On Quitting Smoking

As Mark Twain was quoted once: "quitting smoking is easy - I've done it thousands of times!" Likewise, ever since the nicotine fiend grabbed me in earnest the Spring of 1996, I have likewise felt that a truly honest person can never really say "I quit smoking..." rather, one must say, "I am taking a BREAK from smoking." Even if I ever manage to put down the thing for more than a year, more than ten years.... or indefinitely, I will always say the same, "I am taking a break."

The following painting occurred during one of my most successful 'breaks' that lasted a good 3 1/2 months, and ended two weeks ago. The painting itself tells the story of how I would someday go back, no doubt!

But I wanted to further explore the idea of smoking and quitting smoking in general, and point to some personal experiences which might or might not help others.

First of all, I fully intend to go back to not smoking, and to making my break from smoking as long as possible. Only when you succeed in not smoking for a longish spell do you really realize how nasty the habit is.

Things I noticed:

1) increased energy

2) clearer skin

3) a sense of possibility emerged out of nowhere, as if things long dormant by all the poisons were coming forth. I became strangely artistically productive during those months, working on 10 or more paintings

4) a renewed interest in exercise

Exercise itself is KEY, and a fundamental aspect of non smoking. I found that it not only helped me compensate for additional eating, it helped reduced cigarette cravings, even from the very first. To every person undertaking this feat, I recommend an hour-a-day daily committment to SOME form of aerobic exercise. Without it not only will you gain some dreadful weight, but you will constantly battle cravings and MOODS - the two things that finally felled me two weeks ago.

To show how FUNDAMENTAL exercise is when quitting smoking, I will point to the fact that, due to general busyness, I had to cut down or eliminate my exercise habit.

Almost immediately, all sugar cravings became intolerable. And, a week or so into the 'non smoking mode', cigarette cravings, once thought lost forever, came back.

At the same time, even without my awareness, my mood soured. My affect changed, and even the most minimal setback became intolerable, painful, unforgivable. All this in a context of running around trying to effect all sorts of new things ---- something had to give. Something finally did.

Here's one fundamental thing I learned about nicotine/tobacco during research:

Nicotine inhibits the release of insulin from the pancreas, a hormone that is responsible for removing excess sugar from a person's blood. This leaves the smoker in a slightly hyperglycemiccondition, meaning he has more sugar in his blood than is normal. High blood sugar acts as an appetite suppressant, which may be why smokers think their cigarettes reduce hunger.

This site explains all sorts of other effects - nicotine on adrenaline, nicotine on dopamine, all which affect generalized moods and mindstates - both which declined for me after quitting. But the effect on blood sugar was just absolutely key for my understanding of the whole mess.

I have lived in a hyperglycemic state for the past 15 years or so - all which have affected my ability to eat reasonably on a schedule, but mainly which has trained my body to only be happy when excess sugar is going through my system. Any wonder the desire for pie, cake, anything is HUGE when the cigarette goes away? Any wonder moods go up and down, and that exercise - which to me is a process which helps break down body fat and complex meals for the release of sugars into the blood stream - helps with all these ills?

The study:

In his laboratory study, he exposed human blood samples to nicotine. The nicotine raised the level of hemoglobin A1c, a measure of blood sugar control. The higher the nicotine dose, the more the A1c level rose.

...

Liu took red blood cells from people and treated them in the laboratory with glucose and nicotine at various concentrations.

To measure the effects of the nicotine on the levels of blood sugar, he used the hemoglobin A1c blood test. This test measures the average blood sugar control for the previous three months or so.

The higher the test results, the more uncontrolled the blood sugar is.

Liu used doses of nicotine comparable to what would be found in the blood of smokers. The levels of nicotine he used in the lab would correspond roughly to the exposure a smoker would get by smoking one or two packs a day, he says.

He found that the nicotine raised the HbA1c level by nearly 9% to up to 34.5%, depending on nicotine exposure.

In the future, I will benefit from understanding more the role that sugars, exercise, and stress play in keeping me hooked - a multidimensional approach might prove more successful.

In a more existential way, the whole thing made me think of MEDICINE - the paradigm of medicine - medicine is in itself inherently toxic/alien to the body - and the reason we administer it is so as to correct an existing imbalance.

When you think about homeopathy (where small doses of the poison/toxin causing the illness are administered so as to cure it), or vaccination (where the offending agent is introduced in the body so as to help the body create antibodies), or Western medications of all sorts (which are in many cases so acutely toxic that many come with long lists of warning or sideffects), we can see that a lot of healing involves, in a sense, unbalancing the body and actually exposing it to ills.

And here's where we get to smoking. I've always been a smoker. Then I quit. For 3 months. I LOVED not smoking, let me tell you. Then I became emotionally/mentally unstable, and smoked again, right before the psychosis hit me full force, as it has in the past. I felt sorry that i HAD to, in essence, SMOKE, so as to manage my mental space. But that's when it hit me - tobacco was one of those things long- used by Native Americans for whatever obscure purposes. Nicotine directly affects not only Adrenaline and Dopamine, but it also has a long-term destabilizing effect on blood glucose levels. If you are someone who, for whatever reason, suffers from mental issues, tobacco is pretty much... medicine. Until you find something better.

Maybe I will- maybe I won't - but, for now, I am happy to imbibe long draughts of the "peace pipe" - the name does not come in vain.