25 août 2009
Little habit
"Nasty little habit?" We are true drug addicts in every sense! That’s right, look in the mirror
and you'll see an honest to goodness drug addict looking right back.
This is one of the most harmful rationalizations of all as it minimizes the risk of using
nicotine products in the minds of our children. While it clearly takes time and repetition to establish a habit, research suggests that “experimenting” with smoking nicotine just once
may be sufficient to begin fostering a loss of the autonomy to stop using it.
Adoption of the “habit” rationalization is also disabling to those already enslaved. Instead
of learning and living on the right side of the “Law of Addiction,” we reside in a pretend
world where some day we’ll awaken and at last discover how to control, mold, modify or
manipulate our nicotine use, so as to allow us to use or not use nicotine as often as we
please. At last we’ll discover how to have our cake and eat it too, ” or so we dream.
The phrase "nasty little habit" is just more junkie thinking. Such soft fuzzy words are used
to self minimize the hard cold reality of being chemically married to and dependent upon
nicotine. It’s much easier to tell yourself that all you have is some "nasty little habit." The
warmth of the phrase is akin to that found in the word "slip," a means to sugarcoat relapse
and failure.
Failing to use turn signals while driving is a "nasty little habit" and so is using too many
cuss words, cracking our knuckles or maybe even losing our temper too often.
But, we will not experience physical withdrawal symptoms if we start using turn signals, stop using cuss words, stop cracking our knuckles or when we learn to keep our temper in check. Chemical addiction does foster habits but it does so by forcing each of us to select patterns for the regular delivery of our addictive drug. Our addiction fathers our drug feeding habits, not the other way around. We would never develop a habit of sucking smoke into our lungs while talking on the telephone or after a meal unless the consequences of constantly falling reserves compelled us to do so. Nicotine dependency is extremely dependable. Our blood-serum nicotine level always declines by roughly half if we fail to replenish within two hours. We can depend upon our mind to begin issuing subtle urges to remind us that it is time to bring more nicotine into our body. Calling nicotine addiction a habit is like calling a young child a parent. It didn't take any two hours for my mind to generate the anxieties needed to compel me to smoke more.
At three packs-a-day, if I was on the phone and had not filled my nicotine tank in the past 15 to 20 minutes, then, like call waiting, a second message from my brain’s insula arrived, reminding me of my need to feed. Even food refueling would take a backseat to nicotine replenishment if the meal lasted much longer than 30 minutes. It limited uninterrupted driving time, romance, learning, exercise (if you can call it that), work, living and nearly every aspect of my life. Yes, it was almost always nearing time for another fix. Yes, I developed habits but not just for the sake of having habits. There were only two choices - smoke more nicotine or prepare for withdrawal. I wish it were just a "nasty little habit," I truly do. But, truth is, my name is John and I’m a recovered nicotine addict. Comfortably, I live just one puff away from three packs a day.
12 août 2009
Freedom Starts with Admitting Addiction
It was not easy looking in the mirror and at last seeing a true drug addict looking back. I felt like I was surrendering, that after all those failed attempts I’d lost, that I was a total and complete failure. But as horrible as that moment felt, doing so was the most liberating event in my life. It was then and there I no longer needed the long list of lies I’d invented to try and explain my captivity, my need for that next fix. Yes, there were countless times during my 30 years of bondage where I’d told myself that I was hooked or addicted.
But not until early 1999 did it hit me that, like alcoholism, it was for real. It was then that it hit me that I was no different from the methamphetamine or heroin addict. Dr. M.A.H. Russell, a psychiatrist and addiction researcher at London’s Institute of Psychiatry had me pegged all along. “There is little doubt that if it were not for nicotine in tobacco smoke, people would be little more inclined to smoke than they are to blow bubbles or to light sparklers, ” he wrote. “Cigarette-smoking is probably the most addictive and dependence-producing form of object-specific self-administered gratification known to man.” These now famous quotes by Dr. Russell date back to 1974.
Over the years, millions of nicotine addicts have tried proving Dr. Russell wrong. In January 2003, a Miami based company, the Vector Group Ltd., began marketing a nicotine-free cigarette called Quest in seven northeastern U.S. states. A novelty item, thousands of smokers rushed out to purchase their first pack of nicotine-free cigarettes but locating any smoker who returned to purchase a second pack has proven near impossible.
We would no more smoke nicotine-free cigarettes than we’d smoke dried leaves from the backyard. Hello! My name is John and I’m a comfortably recovered nicotine addict. It is not normal for humans to light things they place between their lips on fire and then intentionally suck the fire’s smoke deep into their lungs. Nor is it normal to chew or suck a highly toxic non-edible plant, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. We rationalize such irrational behavior because of the neuro-chemical reward we can steal by performing the act; a nicotine induced dopamine explosion.
Cuddling up to the warm, cozy rationalization that, at worst, all we have is some “nasty little habit” serves the tobacco industry well. While habits can be manipulated, modified, toyed with and controlled, nicotine addiction is an all or nothing proposition. The industry knows that so long as its marketing continues to sell nicotine addicts on the idea that they’re in full control, that they will likely continue to hand the industry their money until the day they die. Regardless of the delivery device or method used to introduce nicotine into the bloodstream, fully accepting that nicotine dependency has permanently altered our brain not only simplifies the rules of recovery, it provides the key to staying free. Thousands of words but only one guiding principle for keeping our dependency permanently under arrest ... No nicotine today! 67
05 août 2009
Stop using nicotine
any attempt to stop using nicotine is met with a rising tide
of anxieties. Soon, old nicotine use “aaah” memories that fill our brain memory banks
begin looking like life jackets. Instead of staying afloat for the up to three days needed to
navigate the roughest seas and see the emotional storms at last peak in intensity, hungry for
calm, in the mind of a nicotine addict the instant and obvious solution is to take the hook
and bite on old “aaah” memory bait.
We seek and find relief in the exact manner our
addiction conditioned us to generate relief. We reach for the very thing from which only
hours or days ago we were trying to flee. We reach for nicotine.
As illogical as it may sound, we convince ourselves that we can succeed if we just have a
little now, that we can stop using nicotine by using it. We sell ourselves on the belief that
this is our reward for having briefly succeeded in going without.
This quick fix isn’t a solution at all. It is a guarantee of continuing bondage within a cycle
of nicotine-dopamine highs and lows, a lower-intensity storm that’s never ending.
If an underlying current of physical withdrawal anxieties isn’t sufficient to get us to bite,
we face the conditioned consequences of years of nicotine feedings that involved
replenishment patterns that did not go unnoticed by the subconscious mind.
Our subconscious became conditioned to associate various activities, locations, times,
people and emotions with using nicotine. It learned to expect arrival of a new supply of
nicotine in specific situations or under specific circumstances. Insula driven urges, craves
and anxieties alert us when a conditioned use situation is encountered. Normally the urge
is so subtle it goes unnoticed but we reach for nicotine to satisfy it nonetheless.
This classical conditioning bell, like that which Pavlov used to teach his dogs to expect
food and start salivating, must now be un-rung. We must extinguish the flame of each
established feeding cue that we lit through association. But encountering a feeding cue
during a time when brain nicotine reserves are at or near depletion can trigger a brief yet
powerful anxiety episode. While seemingly unmanageable, and while recovery time
distortion can make minutes feel like hours, the episode will last less than three minutes
and is entirely manageable, as detailed in Chapter 11. Contrary to what we then feel, those
three minutes are extremely short lived in comparison to a life of addiction.