Quit Smoking

After about eight to ten weeks of not smoking, work got incredibly stressful. One day was particularly bad. I decided then that the stress was more dangerous to my health than cigarettes and bought a pack of Lucky Strikes. I’ve been smoking again ever since.

I’m not bothered by it either. At least, not at the moment.

I forgot this was on my “given up” list of goals. I haven’t smoked in about a month. I miss it and I don’t. I still like the smell. I still crave them, a little bit. But at the same time, I really don’t want to give back in. I really don’t. I definitely don’t want to buy another pack, and I don’t even really want to bum one off of friends. I don’t want to start up this goal all over again. I’m just tired of it… But I admit, I also miss it.

Now, in full disclosure, I must admit that I have also recently started taking Wellbutrin, which helps. When I marked this as “given up” nearly a year ago, I had fallen into a bad moody depression. After I started smoking again, I felt like I leveled off to a degree. About a week later I read that nicotine can have a similar effect to certain antidepressants like ZyBan/Wellbutrin. Reading that, and feeling the way that I did back then, I thought that perhaps it really was time to finally see a therapist / psychiatrist.

Only recently did the topic come back around to depression. I hadn’t been feeling the deep moody depression feeling (doom! gloom!), but I had basically stopped functioning this past summer. I worked, I walked the dog, I went to the Farmer’s Market every week. But I also completely ceased being social. And I slept alot. I wasn’t painting, I wasn’t working on music, I had just stopped. But I wasn’t gloomy. I forgot that one doesn’t have to feel gloomy to be in a kind of depression, and after discussing this with my doctor – “it’s strange, i just don’t feel like doing anything” – he suggested trying Antidepressants. I had avoided them all of my life, but at 31, I was ready to at least try them. What did I have to lose? Still, not being a fan of Prozac and friends, I pushed towards the Wellbutrin as the first meds to try, remembering the effect that smoking had on me when I resumed it nearly a year ago.

About a week into trying the meds, I stopped smoking. It hasn’t been easy. But I must admit that now, just over a month after quitting, I am feeling pretty good about it.

I don’t know if there’s really a medical / chemical / biological connection between smoking cessation and wellbutrin. It may have just been the excuse I needed to quit (a magic placebo). But if you’ve had a hard time quitting, and other stop-smoking methods haven’t worked for you in the past, you may want to take a look at it from the psychiatric side.

After about 5-6 weeks of not smoking, I gave up. I also found myself in a great depression and got around to thinking “who am I NOT smoking for?” It felt then like it didn’t really matter whether I smoked or not, and so I resumed.

After I resumed, I seemed to start leveling out a little bit. About a week later I read (unexpectedly) that nicotine has a similar effect as certain anti-depressants such as ZyBan, and that some people are smokers because of that. They don’t know it, but it helps stabilize them. I found that very interesting, as this big depression hit really hard around the time that I quit smoking.

As a result, I’m still smoking. It remains rather casual and light. So I botched this goal. But I also started seeing a therapist and a psychiatrist, which may help with another goal of mine.

It’s been 3 weeks. The craving have been much less for most of this past week, partially due to the distraction of having a new dog in my life. If I make it through the first month (one more week), I’ll mark this as done.

About five years ago, I quit smoking for about 5.5 months. It was in the style of “I haven’t smoked for a couple of days, what the hell – why not continue?”

A couple of weeks ago, I started the same line of thinking. Five years ago, I was coming off of a good year and it was christmas break – new years when I decided to earnestly try quitting. Now, it’s mid-summer and the past couple of years have been really rough. But I’m about to adopt a Greyhound and… well, my vices (smoking and drinking) have been letting me down lately. So, I’m cutting back on drinking for now, and for the sake of me and my new dog, I may as well quit.

But today, two weeks into it (almost), I’m falling apart. And I remember that halfway through my first month of serious-quitting five years ago was the worst part. This has also been where I’ve fallen down in recent years when I’ve idly tried again to ‘quit’. But this time, I want to really be off cigarettes (at least for a while), so I’m trying to soldier through.

I have to perform at a bar that allows smoking tonight. That will be a good test.