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.