Nicotine Addiction - The Reality

We hear all the time how addicting nicotine is, don't we? I've actually heard that nicotine is as addictive as heroine. Is this a fact? I don't know, but I've most certainly heard it. I really don't even know what this might mean, but hey, it is what it is. The point is that nicotine is widely accepted as being very addictive. And quitting smoking, because of the nicotine, is said to be harder to do than solving a Rubik's cube with your eyes closed.

Well, I smoked cigarettes for 15 years, so I sure think that would qualify me as being addicted. The problem is that I never bought into the whole "being addicted to nicotine" idea. Even while I smoked I questioned it. If I went three or four hours without a cigarette, I wanted one. In many cases after not having a lung dart jammed in my pie hole after a couple of hours made me want one.

But I always wondered if these "cravings" or the feeling of "wanting a cigarette" were all mental. My logic always was if you do anything and I mean anything, every hour or so for more than a decade, of course you're going to think you need them. But do you really, in reality need it? Are you really addicted to it or has is simply become such an engrained habit that you think your addicted?

I thought about this subject for quite a while and all that time, I continued to smoke. Then the day came when I wanted to test my theory. I was tired of being out of breath from walking up a flight of stairs. I was tired of my hands and clothes smelling like a disgusting ashtray. I was tired of smoking and all of the BS associated with it. So I walked away from cigarettes, without the aid of any gum, patches, pills, hell anything. I just walked away. It was time to test my theory of the process being mental.

As it turned out is was mental. I heard it said somewhere that if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Well, I had effectively changed the way I thought about smoking, and the act of smoking did in fact change. Were there times that I wanted a cigarette?

Of course there were. As I said earlier, after a person has been engaging in an activity every hour for more than a decade, it's going to feel like what your body wants to do. The difference was that I didn't do that anymore, and since I had changed my thoughts about smoking, I was effectively no longer a smoker.

The reality of nicotine addiction, at least for me, is that it wasn't an addiction at all. Smoking was a habit, something that I had become completely accustomed to. Once I changed the way I thought about smoking, and the process, I was able to change the actual act of smoking.

by Trevor Kugler -

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