Psychological Warfare

The morning cigarette with a good strong cup of freshly brewed coffee... this is smoking for the pure indulgent pleasure of it. Arriving at work and sitting down for a few minutes to chat with the guys and have a quick puff before clocking in... this is habit. Reaching for a ciggie after taking a draught of cool refreshing beer... somewhere in-between.

I keep the chewing gum together with a packet of cigarettes. I'm a smoker, I can have a cigarette any time I choose. When the urge strikes, I reach for them both. At the moment, the gum is winning. I've smoked less than a pack and a half in the last week and a half, some improvement on a pack a day.

I make some rules about what I can and can't do, what I must do. Rules for a day, just to try them out and see how they go. I'm a smoker, so I can't 'fail' if I break them. "Today I must smoke 5 cigarettes"... "I must have a smoke when I don't feel like one". A big stumbling-block for quitters is when they're really good and fight the craving for weeks, then in a moment of weakness they have a few cigarettes and believing they've failed give up and go back to their old habits. I'm a smoker. Always will be. So this cannot happen.

Now I can thoroughly enjoy every cigarette I smoke. The way it feels in my fingers, on my lips. The ritual of lighting it. The sensation of drawing on it. The taste, the smell, being surrounded by the plume.

I continue chewing the gum long after it has yielded all of it's nicotine, it's a substitute for the oral gratification a cigarette provides. My jaw ached after the first couple of days, but I think that strengthened the muscles and I don't notice it now.

If I had known before that you get such a good nicotine hit from a piece of gum, I might have started using it years ago. Replacing the 'habit' smokes with gum has turned out to be remarkably easy (at this early stage). In fact, so good is the hit, that when I do smoke one of my strong cigarettes now, it tastes like a much lighter one and I'm left wondering where the kick is. The gum provides a lot more nicotine than a cigarette does, so possibly my tolerance has increased. I read something about how addictions form and stabilise at a certain level somewhere once, I'll have to look it up again.