We are nearing the end of Stoptober, which means thousands of people across the country will have managed to stop smoking over the last few weeks. If they have, they are now three weeks without smoking and have made it through the hardest part.
This has given me a moment to reflect on my own relationship with smoking and what it meant to quit. It might even be helpful to others still looking to quit.
Because I wasn’t an occasional smoker, or a social smoker. I was an inveterate smoker, an addict, always smoking somewhere between 10-15 a day. It was my instinctive response to stress, or high emotion. And more than this, smoking was very definitely tied up in my identity. It felt somehow fully intertwined with my rebellious teenage self, with my student years, with relationships and friendships, with my working day. It had cameo appearances in most of my best memories, and a few of the worst.
And this mattered, because I knew I needed to quit. I could feel the toll it was taking on my health. I often seemed to have a cough I struggled to shake. In the summer, when hayfever season kicked in, I could find myself wheezy and breathless, especially in hot weather. Above all, I worried about the increasing impact this could have on my wellbeing as I got older. But those worries were always about ‘tomorrow’. My addiction and triggers to smoke were always about ‘right now’.
After numerous failed attempts to quit using nicotine replacement, I started to read the Allen Carr book which someone had recommended. While there are many other effective ways to stop smoking, this book helped me to break down every reason I ever gave myself for why I smoked. I fully de-constructed them, and circled back to the crude, underlying reality – that I smoked because I was addicted to nicotine. Break the addiction, and all your ‘reasons’ fade away.
This is important to remember in current debates around anti-smoking policy, when people talk about the ‘freedom of choice’ to smoke. When it comes to addiction, freedom of choice is a rather awkward concept.
Interestingly, the book also tells you not to try to stop smoking until you have finished reading the book. Which was super handy for me, because I wasn’t quite ready to quit when I started. So, I somehow managed to keep reading the book over a 6-month period. But in the week before my 39th birthday I worked through the final chapters and on the morning of my birthday, I finished the book, very intentionally rolled and smoked a cigarette and then stubbed it out, resolving that that was the last cigarette I would ever smoke.
The days that followed were a pretty intense experience. I was in an almost constant state of unease, craving a cigarette, everything slightly a blur, with a lot of my mental space being taken up by inner monologues about breaking addiction and not being a smoker any more. I sometimes found myself walking towards the door of my flat as if going for a cigarette, only to have to physically turn myself around and say ‘no, you don’t do that anymore’.
After five days I felt the worst of the cravings had passed. After ten days, I no longer had cravings. But there were still some big obstacles to come. Drinking and nights out had always been the thing that broke my previous attempts to quit. I hadn’t drunk anything for the first two weeks of quitting. The first time I did, I met a friend who didn’t smoke. To my slight surprise I found that I could enjoy a couple of pints just as much. The next major test came a week later when I went for a boozy night out with a group of colleagues from work, all of whom would smoke socially. I had a good night and although it felt odd not to be smoking, I never really felt any strong compulsion to do so. I felt like I had somehow broken through to the other side.
And I had. I didn’t smoke another cigarette for two years after that. I must admit, I have sometimes smoked the occasional cigarette since then. An odd moment of weakness or curiosity here and there. But having fully broken my addiction, those occasional lapses have tended mainly to strengthen my disassociation with smoking. It actually wasn’t very pleasurable after all. It tasted and felt disgusting. I felt notably worse for it.
Quitting smoking feels like a kind of ‘sliding doors’ moment in my life, where I took a path that has led me to a better life; mentally and physically healthier, somehow more in control. And I feel hopeful that I’ve managed to dodge what would have been a likely future of declining health, longer-term serious illness and quite probably a life cut short. We need to do everything we can to help millions more remaining smokers make that leap.
Written by Andy from the CancerWatch Team