All Aboard the Misery Train: Here's What It's Really Like to Quit Smoking

I quit smoking earlier this year. Just saying that feels a little strange, since my long love affair with nicotine was largely a secret to the people who love me most. I had a lot of shame about smoking because smoking killed so many people I loved, and because I'm otherwise really committed to my health. I also spent the first 20ish years of my life as a rabid anti-smoker, so turning into a smoker made me feel like a horrible person.

But I've quit now, so I can finally talk about it without feeling such incredible guilt. One of the worst things about quitting was how little quality help was available to me. The quit-smoking lines actually made it worse (I'll probably write a blog entry about that at some point). The information my doctor, government quit sites, and random friends gave me ranged from useless to harmful. I'm young, extremely healthy, and never suffered any real consequences as a result of smoking. So scare tactics about cancer and heart disease did little but make me anxious about the future, thus increasing my desire to smoke.

The point of this long and rambling prelude is that there's a lot of shitty, harmful, completely useless information out there, and I think this dearth of information makes it harder for smokers to quit. Quitting smoking is the hardest fucking thing in the world. I pride myself on my emotional stability, and I'm not prone to meltdowns or erratic behavior. But quitting broke my fucking spirit. I was convinced that my happy life was a delusion, that really, cigarettes were the only good thing going on in my life. I spent several days balled up on the floor sobbing. My husband had no idea what the fuck to do with me; I was so horrible to be around that he seemed half-convinced that smoking was the only thing keeping me happy. When I wasn't deliberately picking fights with hubby, sobbing on the bathroom floor, getting angry at the dogs for "deliberately provoking me by looking at me," or throwing up, I was sweating myself into dehydration while suffering through terrible nightmares.

But I did it. I am weak-willed and prone to addiction. I'm a writer who previously believed it was literally impossible to write without smoking. I made it through the darkness, and I quit, and my life really is better without cigarettes now. So I'm here to tell you what it's really like to quit smoking, so that you don't have to listen to the bullshit advice that comes from the robots who staff the quit assist lines, and so you don't have to believe your friends who tell you you'll always have cravings. You won't. That's a lie. Punch the next person who tells you that.

First, Some Advice
I suffered so much when I quit, but I was able to tolerate the suffering because of my mindset. I told myself that every hour I spent not smoking was an investment in eventually not having cravings. Caving in meant that I would have to go through it all again, and the only way to the other side was to go through the misery. If you can conceive of your misery as an investment -- not entirely unlike depriving yourself of money to put it into a savings account instead -- then you'll be better equipped to endure it. You cannot smoke. Not even one.

Not only should you not smoke, you should also not use any nicotine replacement products. Yes, I know you want to. I know you want to do anything you can to reduce the misery. But you can't. You're not addicted to smoke, or lighting things on fire, or feeling burning in your lungs. Those are stupid things to enjoy, and things to which no one ever gets addicted. You are addicted to nicotine. 

You wouldn't treat a crack addiction with more crack, so why the flying fuck would you treat an addiction to nicotine with more nicotine? It's not going to make quitting easy to use nicorette or a similar product. It's just going to prolong the inevitable. Don't do that to yourself. I know your doctor and the government and everyone else says to use nicotine replacement therapy. Those people are just saying that because they don't know what it's like to quit smoking. Research doesn't support nicotine replacement therapy, and most successful quitters did it cold turkey.

So don't give in and expose yourself to more nicotine, whether through smoking or NRT. Get that poison out of your system as soon as possible, and your misery won't last one second longer than it has to.

What to Expect
In the short-term, what you should expect is everything. Your mileage may vary quite a bit from mine, of course. But you should plan for the absolute worst, and you should not beat yourself up when the worst comes to fruition. Whatever you're doing is normal, unless it involves harming small children, overt violence, or harming your pets. Feel suicidal? Yup, I did, too. Think cigarettes are your sole source of happiness? Totally  normal. The unfortunate thing is that, if you talk to a doctor or a quit-assist counselor, they won't necessarily know that this stuff is normal, thus potentially pathologizing what you're feeling.

You are normal. You are ok. You are doing something really, really hard, and strong emotional reactions are to be expected. Spend your time with people who are willing to give you a break. Repeat again: You are normal. You are good. This too shall pass. 

Expect the first week to be a haze of misery. Supposedly nicotine is gone from your system by day three, and symptoms peak around this time. For the first seven days, I was utterly miserable, but I saw a pretty significant downturn in symptoms by day six. At that point, I was able to work a little bit, and even took periodic breaks from my crying spells to eat, bathe myself, and brush my hair.

During this first week, I did not have discrete nicotine cravings, so all the advice about coping with cravings was useless to me. Instead, I spent every second of every moment of every day wanting a cigarette.

By the beginning of the second week, I was no longer crying every day, but any stress was sufficient to send me down a rabbit hole of misery. I began having nicotine cravings about twice an hour at this point, and had brief periods of time during which I didn't think about smoking.

Between weeks two and three, things really got better. I stopped sobbing about smoking all the time, and returned to about 75% of my previous productivity.

Since that time, the improvements have been slow, but steady. Emotional lability turned into strong cravings. The cravings became less frequent, and then the challenge became finding something with which to replace smoking. It took about three months before I really felt normal again, and even then I still had periodic cravings.

Let me be clear, though: Those cravings were nothing, nothing like the cravings of the first week. So please don't allow yourself to be disheartened by the fact that I was still having cravings at three months. We're talking real cravings here -- the kind that last 10 minutes and go away, not the kind that leave you crying on the floor and wanting to kill yourself. These cravings were manageable even for weak little me.

Once you get to this point in the game, the key is to ignore the cravings. Remember, you've already invested so much time and misery. Don't lose your investment. If you can make it to three months, you have a 90% chance of remaining quit.

Does It Really Get Better?
One of the most horrible things people kept telling me when I quit is that the cravings would never go away. I'd hear this and envision a life spent lying on the floor crying since, at the time, that's what a craving meant for me.

Listen to me: Those people are lying to you. They're saying something that sounds good. When I called a quit assist line, the robot on the other end told me cravings would last forever, and I told her that then there was no point to quitting since I'd be miserable forever. She didn't understand this because she had never quit, and neither do the people you know who are feeding you this line about cravings lasting forever.

Your cravings will not last forever. They will go away. This is temporary. 

I still get a longing for a cigarette occasionally, but it is NOT a craving. My thoughts about cigarettes are more akin to the thoughts I have about buying stuff I don't need. It would be a nice, luxurious, frivolous thing to do. But it's not something I need. And I go days -- sometimes even weeks -- without wanting or even thinking about a cigarette.

My life is good without cigarettes. All of those terrible thoughts I had when I quit were the product of addiction, not some ultimate truth that the haze of quitting taught me. All of the bad thoughts you're having right now are the same. You're lying to yourself, and your addiction is lying to you. You can and will have a better life without cigarettes, even if you're like me and never really suffered even the slightest loss because of smoking.

You can do this. You really can. The thing no one tells you about quitting smoking is that, when you quit, you are giving up your security blanket. You will mourn cigarettes like you mourn a friend who has died. And that's ok, so long as you remember that you're mourning a shitty frenemy who hurt you every day of your life, not some loving bff who was always there for you.

Mourn. Cry. Be miserable. Scream. Break stuff in your house. Just don't smoke. Because if you do, all of the suffering you've gone through will be for nothing, and you'll have to do it all again. If it were easy, or just a little bit hard, or even just really hard, everyone who smokes would quit. Quitting is the hardest thing you'll ever do. Non-smokers will never understand this. But I do understand it, and I am telling you you can get to the other side.

No. Not one more. Not one more ever. You deserve better. Fuck cigarettes.