I've yet to try to quit, like I said the main problem stopping me is that I truly enjoy it too much. Call me stupid for it, I fully understand just how stupid it sounds/is. However I know a few that have tried, and quite unsuccessfully. One of my co-workers gave Chantix (sp?) a shot, and it didn't work for him. He said he would have terrible headaches, very bizarre nightmares, and it caused him to evidently sleep walk because he'd wake up in strange places in his house with no recollection of how he got there. After a couple times of that he stopped taking it. Another friend went the patch and gum route, and he stopped smoking for a few months but ended up hooked on the gum instead.
I've come to the conclusion that when I get my shit together and decide to give it a shot, that the only proper way to do it is to just go cold turkey. I know it'll be one of the hardest things I'll ever do, but dropping one addiction for another makes fuck all sense in my book.
I was a smoker, cigars, pipe, and Marlboros. The key ingredient to breaking the addiction is desire. If you have not found a reason to stop, you won't. You can try all the OTC and Rx out there, and it will be a waste of time and money. If you want motivation, consider this: You are running a gamble between two deadly things, and cancer is not one of them. 1. Cardiovascular effects can lead to heart attacks that you may or may not survive. If you survive and continue smoking, it will happen again to an already damaged heart muscle. 2. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is directly from smoking. There are small cillia, small hairs, that line a good portion of your lungs breathing tubes. They act as filters, and they move inhaled crap from deep in the lungs up to the parts of your airway that make you cough, and get rid of some of what has been inhaled. Smoking does two things to these cillia: first is that the cilliary movement stops, and you have stopped your lung's clearing ability. Second, after a few years of smoking, the cillia just do not grow back. Soooooo, you have small chronic subclinical(You Don't Know About It) lung infections going on throught both lung fields nearly all the time. This causes scaring in the lungs, and it becomes harder and harder to breath, exhaling in particular. At this point you are smoking while breathing oxygen, and struggeling to do much of anything at all; a true pulmonary cripple.
All that said, you are gambling that you have a massive heart attack and die from that, or you become a pulmonary cripple who will be having trouble moving enough air to talk, eat, stand and walk, etc. I have not even touched on the variety of cancers that smoking is directly linked to. There are things now available the can make it easier to stop. You have already thrown up roadblocks in your head for Chantix, and Nicorette. Because there are side effects for some, does not mean it will happen to you. I used Chantix, and it made it really very easy. I had no side effects, and continued to smoke while on Chantix. After about 5 or 6 days, I found that the desire to smoke dropped to zero. I found that if I smoked or not made no difference at all. I stopped buying Marlboros. I stopped smoking. I then went off the Chantix and I was a non-smoker. There are still times I would love a cigar, and a smoke of some sort. I have a small mantra in my head that says," just don't buy any today"; "just don't do it today".
The bottom line really, is you have to see the need to stop smoking. Without that nothing you try will work. We have a thread or two about this, use the search tool, and you will see where quite a few on this site have stopped smoking. It really is up to you, and today smoking is becoming more and more of a taboo. They make it pretty hard to smoke at work, and just about any place else. I'd say that there is plenty of incentive, you just have to tune into that and apply it to your life.
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:wall:... you should know that by now... jeez RF1, you are getting a bit slow lately...
