hi Dale, hope your well! but how do you separate your emotions from the quit when emotional issues are the first thing that come up when you let go of nicotine....in my case nrt , i m still smoke free 4years already
Catch yourself before you build your emotional state out of control? But some stuff or situatians or arguments make us angry or sad or irritable how can we not do that anymore? Is the self talk I dont get emotional anymore or i dont have nicotine no matter what anymore?
@ rainbow - the self talk for me now is "don't go there. Just don't go there." VERY hard to do with negative emotions. And my success rate is not great, but it's improving slowly. Thought control, I'm finding, is just another skill. Like quitting, it takes much practice. The more you are able to step back and out of the emotion and become a fly on the wall, the better able you are to SEE it and then control it. The problem is that we get caught up in the whirlwind of emotions and at that point we're coming at the them from the inside out, rather than the outside in. And it's much harder to detatch ourselves. A craving isn't that much different than an emotion, it seems to me. (I mean obviously it's physiological, but it feels like an emotion.) So the idea is to catch the thought just as it's happening - that "ohhhhhh I want a cigarette," and then immediately stopping the thought dead in it's tracks by saying to yourself, "don't go there."
Thank you Dale and Giulia for the responses. I understand it much more now. We have to experience them without nicotine which is harder at the beginning bc we are extra sad without the nicotine and then hopefully it levells out and we experience them as non smokers do and get angry instead of extra angry!
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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.
