[[The common dream was that I had forgotten that I quit smoking and managed to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes before suddenly realizing that I just reversed the ten years of effort that it took to quit. ]]
Yup- i still have that dream- I think it’s a repressed fear that we will ‘accidentally forget we quit’ that causes these common dreams like this-
I quit alcohol 20 years ago- that was a tough one to quit too- but I think ciggs was tougher- although i still have dreams abotu drinkin too and still every now and again think ‘I coudl handle it’ — thankfully htough I’m at the point now that I admit i can’t
When i quit ciggs, I was addicted to hydrocodone too that i had taken for years due to muscles problems caused by a health condition- I quit both ciggs and hydro at the same time- it was hell- but fortunately I was not working, so i had the free time to lay in bed for awhile to get me through the roughest part
Every 1/2 hour i had to keep telling myself i was a 1/2 hour closer to beign free fro mthe addiction- 1 hour further from being addicted, 2 hours, 5 hours, 8 hours- and so on- did that for a couple of days- it was the only thing powerful enough to make me realize that i had power over my circumstances- reminding myself that although it was rough, I WAS beating it- I was making progrses- I had to keep my concentration on the fact that as each hour passed, i was that much closer to being free-
Now when i get hte cravings, i can remember back to how much hell i had to go through when quitting- that and hte fact that i couldn’t possibly afford to keep smoking now financially and physically
I quit drinking after hearing about a head-on accident about a mile from my house where a drunk driver killed a family of four. I realized that I was just one careless act away from the type of mess that ends lives.
About a year after that I saw a public service ad featuring a young female school teacher. Six months before making the ad, the teacher was happily vacationing in Hawaii without a care in the world. Two weeks after making the ad she died of lung cancer. The sadness in her voice at how she had screwed up her life was something I decided was simply unacceptable for someone as smart as I am. I never smoked another cigarette after having smoked a pack a day for ten years.
I don't know what others have experienced, but I had the same experience with both drinking and smoking. When I had actually quit it was like throwing a switch inside my brain. I simply decided that from that moment on I was a non-drinker or a non-smoker.
The hardest moment came about six or eight weeks after I quit smoking. External events just seem to pile up and I so longed for that relaxing feeling you get when you light up a cigarette. Somehow the drug helps one to cope with problems. When I made it through that time I was convinced that I had quit for good.
I would advise those trying to quit to first cut down as much as they can. There are both physical and psychological aspects to these addictions. Quitting will be easier if one can reduce the physical aspect first.