One of the hardest things for me to hear around this community was “smoking does not relieve stress”. Hogwash! It most certainly does! For an ex-smoker to claim otherwise is appalling!
But, once I wrapped my mind around the deeper truths, it made a lot of sense.
First, back in the days when we had never touched a cigarette, we dealt with stress in any number of ways that did not require smoking. In the moments just before we took the stage in the middle school Thanksgiving assembly, we never once chain-puffed a Marlboro Red because of our stage fright. We simply took a deep breath, waddled across the stage, and just…did it. This one example reminds us that we were always supposed to handle stress without the need for cigarettes or smoke breaks.
But, we did end up using cigarettes and smoke breaks, so let’s talk about that now…
When we smoked a cigarette on a very peaceful day, we got a mood-boosting high from the nicotine. But, when our bodies metabolized that nicotine, we got a nerve-prickling crash from drug withdrawal. We felt antsy and irritable and needy, and we had to smoke again to fix it. In this way, even on a calm day, smoking a cigarette deliberately set us up for craving and using another cigarette. You see, it perpetuates the hunger for itself, and feeding that hunger cycle, in turn, places a stress on us. A specific stress that we would be oblivious to, had we never smoked a day of our lives.
Now, on a hectic day, when we experience an outside stressor that is not nicotine related, the act of smoking can distract us away from any actions we could be taking to deal with the stressor. Procrastinating with a smoke break does not address the stressor. It’s an emotional delay tactic we use to hide from the problem, to stuff the trouble down, and bury it under a “high” until the stress (hopefully) goes away.
On the flip side of this scenario, we are free to stomp away from the stress in order to cuss, to shout, to cry, to breathe, to collect our thoughts, to plan, and to act. All these things can happen without smoking a cigarette on top of it. And billions of non-smoking (and ex-smoking) people across the planet already practice these exact things, every day, in times of stress. No smoking required.
Throw in the fact that, over the course of a nicotine addiction, it takes more and more of the drug to reach a level of “normal” that is less than the level of actual normal that a non-smoker enjoys., and you’ll see that cigarettes never relieve us a fully as is naturally possible, otherwise..
And let’s not even think about the intentional stress and sorrow you’ll wallow in for days and days if you purposely throw away your quit because of some stressful “whammy” that only lasted 7 minutes.
Yes, smoking a cigarette does relieve the stress of the high-low, up-down cycle that the cigarette is guilty of creating in the first place. And, yes, it does provide a handy escape for avoiding the task of facing stress.
However…
Smoking is not a teachable stress- reducing tool.
Smoking is not proactive against stress, it is reactive to stress.
It is not a healthful method of solving problems.
It is not an enduring, long-lasting stress relief.
It is not an emotionally-authentic means of dealing with situations.
It is not an effective coping mechanism.
How could it ever be genuinely effective?
It’s either causing stress, itself, or enabling you to run and hide from stress!
No, smoking does not fundamentally relieve stress, my friends.
Not in the ways we thought it did.
So, let’s think differently now.
STORM: 417
