Quit Smoking and Nicotine

China Expands Smoking Ban to 7 Cities

2010-02-16T01:14:00.000+07:00

Chinese authorities plan to expand smoking bans in indoor public places across 7 major provincial capitals. But the numbers just don't look too promising.

Smoking is a huge business in China: 2 trillion cigarettes are sold in the country every year. The country accounts for more than one-quarter of the world's 1.3 billion smokers, with about 60 percent of Chinese men and 3 percent of women indulging in the habit.

Taxes from tobacco sales topped 416 billion yuan ($61 billion) last year, up 26.2 percent from 2008, according to a report issued last week by the state tobacco industry regulator. Interest on government loans to the industry added another 97 billion yuan ($14 billion).

A lot of this money is raised by the provinces rather than central government, making it even harder to curb cigarette sales. Stressed out local administrators will probably need a few extra packets now.

[Yahoo Finance]

Electronic Cigarettes - Quit Smoking or Quit Nicotine?

2010-02-16T00:44:00.002+07:00

The electronic cigarette was developed in China in 2004 and designed to replace the smoking of tobacco cigarettes and cigars. In spite of indoor smoking bans sweeping across the globe, many smokers are finding it difficult to quit. There are a variety of nicotine replacement products but these drug delivery systems in no way replicate the smoking experience. The e-cigarette is different in that it aims to both deliver nicotine and also simulate to some extent the experience of smoking a traditional cigarette.

Using an E-cigarette

The e-cigarette, or e-cig, consists of a mouthpiece containing a cartridge with a nicotine solution, a heating element or atomizer, a lithium-ion battery holder and finally an LED at the tip of the e-cig. The way e-cigarettes function means they also contain some electronic circuitry and an airflow meter. They come in different designs, often made to look like a fountain pen so can be discreetly kept in one's pocket but also available as a replica cigarette.

Using an electronic cigarette is pretty much like one of those nicotine inhalers one can buy in the pharmacy. There is no need to switch it on but rather just inhale through the mouthpiece. The airflow sensor then becomes activated and switches on the heating element. A short burst of heat vaporizes a little of the nicotine solution which is then inhaled. At the same time, the LED at the tip of the e-cig lights up showing that the battery is functional and the device operational but also simulating the burning tip of a tobacco cigarette. The nicotine vapour is largely absorbed through the lungs, just like tobacco smoke. Exhaling actually creates a “smoke” vapour even though, obviously, the tip of the e-cig doesn't emit smoke. After an e-cig puff the device switches itself off automatically.

The Smoking Experience

One question that arise is why develop an electronic device, with the possibility of it breaking one day, when there are already cheaper nicotine inhalers on the market? The motivation here is that the experience of using an inhaler is just not particularly enjoyable. It may be an effective nicotine delivery method, but it tastes like... well, like nicotine! On the other hand, e-cigarettes come in different flavours depending on the cartridge used, some of them even trying to duplicate traditional brands such as Marlboro and Camel. As has already been stated, the real aim of the electronic cigarette is to replicate the smoking experience, not just to deliver nicotine.

The nicotine solutions are available in different strengths and flavours with the main solvent being propylene glycol. Different recipes exist, sometimes with tobacco essence added or flavourings such as menthol. Rather like some pipe tobaccos e-cigs also come in exotic flavours such as strawberry, vanilla or coffee. Although tobacco smoke contains a huge cocktail of chemicals the novelty of the liquid nicotine ingredients has raised concerns about their safety. According to the US Food and Drug Administration, propylene glycol is considered safe for human consumption in foods and medicines, but there are indications that inhaling the chemical can cause irritation to some individuals. The profile of electronic cigarettes has suddenly increased when they were exhibited at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2009. There are many online stores selling them and they can also be bought on eBay. The arguments as to their safety and their legality have just started to heat up.

Are E-cigarettes Healthier Than Tobacco?

Early marketing of e-cigarettes advertised them as a healthier alternative to tobacco cigarettes, some going so far as to claim WHO approval. However, the World Health Organisation stepped in with a strongly worded disclaimer. "The electronic cigarette is not a proven nicotine replacement therapy," said Dr Ala Alwan, Assistant Director-General of WHO's Noncommunicable Diseases and Mental Health Cluster. "WHO has no scientific evidence to confirm the product's safety and efficacy.” The organisation does go on to say that clinical tests are urgently needed. There have now been some tests done in China and the UK, with New Zealand seemingly at the forefront of research. However, the Health New Zealand website claims that government funding for research is not forthcoming. In the USA e-cigarettes can be sold as alternatives to cigarettes as they contain no tobacco but are not approved as smoking cessation products. It is thus becoming clear that there are real moral and liberty issues here. Is quitting smoking the same as quitting nicotine?

Quit Smoking or Quit Nicotine?

Products such as the electronic cigarette highlight the fact that tobacco smoking and nicotine addiction are two separate issues. Yes, tobacco has been the main transport mechanism for nicotine intake. But we are in the situation where one nicotine product – tobacco – is freely available and highly taxed, whereas any other nicotine product needs clinical trials and sold as a medicine. This all starts to smell like the lobbying efforts of tobacco companies. But is nicotine bad for humans? Long term tobacco use is certainly unhealthy yet cigarettes are still on sale. But the idea that smoking cessation nicotine products actually work is highly debatable. The way that nicotine reacts in the brain and body means that even a small amount will keep the nicotine addiction thriving. Although due testing of the chemical cocktail inside e-cigarettes is definitely needed for health and safety reasons, the product should be welcomed as a stigma-free non-polluting alternative to tobacco cigarettes. But some governments disagree.

Are E-cigarettes Legal?

The eBay Australia auction site has this week (late January 2009) removed all e-cigarettes for sale after the Federal Department of Health and Ageing stressed that every form of nicotine, except replacement therapies and cigarettes, are classified as poisons. In October 2008 the National Drugs and Poisons Schedule Committee reiterated their earlier stance that e-cigarettes were a form of poison, thereby making it illegal to sell them. Although illogical and ridiculous to class the same chemical as poisonous in one product but not in another, the real reason is that the Australian government sees e-cigs as an insidious product designed to hook non-smokers onto nicotine and then onto smoking tobacco. They fear a similar sequence of events as with alco-pops. Across the world, laws on e-cigarettes are currently in utter confusion with some countries like the UK openly accepting them whereas many others classing them as medical products and needing to comply with the same regulatory requirements as other medicines. The question needs to be asked again: is nicotine bad for humans?

The Effects of Nicotine

What does nicotine actually do to make it so addictive? For a detailed explanation please read the Wikipedia article, but the important thing is that nicotine passes through the blood-brain barrier and increases the levels of various neurotransmitters. “It is thought that the increased levels of dopamine in the reward circuits of the brain is what is responsible for the euphoria and relaxation and eventual addiction caused by nicotine consumption.” Nicotine also increases the flow of adrenaline (or epinephrine) which is a stimulating hormone and increases the heart rate, blood pressure and breathing. Many other hormones and neurotransmitters are activated but just these two show that the same nicotine can have opposite effects. This is largely determined by the quantity of nicotine in the system, with low levels causing a stimulating effect and high levels acting as a sedative. In this respect nicotine is unique when compared to other drugs, with amphetamines showing the opposite profile.

Its effects as both a stimulant and a sedative don't yet explain its addictive nature. The addiction seems to be due to the effects of dopamine on the reward pathways in the brain. Bizarrely, as dopamine levels increase the brain tries to compensate by decreasing its natural production when not smoking. Because of this decrease in background level the brain also increases the number of dopamine receptors so it can react more sensitively to the lower default level. This then means that just one puff of a cigarette will increase the dopamine level to such an extent as to activate all these extra receptors. This is the buzz of that first cigarette of the day. It is also the reason that nicotine increases the sensitivity of the reward pathways in the brain. Again, this is the opposite effect of other addictive drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Although nicotine withdrawal symptoms are mild compared to, say, heroin, those brain receptors and neural pathways take many months to return to their pre-nicotine levels.

Is Nicotine Addiction a Medical or Moral Issue?

Now, the medical profession seems happy enough to prescribe mood altering drugs to millions of people and yet somehow nicotine is an evil that needs to be fought. Perhaps because it is a natural product and freely available without prescription that it needs to be either banned or brought within the pharmaceutical industry. The development, manufacture and sale of electronic cigarettes has caught them by surprise and needs to be regulated. The “soma” pills taken in Huxley's Brave New World could very easily be nicotine tablets. But perhaps, with a cultural history of smoking cigarettes people might prefer an e-cig rather than a pill.

So perhaps the case against nicotine is not a medical one but a moral one. Being addicted to anything means not being wholly free. Being addicted means having to do things to feed the addiction. This can cause other parts of life to suffer as a consequence. The negative health effects of smoking tobacco is proof of the power of addictive behaviour in spite of the consequences. But we now know that it is not the smoking that is addictive but the nicotine in the smoke. In a bid to halt smoking related illnesses there has been a worldwide drive to make cigarettes expensive and socially unacceptable. Replacement therapies give an illusion of attacking the underlying problem whilst at the same time feeding the nicotine craving. But quit smoking aids are really not much fun! In the e-cigarette we have a product that users seem to enjoy and delivers the needed nicotine without the tobacco smoke. Perhaps governments should just ban the sale of tobacco and switch to e-cigs. The tobacco giants would love that! Watch and see who owns the e-cigarette manufacturers to see how this story will end.

For the moment, electronic cigarettes are easily available online but do check the regulations for your particular country or risk the possibility of them being confiscated by customs. The arguments for and against e-cigarettes are only just beginning.

What's in a cigarette? The FDA Finally Wants to Know!

2010-01-19T10:48:00.001+07:00

The US Food and Drug Administration is finally trying to do its job. By June 2010, tobacco companies must tell the FDA their cigarette formulas - for the first time ever. The companies also have to hand in any studies they have done on the effects of such ingredients... cough! cough!

"Tobacco products today are really the only human-consumed product that we don't know what's in them," Lawrence R. Deyton, the director of the Food and Drug Administration's new Center for Tobacco Products and a physician, told The Associated Press in a recent interview. [Yahoo]

However, the FDA won't be publishing cigarette recipes any time soon as the disclosures are still subject to trade secret laws, but they do promise to publish a list of any harmful ingredients.

Cigarettes and their smoke contain more than 4,000 chemicals; among them are more than 60 known carcinogens, according to the American Cancer Society. But scientists say they can't yet tell all they'll learn from the new data because so little is known about how the chemicals combine to affect people.

One major problem is the difference between what is in an unlit cigarette compared with what is in the inhaled smoke. The two cocktails can be very different. Just compare what happens when you burn plastics.

The shift from nicotine addiction through cigarettes to nicotine addiction through smokeless products is going to be a slow crawl.

Barack Obama Quit Smoking to Run for President

2010-01-11T13:51:00.002+07:00

Today's The Times runs extracts from a new book about the behind the scenes personal dramas of the candidates running for the US presidency in 2008. High calorie gossip feed, but one revelation was that Barack Obama's wife, Michelle, was less than enthusiastic about his bid and only gave her support after extracting some concessions.

"It was only after he promised to quit smoking, be home on Sundays and attend his daughters’ parent-teacher meetings and music recitals that she finally swung behind his bid." All very heart-warming, but in relation to his stopping smoking this should serve as a great counter-example to those who put off quitting because their life seems too stressful.

Imagine running for the Democratic candidacy and then for President of the United States. Now there's a stress-free life! Quitting whilst your life is genuinely stressful - rather than the false stress of a nicotine withdrawal - means that many of those smoking triggers get trampled underfoot. Waiting for a time of tranquillity is just another excuse not to quit.

Will we be seeing the "Obama Guide to Quit Smoking"? A marketing pipe dream.

Yes We Can! [Notice the power of propaganda. I will come back to this another time to create our own positive propaganda slogans.]

Training to Quit Smoking

2010-01-07T07:41:00.001+07:00

If you're a smoker chances are you wish you would quit. Chances are you also think that you can't. Rather than waiting for a bolt of lightning to push you into your nearest smoking cessation clinic, this is an opportunity to prepare yourself. After all, there is already an inner conflict: to smoke, or not to smoke. You are consciously aware of the dilemma but don't as yet have the tools to override years of unconscious conditioning. Nicotine addiction is partly physical and partly psychological. The first obstacle is the psychological conditioning that you are a smoker, and always will be. The first real barriers are the physical withdrawal symptoms. Put those two together and it is no wonder that most people recoil from stopping to smoke. It just feels like too much pain, right?

One thing that struck me was that very little has been written about training to give up smoking. Yes, I can see those eyebrows have shot up in amazement. How can anybody train to stop smoking? It just sounds like another lame excuse to carry on smoking, right? Well, not if it's done properly. As I see it, you're already in that majority of smokers who would like to stop. Rather than waiting for some divine guidance or, more commonly, a stern warning from your doctor that you're killing yourself, this is a time to look at your dilemma really closely.

What if you quit smoking right now? Yes, you've had your last puff without knowing it. What's going to happen if you stop smoking this very second? As the nicotine level in your system drops you will start to feel withdrawal symptoms. If you can get through a few days the nicotine will have disappeared but the wiring in your brain is still primed for another nicotine hit. Your desire for a smoke will manifest at every opportunity. All those behavioural triggers will start going off and you feel as if you are staggering through a minefield in a daze. What equipment did you bring with you to get you to the other side safely? Nothing, I bet.

Those smokers who go through some quit smoking programme, either online or at a clinic, will (hopefully) be given all the tools they need to quit. The problem here is that they are given the tools at a time when they desperately need them, suffering an altered state of mind and with no idea as to what works and what doesn't. Sure, there's no way to make drug withdrawal a pleasant experience, but there's also no reason to make it worse than it need be. Most things in life require some training, whether it's learning to drive, getting a degree, playing a sport or even smoking! Yes, hard to remember but I don't think any of us went from non-smoker to smoker with a 20-a-day habit on day one. Parts of our body hated those first cigarettes but parts of our brain loved them; so much so that we trained ourselves to love the whole experience in spite of our rational misgivings. So it is time to train ourselves to be free from the conditioning of nicotine.

Let me first say a few things about what I mean by training. It is not an easy way to stop smoking because you haven't as yet committed to stop smoking. The aim of training is two-fold: firstly to tip the dilemma in favour of quitting to smoke; and secondly, to practise those techniques that will help you navigate through those desires to start smoking again. I repeat, training is not the real thing – you have not yet given up smoking. Thinking that this is a gradual path to cessation is wrong and will inevitably lead to a feeling of failure. Except that you cannot fail because you haven't quit yet. So relax and start to learn something about yourself, your body and your mind. When you're ready to quit you'll know it.

I would bet that there is nobody in this world who would sign up to run a marathon with absolutely no training – nobody. The strain on the body would likely kill the runner before half way. Training for a marathon has both a physical and a psychological dimension to it. Slowly increasing the distance run is sensible. Running just 5 or 10 miles during training is not a failure to complete a marathon because you're not running in one – you're training. Similarly, there comes a distance at which every runner feels they can't go any further, that their body just can't do it, that it's physically impossible and that other marathon runners must be either superhuman or crazy. Then they discover that they too can carry on and go all 26 miles. Passing this barrier is both a physical and psychological test and both tests need to be passed to be successful. This barrier never completely goes away, but with training the runner can recognize it for what it is and breeze past it with confidence. Training to stop smoking has the same aims: to experience and learn how to breeze past those barriers to total smoking cessation. Hopefully, the former smoker only has one marathon to run, so best be well prepared.

One other myth I'd like to dispel: that this training is somehow a gradual quit smoking technique. One consequence of the various techniques may well be that your smoking will decrease slightly, but this is a side-effect and not the main aim. I think to quit gradually is a recipe for disaster. Cutting down from 40 to 30 cigarettes a day may not make much difference, but everybody is going to hit a brick wall when they get down to the minimum smokes needed to maintain their nicotine level. At that point you will be suffering permanent withdrawal symptoms and still be nowhere near quitting. At that point you may well be ready to sling those cigarettes away for good and commit to stop, but that is a decision you have to make consciously. Experiencing and learning to manage withdrawal symptoms is part of the training but there is no point in feeling so miserable that you give up both the training and the desire to quit smoking altogether. If a technique is not working then find one that does. Much better that you discover what works for you now than finding out when you really need it. Remember, there is no relapse from training because you haven't quit smoking yet.

Let me go back to what I see as the two pillars of this training to quit smoking. These are Motivation and Techniques. As I said at the start, most smokers would like to quit. They are therefore already aware of a dilemma, but the reflex action of a nicotine addict is to reach for the next cigarette. The first aim is to study this dilemma more closely until you reach the point where the desire to quit is overwhelming. All the bad news about smoking related deaths and all the smoking bans in the world are not going to stop an addict getting his or her nicotine fix. But just as there are triggers for smoking so there will be triggers that make you sit up and seriously think about quitting. The art is to use your rational mind to retrain your unconscious mind. It isn't going to be easy but you can do it.

Imagine driving along a superhighway at full speed. Those years of smoking have created a kind of psychological motorway that links your nicotine product to your pleasure circuits in the brain. It's a wonderful piece of engineering and gets you from A to B in 10 seconds. But you're tired of this and long for a better experience. You get off the motorway and try a more scenic route, only to find a dirt track. The scenery is indeed great, the air is clean but the road is terrible. However, this is your new road of choice. As you drive up and down this track it starts to get smoother. You will soon find that your dirt track gets a layer of tarmac, and you can still see the motorway in the distance overgrown with weeds and potted with cracks and holes. You now have a great road and great scenery – you have re-engineered your brain.

The second aspect is to learn various techniques you will need to navigate those inevitable withdrawal symptoms. These are both physical and psychological in nature and, sadly for the addict, those memories of nicotine dependence never entirely disappear – that motorway may look abandoned but it is still there to entrap you if you ever for a moment consider using it again. Where the motivational aspects are more intellectual, the techniques have a more practical basis, although the two should be done at the same time. The first horrible lesson is that you are a slave to nicotine. The second lesson is that you also have the keys to your own freedom. Luckily, the brain is plastic and our minds flexible. We can train ourselves to take a more detached stance towards our body and our mind. What may be experienced as an insatiable craving for a cigarette is just a bunch of chemical signals – the bark of your slave master ordering you to fetch that nicotine. But you've broken free of your jail; you can still hear the bark and you can still see the prison but you're perched on a hill and can ignore it all.

The techniques come from a range of sources and largely involve in some way re-engineering ourselves. Freedom from nicotine is a return to your natural mind but it has probably been so long since you thought for yourself that you may be surprised at what you discover. To think that you can just throw the nicotine addiction away with the cigarettes is, I feel, simplistic. This is an opportunity to learn new things about yourself and new abilities you perhaps had never considered. To start that journey before committing to quit smoking may actually create the motivation that has so far been lacking.

Research Finds Quitting Smoking Increases Diabetes Risk - How to Eat Properly Again

2010-01-06T10:56:00.000+07:00

A study by U.S. researchers found that people who stop smoking have a 70 percent increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the first six years without cigarettes as compared to people who never smoked. The risks were highest in the first three years, and returned to normal after 10 years.

The study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine journal, looked at almost 11,000 middle-aged adults who did not yet have diabetes from 1987 to 1989. The patients were followed for up to 17 years and data about diabetes status, glucose levels, weight and more were collected at regular intervals.

The researchers said they suspected the increased diabetes risk comes from extra weight gain common in people who quit.[Reuters]

Diabetes is reaching epidemic levels, with an estimated 180 million people suffering from it around the world. [Has anybody taken a serious look at the role of carbonated drinks and junk food?]

OK, my suspicion is that a lot of the weight gain experienced by smokers quitting is due to a lack of understanding as to what is going on in the body. When nicotine hits the body it creates a number of reactions. The most common is the release of dopamine and the lighting up of our pleasure circuits, but nicotine also releases adrenaline and another chain of chemicals that are designed to prepare the body to fight or flee. This pathway prepares the body and mind to be in a state of red alert. The digestive system shuts down and stored energy from our sugar and fat reserves is released in preparation for action.

By smoking cigarettes the smoker has been trained to bypass natural feelings of hunger as well as being 'fed' at the same time due to the release of energy reserves. All of this happens in about 10 seconds! In contrast to this, having a proper meal will also release dopamine and distribute energy to the body but this now takes about 10 to 20 minutes to achieve. That postprandial feeling of well-being is your reward for keeping the body alive. But the smoker has been used to an immediate rush and this natural system feels like the slow train to nowhere.

The lesson here is to re-learn how to eat normally. Expecting an immediate high means potentially eating for the whole 20 minutes until you can feel the effect. This is now a recipe for over-eating and hence weight gain unless accompanied by an equivalent increase in metabolic rate through exercise. Nicotine has been quite literally feeding your body but deluding you into thinking you don't have to feed yourself. It has also artificially increased your metabolic rate by an inappropriate fight or flight response when it was totally unnecessary. Now that you no longer need to panic over nothing you don't need to call on those energy reserves and so, yet again, you may experience some weight gain as the energy input now exceeds your energy output.

It is also entirely possible that as a former smoker your addictive personality has merely transferred the addiction from nicotine to food. This is possibly the main reason for chronic weight gain. However, a small increase in weight after quitting smoking is normal and merely means returning to a more natural eating pattern and more real physical exercise. Our current society seems at times to be designed around making us all addicts of something, be it nicotine, pharmaceuticals, carbonated drinks, computer games, whatever. Having gained freedom from one addiction should give you an insight into addictive behaviour and start to ring huge alarm bells - if you can spot it.

Regards eating, avoid carbonated drinks as they are poison - drink natural fruit juices or water instead. I know, water is dull so I often squeeze half a lemon to add some natural taste. I personally avoid chewing gum as I find it totally pointless - all it does is delude the body into thinking you are eating thereby releasing gastric juices but with nothing to feed on except your saliva. I'm not suggesting going on a diet but if you find yourself reaching for food as a replacement for smoking then make sure that extra food has a minimum number of calories. You may also find yourself eating more often but with smaller portions. This is perfectly natural - it was replacing lunch with a couple of cigarettes that was unnatural. The whole aim is to avoid big spikes in sugar intake whilst maintaining a constant and healthy supply of nutrients. Your body knows perfectly well how to distribute what you eat - just don't overload the system.

The Best Books on How to Quit Smoking Are Free

2010-01-05T13:11:00.000+07:00

Nicotine addicts are easy prey. Just take a look at the myriad adverts to stop smoking the easy way, quit smoking without pain, simple smoking cessation methods, nicotine replacement therapies and a seemingly endless gallery of quick, easy, almost magical methods to be free from nicotine addiction. The huge irony here is that the vast majority of former smokers were successful by using a largely unadvertised and essentially free method: their mind.

Yes, sure, people need to make money and considering the thousands you've spent on cigarettes then spending a bit of money so as not to spend another thousand on nicotine is an understandable investment. But the most important investment you need to make is in reprogramming your mind. How to do that is largely the focus of this blog. But I have found two books that come very close to my initial intention, and best of all, they are both free online.

"Never Take Another Puff" by Joel Spitzer is available as a free pdf file. The book is essentially a collection of Joel's articles and the focus is on understanding how nicotine works and how it generates addictive behaviour. The obstacles to being nicotine-free are largely a conscious misunderstanding of unconscious forces that are a consequence of the methods of action of nicotine. Joel's Quit Smoking Library also includes numerous audio and video quit smoking guides.

Joel Spitzer is the education director of Freedom from Nicotine, a forum founded by John R. Polito whose own ebook is entitled "Freedom from Nicotine, The Journey Home." This book is largely inspired by Joel's work but is better structured with a clear narrative and a wealth of links to recent research papers and documents. If you ever had the sneaking feeling that so-called nicotine replacement therapies were just a scam to keep you addicted to nicotine and that the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries were conspiring to keep you enslaved, then here's some proof for you.

“Very few consumers are aware of the effects of nicotine, i.e., its addictive nature and that nicotine is a poison.” June 24, 1978, Memorandum: Future Consumer Reaction to Nicotine, Brown & Williamson (now part of RJR). Read the book for many more such quotes. Tobacco companies are essentially drug companies that specialize in just one very specific drug: nicotine. The gradual move away from smoking is being replaced by other delivery systems and the human addiction to nicotine will continue.

Both books have their mantras: Never Take Another Puff; or, No Nicotine Today. Slogans and mantras are an important part of your reprogramming. It is important that your rational mind understands how your unconscious mind works and thereby be able to put in place effective strategies to win both the biochemical and psychological battles ahead. "Battles?!" I hear you cry."But what about an easy quick fix?" Some freedoms are surely worth fighting for. Step back and look at the numerous assaults on our personal freedoms on a daily basis. Nicotine addiction is just one of many forms of enslavement. The freedom to be fully human, fully conscious and knowledgeable beings is being eroded by stealth.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us."
Marianne Williamson, 1992 [erroneously attributed to Nelson Mandela]

The two books above are very close to what I wanted to write myself. I am thankful for finding them so early in my quest. It also means that I will focus on how each and every one of us can find our own personal path to freedom from nicotine. Every mind is unique and so every nicotine prison has its own unique key to unlock the door.

Free NHS Stop Smoking Quit Kit

2009-12-31T18:55:00.001+07:00

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

2009-12-31T10:31:00.000+07:00

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

2009-12-18T13:53:00.000+07:00

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?