Free NHS Stop Smoking Quit Kit

Smokers are being offered a free “quit kit”, featuring calming audio downloads and a stress toy, in an effort to help them kick their habit in the new year.

The NHS Stop Smoking Quit Kit, ordered online or over the phone, will provide smokers with a range of aids to help them to give up, including a toothbrush [absolutely crucial] and a “health and wealth” wheel to calculate the money saved by ditching their cigarettes.

Some useful statistics from this Times article. Smoking related diseases currently cost the NHS £2.7 billion a year but the government makes £9.9 billion a year from tobacco taxes. This also assumes that 'smoking related diseases' really are due to smoking as the two people I know who died of lung cancer had never smoked - air pollution anybody? The cost of this Stop Smoking Quit Kit is £2 - less than half the cost of a packet of fags in the UK.

Some 44% of smokers will resolve to stop smoking in the new year (is 'resolve' the right word here?) and only 5% will have truly quit by the end of the year. As usual with news articles it isn't clear if this is 5% of 44% - and hence just 2.2% of smokers overall - or 5% of smokers, giving a success rate of 11% of those who vowed to quit.

As usual, the NHS keeps pumping money to the pharmacos for alternative nicotine drug delivery systems, euphemistically and erroneously called nicotine replacement therapies. They don't work because the addiction is not to smoking but to nicotine and the alternative delivery systems suck in terms of buzz. Except that the NHS cannot be seen to support things like electronic cigarettes as this would look like supporting a habit rather than trying to stop it.

If you like receiving freebies in the post, then the new kits are available by calling the NHS Smoking Helpline 0800 0665 826, or visiting the website http://www.nhs.uk/smokefree.

What Happens When You Quit Smoking? Nicotine Tolerance

This is a page from About.com's Smoking Cessation guide and includes a short video about what happens when you stop smoking... or at least according to them. It says that repeated exposure to nicotine results in tolerance to the drug. Except that this isn't true. Nicotine is the opposite of drugs such as cocaine and, as every smoker knows, it only takes one puff to get high. What develops is a nicotine sensitivity - not tolerance - and the withdrawal symptoms are due to the brain's pleasure circuits screaming for another hit. Just a little will do, but as nicotine's half-life in the body is about 2 hours this means a little but fairly often.

I just wish About.com would correct the error but figure the video would be a pain to edit.

How to Start to Stop Smoking

The brain is an amazing organ. Just thinking about the complexity of keeping you walking, talking, working, sleeping and all the myriad tasks needed to just keep you alive is mind-boggling. So much so that most of this machinery is kept well away from our conscious mind. You know what it's like fiddling with the default settings of a piece of software when deep down you haven't a clue what you're doing. But we are curious creatures. Sometimes we can't stop ourselves from meddling with those default settings. Sometimes we learn new things about ourselves. Sometimes we forget what those default settings were.

Self-Indulgent Preamble

What the internet really needs is yet another site about the evils of smoking tobacco, the futility of nicotine addiction and the long journey out of slavery. So why bother? Well, out of curiosity, really. I wrote an article some time ago about electronic cigarettes which quickly expanded to include the biochemical and neurophysiological effects of nicotine. It then struck me that many methods to quit smoking were doomed to failure as there seemed little awareness of what was really going on deep below our manifest craving for a smoke. This got me thinking and this blog is the result. This is an experiment on myself to see if my ideas on paper actually work in practice. Sure, I could have tried it out, kept a journal, then publish the results. But where's the fun in that?

How to Start to Stop Smoking

Like I said, the brain is an amazing organ. Our mind, our conscious awareness of it, is equally astonishing. We are able to construct and remember a vast model of our universe and our place in it. Unfortunately, this model is not always very accurate. Our mind will often forsake truth in the name of utility. Events are tagged and stored with an emotional quotient that is often more powerful than any rational overview. This is perhaps not surprising as the brain is the central processing unit of a neurological network whose activities we largely describe in emotional terms, be it anger, love, hate, boredom or craving for a cigarette. Pure thought exists only on paper; our sense of what is true or false is as much an emotional reaction as a rational one. This has serious implications for what appears to be the very simple process to quit smoking.

On the face of it, quitting to smoke involves not doing something. What could be easier than not buying cigarettes? However, the consequences of doing so (or not doing so) are obvious to every smoker. Rather like not going to work one is faced with what appears to be a kind of mental bankruptcy. The craving for a cigarette – actually, the craving for nicotine – engulfs our whole world to the exclusion of most everything else. We weren't born this way, so what happened? What happened is that nicotine has altered the wiring in your brain. Nicotine has changed some of the default settings without your conscious awareness. The good news is that this can be fixed. The bad news is that... well, there isn't any bad news. There is, however, the need to find an emotional state where not smoking is stronger than smoking.

I see so many people posting online that they have set a 'quit date'. Such days usually come and go with nothing much being achieved. I've done so myself in the past. There is always some particularly propitious day just round the corner where the planets have aligned themselves just perfectly for you to stop smoking. I think it's all a delusion. The best day to stop smoking is the day when you know you're going to. I'm not going to talk about willpower as that seems a speculative concept. What I do want is a method that will lead to that 'Aha!' moment where doubts have been banished, or at least overridden.

As I said above, rational thought and the search for truth are also suffused with emotional content. So we need a rational method that will lead to an emotional reaction. Thinking about all those logical and virtuous reasons to quit smoking somehow doesn't work. Even taking a decision to quit smoking doesn't always work in the light of the following morning as you light up that first cigarette. So many people also flounder within the first week, shredding their idea of having a will and the power to see it through. In short, the reason why none of the methods have so far worked is that you didn't have any emotional attachment to your decision. In truth, you didn't really believe you were going to stop smoking. Once you know that you're going to quit, then any method will work.

Write It All Down

The most important equipment needed to stop smoking is a pen and paper. Yeah, that sounds trite, right? Well, a large part of the brain's activity is to process inputs from our senses. We usually think of our inputs as coming from our five senses. However, eastern philosophies have traditionally thought of our conscious thinking as another input – a sixth sense. The chattering monkey that we hear daily inside our heads is not considered to be the fundamental personal 'I' but as a mental process of which we are only sporadically conscious of. This change of view will also be important later on when dealing with those demons that crave a fresh hit of nicotine. For now it suffices to say that the consciousness that is conscious of one's own rational thought I will call awareness. This doesn't lead to an infinite regress nor to the little person inside our head idea. Those who have practised some meditation may already know what I'm talking about, for everyone else just bear with me on this one!

The point here is that writing everything down is using three senses rather than just the one thinking sense. Your thoughts are made concrete and hence become another external input for the brain to process. There is now a lot of data that people who are concentrated on a particular task, be they a scientist, writer or artist, often get their greatest breakthroughs seemingly out of nowhere as flashes of inspiration. However, such breakthroughs only happen after a long hard struggle with their particular problem. The brain continues to process the problem behind the scenes – out of sight is definitely not out of mind. But the problem has to be important enough for the program to keep running in the background, otherwise nothing happens. So by writing everything down you are using your touch and motor skills to actually do the writing (or typing), your eyes to read the text and your mind to process and reprocess the information until you get a breakthrough. At the same time you are increasing the priority level of your task.

Quitting a nicotine addiction is going to be a whole-person quest so it's best to set it a high priority. It will involve changing the wiring in our brains and will play havoc with our biochemistry. This is going to be an experiment in personal re-engineering. Anybody who thinks this is going way over the top should look back at all the failed attempt to 'give up' in the past. Quick-fix methods love to quote the fact that nicotine leaves the body fairly quickly. What they fail to mention is that the rewiring in the brain caused by the nicotine may take three to six months to return to its default configuration. This is not a sprint but a marathon, so it is best to really really want to be there at the starting line. On the plus side, you will discover that you have some control over parts of your mind you perhaps had never thought of.

If I appear to be saying the same thing in different ways then that's because I am... and will continue to do so. The point about writing everything down is that at some point you are going to find that killer thought that is going to dispel any doubts about stopping smoking. We all have the experience of reading something that hits us as unquestioningly, undeniably true – that is your emotional reaction to your personal truths. If I'm lucky that will happen to some of you reading this blog. But rather than waiting for a chance encounter with your personal truth I think it is more productive that you try to find it for yourself using your own words. Just start with two simple questions: “Why do I smoke?”; and “Why can I not stop smoking?” Many people start with “Why should I stop smoking?” but that strikes me as being too far into the future and too prone to finding very good reasons that never get acted upon. We want to focus on the 'now', the reality of what you do now, what you feel now and how to find the key that will make you stop smoking... now.

There are many ways to write this all down, but the key to not losing track is to proceed in a question-and-answer fashion. Firstly, I think that actually writing, with pen and paper is preferable to typing. There will be a lot of rewriting and linking of thoughts and I've yet to find a good way to do that on a computer. Yes, there is brainstorming software, some of it for free, but as the ideas and text increase your monitor doesn't and navigation becomes a serious issue. Brainstorming just seems to work better on paper. Starting a journal is something many advise but if you feel a little self-conscious about having a personal diary then call it whatever you like – I used to call mine 'Research Notes'. One other method is to use a card system, such as blank postcards or indexing cards. This means you can write the question on one side and the answer on the other side. Those cards for which you don't yet have a good answer are the ones to focus on. Every answer should then prompt a follow-up question so that your whole system soon expands like a network until you reach the point of action. The actual method is not so important so long as it is all written down. You will end up with a conceptual map about the state of your own mind, a mirror held up for you to look at yourself. It is therefore also important to be brutally honest. The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung once said that a large part of his job was listening to people lie to him. Once they were bored lying they would start to tell the truth and then his work would begin. Remember, every answer must have a follow-up question. If you lie to yourself this dialogue with yourself will come to a grinding halt. Somewhere in this network of ideas lies the key to your taking action. You'll know it when you find it.


Follow-ups:

Did you find this useful?

Have you ever set a 'quit date'? Was it successful or not?

Is the write-it-all-down method helpful?