Onwards. Not doing too badly considering that it's something I've punctuated my days with for the best part of 3 decades. Crazy really.
Some random observations / thoughts.
- A caveat to precede all of the following: I'm using nicotine lozenges.
- I'm not showing any tendency to eat more than I did before, so hopefully I won't get lardy.
- A lot of the time, when I think I need a cigarette, it's just a general neediness that I'm feeling. A drink of something or a bit of fruit seems to do just as well. It makes me think that a lot of the cigarettes I smoked, particularly those many cigarettes that made me think "why am I doing this, I don't even need a fag" as soon as I lit them, were smoked because I was a little bit tired, thirsty, hungry, or just needed to go for a short wander about.
- To repeat an earlier observation, having an emergency packet of fags is a very bad idea, for me at any rate.
- In some ways, not smoking is less stressful. Examples: 1. I don't have the conflict between what I do for a living (I'm a nurse, in a setting where smoking is a major contributor to the health problems of the people I deal with. Taking away that conflict is a big relief in many ways 2. Recently, almost all of the fags that I have smoked have been marred to some degree by thoughts along the lines of "this is a form of self-harm".
- I'm not noticing any immediate health benefits whatsoever - I've never been one to have a smoker's cough really, unless I've been on the rollies. IT would be helpful if I was noticing some positive change. As it is, I'm noticing things like the lack of ponginess of my clothes.
- Although I wan't a heavy smoker, I'm noticing a financial benefit. I think this is because I don't need to have that £5 odd in casg every day, so if I bring a packed lunch etc. I can go for much longer between visits to the cashpoint. I think that leads to less other spending.
- The biggest change to my daily habits has been at work. My day is no longer punctuated, and dare I say governed by, breaks that are based around fags to some extent.
- One of the big things that could trip me up here is the "but it's too late now, you've smoked so long you're probably going to get cancer anyway". OK, I know that it's not logical to add to the damage, but in weaker moments that's a dangerous way of thinking about it.
- I'm a bit worried about how much of this relative lack of difficulty in stopping (relative to how hard I thought it would be) is down to regularly sucking on nicotine lozenges.
So, onwards. It's very early days. Sometimes I do think "fuck it, I'm happy to take my chances, we all die of something" etc. But so far, so good.
