Smoking Basics

When you first learned to drive, you had to pay very close attention to how you stayed in your lane. Too close to the right and you made yourself steer to the left... just a bit, not too much, not too much, UHOH, TOO MUCH!! BACK TO THE RIGHT BACK TO THE RIGHT... and you did this for a while until you learned. Today, you fly down the highway at speeds of 60 mph, thinking about anything and everything EXCEPT which way you need to steer to stay in your lane. that element of driving became automatic behavior years ago.

Observe someone who knits. Most good knitters aren't watching their hands. It's become automatic behavior... the pressure, the touch, the movement. As a rule, do you need to pay attention when you brush your teeth? Or isit just another pattern in a repertoire of learned behaviors that you simply... do? The same auto-pilot part of your brain that observes road cues while you drive, knits while you watch TV, or brushes your teeth, also observes your physical cues and automatically tells you how to respond. Your auto-pilot is also in charge of survival responses such as fight/flight. So when it says, "JUMP", you're hard wired to jump. In the same way, when it says, "Light up", you feel a compelling urge to smoke.
There are lots of patterns, lots of behaviors that we've practiced to automatic perfection. Driving is one. Smoking is another.

So how did it all begin? Well... nicotine is addictive. No one argues otherwise, anymore.

I have no idea at what point I became addicted to nicotine, but it's a pretty safe bet that it was fairly soon after I started smoking. By 'addicted to nicotine' I'm talking only about that particular dynamic where a dropping level of nicotine resulted in symptoms of nicotine withdrawal. Nicotine effects the human body in fairly specific and predictable ways. Granted we don't all feel them the same way, but we all know from personal experience how they feel. At one time or another we've all run out of smokes and had to go without for 'too long'. Or we've sat in a meeting that just went on and on and on and "dear lord when can I get out of here and have a cigarette?" Or maybe it was a long flight only to sit waiting for a gate while you remained "seated with your seat belt fastened" and quietly climbed out of your skin. We all know what nicotine withdrawal feels like.

Four of the first withdrawal symptoms for most smokers are: increased muscle tension (that ansty jumpy 'clenched' sensation), shallow breathing (truthfully, most of us haven't a clue how we're breathing until we start to pay attention), foggy thinking or difficulty concentrating (we know when our thinking is sharp and when it isn't), and a shift in mood (if it was past time for me to smoke, I became one cranky piece of work. what about you?). Pull out a cigarette, light up, and every one of those withdrawal symptoms just disappears...within seconds... until your nicotine level drops and it all starts coming back around. Every time we lit up and created a bit of change in our withdrawal symptoms, it was like practicing steering to stay in your lane. And just like driving, with time and practice, lighting up to relieve body cues of withdrawal became automatic.

That was the beginning. Then, somewhere around the time we'd trained our auto pilot to light up in response to those subtle symptoms of withdrawal, our smoking behavior started to drift into other areas. Feeling a bit irritable or angry... a cigarette would bring a bit of 'calm'. Feeling a bit down, a cigarette seemed to provide relief. Bored? Light up. Driving? Light up. Hungry, tired, lonely, on the phone, at the computer .... light up. So how did smoking come to be associated with so much of life?

Two reasons:
First, because getting through your day, whatever that day may be, involves most of the same physical sensations, body cues, as nicotine withdrawal.
And second, because auto pilots don't care why you're tense, barely breathing, groggy, and/or grumpy. They only care about immediate effective responses and will repeatedly connect the response they've been taught will get the job done, especially if it 'worked' last time. Every time we smoked and created an intended change, it was just like learning to drive. With time and practice, lighting up to change the body cues of life became automatic.

That's how I smoked my way through 35yrs of life. I think that automatic dynamic of smoking in response to certain body cues, regardless of what caused them, is at the center of smoking for most if not all of us.

If you are serious about quitting and staying quit, it is time to address the smoking behavior and not just the chemical addiction. You are going to 'show' your autopilot how to change and not just 'tell' him that he must. You're going to deal directly with the source of your smoking habit.

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