The idea that it'll be easier next time if I don't give in this time keeps me going.

There's a lot you can do to help your abstinence, but there's no substitute for will-power, unless you can get somebody to lock you up in a padded cell for the duration.

Good luck!

Okay, basically, nicotine has a "half-life" of two hours--that is, half of it is processed out in two hours, half of the rest in the next two hours, and so on. Each two hours cuts the amount in half. In three days, there'd only be negligible quantities left; and some time before that, your body would have started readjusting to its absence.

Nicotine messes with your acetylcholine levels. That's a neurotransmitter involved with learning, memory, energy levels, etc. Nicotine kind of mimics acetylcholine, so your body thinks it's getting more of it than it ought to. That leads to down-regulation of the receptors, because your body's always trying to maintain a steady state; after a while, you end up with fewer receptors for acetylcholine and/or less production of acetylcholine, which is why you end up "needing" the nicotine to keep the same steady state as before. There's a secondary effect with endorphins too, and more with other neurotransmitters, and there are other effects in the rest of the body (heart, blood vessels, lungs, kidneys, etc.). Point being, nicotine changes the way your brain works because in the presence of nicotine, your brain is trying to keep a steady state, so it adjusts itself to a new state that only keeps the right levels of different stuff in the presence of nicotine.

That's tolerance. It's a good thing, really; without all those feedback loops your body would get completely out of whack and you'd probably die the second things changed enough to throw you off homeostasis.

OK, so you're tolerant to nicotine. When your nicotine level drops, your brain's suddenly missing one of the things that keeps it at the steady state it likes to have, and suddenly it's less efficient. That's the irritability you get when you can't smoke for a while. So you pick up another cigarette, and the missing piece is filled again, and your brain's back up to normal operation. But what just happened? Think psychology. You just reinforced a behavior--stimulus, response. Very much like ABA, actually--obey your teacher, get the M&M. But in this case it's not somebody else doing the conditioning; it's your own body.

That's where the cravings come from. It's the second way your brain adjusts to nicotine--by learning. Learning is more long-term than tolerance; and it's a real, physical change in the way your neurons connect.

Those first three days or so will take care of the tolerance problem, if you can suffer through them. It depends on how fast your brain adjusts; but it can adjust--create more receptors, start producing the right amounts of the neurotransmitters. It's the same procedure as what originally got you hooked, only in reverse. The brain re-establishes its steady state, starting as soon as your nicotine levels start to drop; and the longer they stay down, the closer your brain gets to restoring the homeostasis that makes you feel normal.

Just taking care of tolerance doesn't solve everything because there are still some brain changes remaining. While you don't have the physical cravings anymore, it's more complicated because you spent a while smoking. You probably started out with just the physical stuff; but over time, it got tangled with everything else--emotional, social, situational. Quite another sort of conditioning altogether--while you originally had a smoke because your brain wanted it, you started to associate it with other things, which are now stimuli for behavior just the way the cravings are. Because every time you had a cigarette, you were rewarded, every situation associated with that event started to have the same meaning. Someone who's been smoking for a while has Pavlov ringing multiple kinds of bells in his head to touch off cravings even after physical tolerance is all but gone.

So, yeah, you have to re-learn. Extinguishing a behavior is difficult. People who use patches are trying to break the second sort of addiction--the conditioned one--because it's a way to break the stimulus-response cycle without also having to cope with physical withdrawal at the same time. There are a lot of ways to change behavior, but they all boil down to either substituting another behavior or removing the reason the behavior took place.

But you haven't quit successfully unless you can deal with both sorts of stimulus--the physical craving and the conditioned one--without giving the expected response.

^
You're right, there's more to it than nicotine addiction, and nicotine replacement therapy alone isn't enough. I probably need to pay more attention to the psychological factors.

I was puzzled as to why the designer of the e-cigarette bothered to incorporate a red light at the end of the device, and why did it have to generate steam? At first I thought it was either to confirm that the device was working, or just pointless gimmickry.....I was just thinking "cut the crap and just give me the nicotine hit!" But I'm beginning to realise that the whole idea is to mimic the look and feel of the smoking experience as closely as possible. None of these features have anything to do with physical addiction, they're there to fool my brain into thinking I'm smoking. Even the weight of the device plays a part - for a while I coldn't understand why I was disappointed that it was rather heavy.

Curiously, a friend of mine got caught out by ignoring the nicotine side of the equation - he figured he could smoke as much as he wanted to while he was away from home, because that was unlikely to have much effect on his tendency to smoke when he got back home, as the environment was so different. The problem was of course that when he got back home again he got nicotine cravings, and as his relationship with his partner was giving him a lot of stress as well, he was soon back to Square One. I don't think anybody's mentioned stress yet as a factor - not that it's an easy one to control, but I'm sure that when you're stressed out, that's when your resolve is likely to break. It's caught me out lots of times.

I once used my cigarette lighter to light a Bunsen burner in a laboratory, and was astonished to find myself putting my other hand to my mouth so that I could draw on the cigarette that wasn't there! It was the first time I'd ever used my lighter for any purpose other than to light a cigarette. It came as quite a shock to realise how my body had been programmed to do something that I hadn't consciously willed it to do. It was a classic Pavlovian response, made noticeable only because my brain made a mistake. I've read that most of us tend to intuitively feel that everything we do is the result of conscious decisions.