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Share your quitting journey

Changing your perspective to pull you out of a crave~A Repost from 3/26/13

JonesCarpeDiem
Member
0 6 17
‎08-22-2014 10:23 AM

i had surgery yesterday morning and was put in a bed in pain, not wanting to move. i was in one position for 13 hours tied to the leg compression devices, iv's and a catheter, drifting in and out of sleep.

the 14th hour i woke up and i felt literally trapped. my back was sweating, it was itching from lack of blood from being so long in the same positon.

i wanted out of that bed. i wanted to find a stairwell where i could get some outside air. (think of this as the crave...the desire to smoke at any cost)

I knew if i called the nurses, they would not be able to react in time to help me. could i even explain  the level of panic i had reached with my fearful mind?

that scared me even more. i was trapped. nothing could get me out of the mind funk i was in.

think of this as the worst crave you could ever experience people. full blown panic.

so I tried to think of something to break the focus on the negative and you know what i did?

i put on my glasses...I had not had them on all day because they were behind me and not within my reach and, everything had been out of focus. Putting them on cleared my mind and calmed me down immediately. i was then able to call the nurses to explain that i had not moved for 14 hours and i was itching to the point of going crazy. one nurse got me on my side propped with pillows but the itching persisted. another nurse came in, saw my back and asked me if i had been scratching? my back was bloody from my fingernails. the second nurse washed my back and put on some powder. in 20 minutes the itching had subsided. when i got home today, i felt the scratches burning on my buttocks and back which reminded me of the bad place i had been and prompted this comparison to a crave.

So....all this talk of distracting your focus....

biting into a lemon, letting an ice cube melt in your mouth, laughing out loud, sticking your head in the freezer for 15 seconds and breathing the cold air, etc... this is how you do it,

changing your perspective for just that moment is all it takes...then, you're still on the way forward instead of going backwards.

ps never once thought of a cigarette!

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About the Author
Hello, My name is Dale. I was quit 18 months before joining this site and had participated on another site during that time. I learned a lot there and brought it with me. I joined this site the first week of August 2008. I didn't pressure myself to quit. HOW I QUIT I didn't count, I didn't deny myself to get started. When I considered quitting (at a friends request to influence his brother to quit), I simply told myself to wait a little longer. No denial, nothing painful. After 4 weeks I was down to 5 cigarettes from a pack a day. The strength came from proving to myself, I didn't need to smoke because I normally would have smoked. Simple yes? I bought the patch. I forgot to put one on on the 4th day. I needed it the next day but the following week I forgot two days in a row I put one in my wallet with a promise to myself that I would slap it on and wait an hour rather than smoke. It rode in my wallet my first year.There's nothing keeping any of you from doing this. It doesn't cost a dime. This is about unlearning something you've done for a long time. The nicotine isn't the hard part. Disconnecting from the psychological pull, the memories and connected emotions is. :-) Time is the healer.