Lessons learned: why you should stay away from Ms Nicotine

The app on my phone says it’s now been 9 days, 22 hours, 5 minutes, and 57 seconds.

How does it feel?

I mean, apart from the dizziness and moments of blurred vision?  Apart from my useless short-term memory and rotten concentration? Apart from the pressure inside my head, as if I’m diving fifteen feet deep in a pool?

I’d say it feels like being horribly anxious without being afraid. Like being extremely hungry, but only in the mouth, not in the stomach. Strange, huh?

And it feels like an invisible, evil demon kicks me in the face every time I start believing I’m getting better, every time I allow myself to relax.

I know who this demon is.

The app says 9 days, 22 hours, 19 minutes, and 29 seconds now.

Since what? Since I broke up with Ms Nicotine.

(Featured image: Model – by Inna Mykytas from Pixabay)

No, I haven’t smoked for a long time

For the record, I haven’t smoked daily for 25 years, and I haven’t smoked any cigarettes at all in the last 10 years. This might confuse you at this point in the article, but I promise it will make sense in the end.

What’s important right now is that I will never ever put myself in the grip of a nicotine addiction again. Or any other addiction, for that matter.

Speaking of addictions, Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones has allegedly said that nicotine is harder to quit than heroin. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never tried heroin. I have, however, had an on-and-off relationship with Ms Nicotine for more than 40 years.

And I can promise you, Ms Nicotine isn’t a girlfriend who leaves peacefully when you try to break up. She will rip your intestines out as she leaves.

It’s been 9 days, 22 hours, 53 minutes and 30 seconds now. I’m still breathing. And I believe I will win this battle. After all, I’m a deliberate one.

My Deliberate 1 mission is to share whatever lessons I’ve learned from life, however stupid or embarrassing they might be, if someone out there can benefit from them. My message today is loud and clear:

Stay away from Ms Nicotine.
It doesn’t matter which fancy nicotine product she tempts you with.
Just stay the f*ck away.

Back when smoking meant safety

For me, it all started with old-fashioned cigarettes. And this is the embarrassing part. I’ve always considered myself to be relatively intelligent and knowledgeable, and there was no rational excuse for starting smoking in the early 1980s. No one could claim, even back then, that they didn’t know about the grave dangers of cigarette smoking.

Still, factual knowledge is rarely what motivates our actions the most. Fellowship, on the other hand, is. For the generation before me, who didn’t know about the dangers when they started out, every social encounter was veiled in cigarette smoke.

As a small boy, I saw it as a positive thing when the adults pulled their tobacco packets out of their pockets and started rolling their cigarettes. This meant the situation was safe. Few people would argue while smoking together. 

Bonding in the blue mist

In the early 1980s, however, the Norwegian health authorities had run information campaigns for years about the hazards of smoking. There were warnings printed on every tobacco and cigarette packet. Still, this was when I started smoking.

Why?

Looking back, I think it was a strange combination of teenage rebellion and a childlike clinging to something known and safe. My friends and I were a bit rebellious at the time. “You say this is dangerous, huh? Look how much we care! We’re not going to grow old anyway!”

Still, we were the sons of our forefathers. We knew about the cosy gatherings around the ashtray. And the instant bond between two people when lighting up their cigarettes outside a pub. A split second of eye contact, and we knew we were ‘in it together’.

Besides, I didn’t smoke that much, not in the start. It was mostly a social thing.

I stayed in control, didn’t I? No!

Here comes the sad truth: with nicotine, you believe you are in control. Until you suddenly realise you aren’t. Suddenly, you need a fag between the lessons in college. Suddenly, you wake up in the middle of the night because you need a cigarette.

You won’t notice when you step over that border between control and addiction. You won’t notice until it’s too late.

Nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs out there. If you don’t stay away from it, you will feel its claws ripping through your body and mind soon enough. That’s a promise.

The first hard break-up attempt

Fifteen years or so went by. 

It had dawned on me I had reasons to live as long as possible. The most important reason was that I had children by then. And having Ms Nicotine as my mistress wasn’t compatible with being a fatherly role model either. My favourite bad habit had to go.

I hadn’t smoked at home since my children were born. My daily consumption was down to four or five cigarettes a day, which meant spending most of the day in withdrawal pains anyway. There wasn’t more I could do except go cold turkey.

And I did, which was nearly as hard as it is right now.

I remember it followed precisely the same pattern. A few horrible days first. Then it got marginally better. “Over the worst now, perhaps?” No! After about a week, it was back again, almost as horrible as at the start. Then, the gaps between the withdrawal waves gradually grew longer, and the waves themselves less ferocious by degrees.

Do they ever stop?

I’m afraid I can’t say. Because I didn’t altogether quit, did I?

Fraternising with the enemy

I thought, back then, that I would never be able to stay away from smoking when I had a drink or two. So why not allow myself to smoke when I was drinking? It seemed an excellent way to avoid failure situations that could break my motivation.

In different circumstances, I’d still say this is a clever approach. In my article about leaving anxiety and depression behind, my advice #39 was to set achievable goals. I said, “Don’t self-sabotage by setting too high goals and standards at the start. Make sure you achieve something before you raise the bar.”

The problem is that this doesn’t work with nicotine and similar addictions. Before long, I don’t think I could honestly say whether I had a smoke because I was drinking or I had a drink because that gave me an excuse to have a smoke.

“One cigarette won’t hurt, will it?”

“Just once. You know it’ll make you feel better.”

These are the things Ms Nicotine will keep whispering in your ear forever if you don’t slam the door in her face once and for all.

Okay, perhaps only one more cigarette isn’t the one thing that will single-handedly give you serious health issues. But it will keep your addiction going. And there will be a long, long row of ‘only one mores’.

Because life will deal you some blows, there will always be moments when you feel tired, sad, anxious, stressed, whatever. If you let Ms Nicotine stay in your system, you will hear her alluring voice on every single one of those occasions.

My life served enough moments when I gave in and enjoyed Ms Nicotine’s short-lived kisses of stimulus or relaxation. Not at all every day, not even every week. But often enough to let me stay in her grip.

Snus – the secret mistress

I felt I needed her more than ever during one particularly demanding period. But I couldn’t take up daily smoking again. I would be thoroughly condemned as a loser by my family if I did so. And I didn’t want to; I had finally started to fear the health consequences. 

Ms Nicotine whispered, “Don’t worry, I can change shape and be your secret mistress.”

What?

Let me ask: have you ever heard of snus? You probably haven’t if you’re not Scandinavian. It’s been around in the Nordic countries for a long time – a tobacco product you put under your lip, and the nicotine is absorbed through the thin membrane of your gum.

Someone made me try a very strong type of snus when I was about twelve, and I got exceptionally sick. This experience kept me away from snus for decades – until then. A small pouch under my lip was a much more discreet way to stay in contact with Ms Nicotine than lighting up fags.

Was snus healthier for me than cigarettes?

Probably. When smoking, you are pulling the smoke and vapours of a multitude of crap substances down into your lungs. It’s hard to think of a stupider thing to do from a health perspective.

And “healthier” isn’t quite the right word to use here. Less harmful, perhaps. The multitude of crap substances are still there in snus, and some of them end up in your stomach and bloodstream anyway. 

However, the nicotine itself is most likely absorbed more frequently and in larger quantities than through smoking cigarettes. This is far from optimal for those of us who must monitor their blood pressure, for instance.

And I had heard people who had tried both say it’s harder quitting snus than quitting smoking. Now, I’m starting to believe that’s correct.

Perhaps it’s because you have fewer immediate and obvious rewards. When you quit smoking, you will feel you breathe better almost instantly, and you start tasting and smelling things you haven’t noticed for years. When you quit snus, you have only the withdrawal symptoms and no noticeable rewards.

Anyway, I hadn’t reached the end of my relationship with Ms Nicotine yet.

She’s a taker, not a giver

In my mid-fifties, I had the most significant changes in my life ever. Some of them were rather challenging. This wasn’t the optimal time for throwing Ms Nicotine out of my life. Furthermore, the abovementioned life changes brought me to England. Where snus, like most places outside Scandinavia, is illegal.

However, nicotine pouches were available. They are like snus but without all the crap substances – except nicotine, of course. Cleaner, in a way. And once again, a bit less harmful. But it is still not a healthy habit to have. Besides, I didn’t want to pay the price financially either.

Because Ms Nicotine gives you so little back for what you pay, financially, healthwise, and riskwise. I felt I’d fed her enormous appetite for decades, and what had she contributed? Blackmail, basically.

You don’t feel much of her marginal rewards once you’re hooked. But as an addict, you’ll definitely feel much worse if you don’t obey her. She can make you feel microscopically better, temporarily, if you do. She will rip you apart if you don’t. She’s a taker, not a giver.

I’m going to win this time

I’m not unfamiliar with other potentially treacherous ‘helpers’ like her. For instance, I’ve known Mr Alcohol since I was 13. And in the 1980s, I encountered Mr Cannabis now and then. 

None of them are something our bodies and minds really need. Both of them can get you into trouble, healthwise or legally. But compared to Ms Nicotine, they actually gave me something back. Some real relief, even though only temporarily.

None of them managed to plunge me into addiction and keep me captive for more than 40 years. Ms Nicotine did.

My app says it’s 10 days, 2 hours, 45 minutes, and 5 seconds now. And I’m going to win! Do you know why? Because I’ve decided:

I’m nobody’s slave

Yes, I want to look after my health. At my age, it’s about time. And yes, I don’t want to spend a considerable amount of money annually to feed an unnecessary addiction.

But the most important reason why I’m going to succeed this time is my deep-rooted aversion to living in any kind of slavery. No person, no substance, is going to hold me in slavery anymore.

That goes for Ms Nicotine as well.

And for all of you who might be tempted by her many new incarnations out there, vaping, mint-flavoured pouches, chewing gum, whatever – the message is still clear:

Stay away! Don’t sell yourself to her! You’ll get nothing in return.

It’s 1,000,000 times easier not to start than to quit. Believe me.