This Day's Retroactively Posted Smoking Log:
1^st @ 11:45 AM
2^nd @ 1:20 pm
3^RD @ 3:00 PM
4^th @ 4:30 pm
5^th @ 6:00 pm
6^th @ 7:00 PM
7^th @ 8:00 PM
8^th @ 8:25 PM (fuck it – I was hanging around outside with my dad…)
9^th @ 10:00 pm
10^th @ 11:30 PM
11^th @ 2:00 am who knows – maybe it’ll somehow help me sleep… fuguck…

An Average Time-Interval of 85.5 minutes... You win some, you lose some...

1^st @ 11:15 AM
2^nd @ 1:20 PM
3^rd @ 3:15 PM
4^th @ 5:15 PM
5^th @ 7:15 PM
6^th @ 8:40 PM
7^th @ 9:55 PM
8^th @ 11:30 PM
9^th @ 1:50 AM Average Interval of 109 minutes! WOW!

The Day's Smoking-Log:

1^st @ 11:30 AM
2^nd @ 12:30 PM
3^rd @ 2:20 PM
4^th @ 4:00 PM
5^th @ 5:15 PM
6^th @ 6:20 PM
7^th @ 7:35 PM
8^th @ 8:45 PM
9^th @ 11:15 PM
10^th @ 1:00 AM Average time-interval 90 minutes!

Smoking Reduces Resistance to the Bacteria that Cause Stomach Ulcers

This is one of those affirmations that isn’t quite so obvious, or as threatening, as some of the others. The bacterium Helicobacter pylori is believed to be present in the upper gastrointestinal tract of more than 50% of the world’s population, yet 80% of those so infected show no symptoms as a result.

While it is speculated that Helicobacter pylori may play an important role in the ecology of the stomach (as so many other bacteria certainly do) it has also been linked to gastric ulcers, chronic gastritis (inflammation of the stomach-lining), and stomach cancer. It is believed that the helical-shape of the bacterium has evolved in order to penetrate the mucous lining in the stomach.

Nasty – and smoking, apparently, makes it harder for the body to resist the penetrative activities of these potentially harmful bacteria. (Before I began writing this post, I was out on the balcony having a cigarette with my Father, and asked him if he’d ever had an ulcer. He said no. I’ve never had one either. It’s entirely possible that we are actually reducing our bodies’ resistance to Helicobacter pylori, but that our natural resistance is strong enough for it not to be a concern… One of the genetic inheritances that run in my Family is incredible hardiness…)

Helicobacter pylori in the lumen of a gastric foveola
Photo courtesy of euthman

Anyway, as promised, here’s the log of yesterday’s cigarette-consumption:

1^st cigarette of the day @ 11:15 AM (unfortunately, I’d only just gotten up at 11:00)
2^nd @ 12:20 PM
3^rd @ 1:30 PM – which I stopped wanting after two or three puffs, and threw away half-finished!
4^th @ 2:50 PM
5^th @ 3:50
6^th @ 5:40 PM
7^th @ 7:10 PM
8^th @ 8:55 PM
9^th @ 10:30 PM
10^th @ 10:50 PM – (by this time in the evening, I’ve had a few beers or more…)
11^th @ 12:15 AM
12^th and final cigarette @ 1:20, just shortly before finally getting to bed…

I’d like to add that the average-spacing between cigarettes of 71 minutes is not the result of any exertion of will-power, I smoked whenever I felt like it. This amount of cigarettes is not unlike the frequency at which I smoked when I was a 15-year-old high-school student, but it is a great deal different from the pack or so a day I’ve gotten used to smoking in recent years. 12 cigarettes in a day was actually pretty disappointing, but Walter’s Special Technique isn’t intended to have instantaneous results. This third time around applying the technique, I’d resolved to consistently stick with it for as long as it took, not only for the urge to smoke to disappear, but to keep it gone by continuing to use these cards even after the quit-date (something I didn’t do either time before…)

So far today, I’ve had one cigarette, and that was an hour ago. I’ll keep tracking them, and we’ll compare them again sometime on the weekend.

RETROACTIVE UPDATE: Smoking Log for the Day:

1^st cigarette of the day @ 11:20 AM (I wake up late these days - this was maybe 20 minutes or so after waking...)
2^nd @ 12:35 PM
3^rd @ 2:05 PM
4^th @ 3:05 PM
5^th @ 4:45 PM
6^th @ 6:15 PM
7^th @ 7:50 PM
8^th @ 8:35 PM
9^th @ 10:20 PM
10^th @ 11:45 PM
11^th @ 12:55 AM
12^th @ 1:35 AM

Average time-interval 77 minutes…

Smoking Dramatically Disturbs Emotional Well-Being

Once, years ago, I was talking with a man who followed the 12-Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous and hadn’t had a drop in many years. We were talking about the emotion-stuffing effects of alcoholism and drug use in general. Now this was back in 2001, when you could even still find those closed-in ‘smoking rooms’ in coffee shops. We were actually sitting in a café which was technically a ‘club’ and they had ceramic ashtrays on the tables – not those disposable foil things they used to use in the food-courts of shopping malls…

Anyway, this guy grabbed one of my cigarettes from the open pack on the table and held it up, looking me in the eye and saying “these are the most powerful emotion-stuffers of them all…” And I simply couldn’t fail to believe him. I’d been a pothead and a drunk, had experimented with other drugs before (and since) and the only drug that absolutely made my skin crawl from withdrawal was tobacco. (Now, mind you, I’ve never been a heroin-addict or anything – I gather that’s a withdrawal process you don’t want to meet…) One full weekend of Ritalin-induced sleeplessness in a coffee shop had me uncontrollably leaking at the eyes as the “reuptake inhibition” of my brain’s “monoamine transporters” wore off, resulting in my brain reabsorbing all the excess dopamine and norepinephrine floating around and causing just about the worst chemically-caused feeling of depression I’ve ever experienced. But it wasn’t exactly difficult to avoid abusing that horrible drug again…

Smokers who try giving up the habit “cold-turkey” experience a pretty wide range of sensations and moods in their first two weeks or so, and the people close to them often experience it too! That’s not to say that quitting smoking inevitably results in outbursts of irritability, but there is almost always irritability going on inside, among other things. It’s simply part of the inescapable physiological withdrawal process, and some deal with it better than others.

I’ve said before, ‘Walter’s Special Technique’ cannot circumvent withdrawal from cigarette-smoking, but it does put the smoker into a lasting frame of mind in which those symptoms do not cause an urge to smoke cigarettes. The two times I quit before, I spent my first few weeks as a non-smoker interestedly witnessing the gradually changing physical sensations in my chest and nerves, and was most interested to find that I didn’t suffer from an unpleasant attitude or any excessive irritability whatsoever.

Indeed, the power of subliminal suggestion has far-reaching effects. There’ve been plenty of other times that my level of irritability was a fairly constant problem, given what was going on in my life and with the people around me – and those were times when I couldn’t possibly attribute the fact to tobacco-withdrawal.

Hence today’s affirmation: Smoking Dramatically Disturbs Emotional Well-Being. The simple fact of it is that, (among so many other effects), routinely inhaling tobacco-smoke interferes with the run of our emotions. It’s not only when a smoker abruptly stops smoking that his emotions are thrown out of whack – in fact, the experience is more an awareness of the process of his emotional systems returning to normal working order. This is why, on the two occasions I found myself suddenly smoking no more without any further temptation, I was able to observe the many processes of healing without being upset or irritated by them. I recognized the sensations as ongoing feedback as to my body’s progress, and was constantly encouraged by them.

oedipusphinx — — — —theJWDban

Anyway, yesterday I said I’d begin a daily log of how many cigarettes I smoke and at what times… Since I’ve been getting into the habit of starting each day by composing a post discussing the affirmation of the day, I thought it would be best to publish the post earlier in the day, instead of including the cigarette-consumption log and posting right before going to bed. So I’ll post the number of cigarettes I smoked today on tomorrow’s post, and so on. I’m pretty excited – as I said before, I’ve cut down significantly without really thinking about it, so it’ll be good to have a precise, daily comparison to track my gradual progress… I hope it’ll at least provide some healthy encouragement for any of you who are starting out using this technique!

Smoking Impairs Brain-Function

In this post I’m not going to go into great detail as to what information I can find to support today’s card – I’m going to talk more from my own experience and provide only my own rational insights.

Years ago, during my second application of Walter’s Special Technique, I was working at Tim Horton’s and talking with coworkers about how the technique works. (Shortly after, I gave up smoking abruptly on the day I decided to, and it was something like 8 months before a combination of alcohol, social-anxiety and relationship-troubles put me into a position where it was easy to rationalize a cigarette or two, and before I knew it I had a pack of smokes in my pocket…)

Anyway, I was talking to a woman who sort of wanted to quit, but wasn’t as motivated as I was. She told me that she understood the validity of how the technique worked, but happened not to agree with a lot of the little ‘factoids’ I had written on my cards. Her apprehension was well-founded – I don’t think a technique like this could work if the one doesn’t believe the affirmations are true statements. I assured her that, in applying the technique, she’d be making her own list, of her own reasons.

The technique is as standardized for anyone to use as it can be. This is based on the similarities of the functioning of everyone’s brains – the particular subconscious associations with cigarettes as a pleasurable habit can be quite different for everyone, and the subliminal affirmations required to counter-act these strong associations must therefore be quite different as well.

I spoke with another co-worker at Timmie’s as well, something about the effects that smoking has on the health of one’s skin, and she replied that smoking damages the lungs, and doesn’t do a great deal of damage to other organs/systems in the body. Now, obviously she was wrong in making so conclusive a claim, but if she’d been applying the technique, her subconscious mind might very well not have responded to something as specific as a statement about the effects of smoking on the central nervous system, just for example…

I believe that smoking impairs brain-function. Without, as I’ve said, looking around online or elsewhere for research-data describing what some of the constituents of tobacco-smoke does in the brain, I can say from experience that my brain isn’t functioning as well as it should while smoking a cigarette, or for some time afterwards.

A common experience reported by heavy smokers is a high frequency of headaches. Everyone who’s smoked cigarettes before knows that they can cause dizziness, and often accompanying nausea.

For me, simply thinking about it a little seems to confirm the fact – Smoking Impairs Brain-Function. There’s benzene and formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide in tobacco-smoke, (at least if all the anti-smoking campaigns and their scare-tactic claims can be believed, and why should they be lying?) It’s totally unreasonable to say that these substances should be completely inert if they find their way to the brain, and one would have to have a very poor understanding of how the body works indeed in order to make the claim that these substances don’t end up in the brain when people smoke cigarettes…

Take, for example, my morning today:

I woke up a little late, (as usual), and put some coffee on. You know those coffee-makers that have the little spring-loaded drip-hole covering, allowing you to pour yourself a cup before it’s all done brewing? Well we’ve got a fairly cheap one of those here… I neglected to secure the plastic lid, resulting in the removable basket not being pushed down enough for the carafe underneath to open that little drip-hole… Some minutes later, the unusual sounds of it had me turning the thing off, pressing down that lid and waiting for the pool of grinds-filled coffee to drip down enough to throw out the wasted coffee, cleaning the loose grinds out of the whole machine, and starting anew – this time being careful to make sure it was all in order before turning it on.

The result was that I didn’t have my morning cigarette until some 40-minutes after waking up. A small achievement, I know, but that’s not the point I’m driving at.

I’ve found in the past that smoking a cigarette immediately upon waking causes a much more unpleasant head-rush than when I wait awhile until I’m more fully awake – but the cigarette I had this morning caused a kind of dizzy head-fuzziness which more than outweighed any enjoyment of smoking. As I’ve said before, I’ve been progressing enough with this technique that my continued smoking is more out of simple habit than from the compulsive need that a tobacco-addict normally experiences. But I wonder at what’s changing (either in my physiology, my psychology, or both), to make my immediate experience of smoking so different than usual…

Is it just that I’m becoming more consciously aware of particular sensations and effects that have actually been happening all along without my knowing it? Or, as I’m more and more challenging and overcoming my subconscious urges to ‘get a fix’ with tobacco, am I actually making myself more sensitive to its effects on my body?

I’m inclined to think that it’s more my becoming more consciously aware of what smoking is doing to my body every time I have a cigarette. I went through this stage both times before – pretty soon now I’ll feel little else but disgust every time I inhale, and that’s the point when simply smoking no more will feel as natural as lighting up did only two months ago.

The impairment of brain-function is, (I strongly suspect), ordinarily unperceived, or at least not consciously associated with smoking. As the technique works more and more, as my subconscious conviction that smoking cigarettes provides a great deal more problems than apparent benefits, I believe I’m simply in an increasingly better position to observe the immediate effects on my body – a valuable support to my growing attitude-change to cigarettes!

But as I’ve said, this is a very personally customized technique – my experiences with it working for me might be altogether different for others. When my brother quit smoking, years ago, (and subsequently started up again, but then quit again - smoke-free for well over a year now), he told me that he’d just been having his morning smoke in the bathroom, and in a flash found himself disgusted with the filthy habit, tossed his unfinished butt into the toilet, and didn’t smoke again for months. And that’s the sort of effect Walter’s Special Technique deliberately causes – one constantly reminds oneself on a subconscious level that there’s really no benefit to be had by smoking cigarettes, until one’s sub-consciousness finally exerts great enough influence on one’s conscious awareness that the determination not to smoke another cigarette is an easy one to follow-through on.

Jram23

Starting tomorrow I’m going to try counting the number of cigarettes I smoke, and the time at which I smoke them. I know I’ve been cutting down quite effortlessly for quite a while now, but I’d like to be able to report precisely how the technique is gradually doing its thing as I go along. So stay tuned!

Smoking Stresses and Weakens the Immune-System

This is one of those ‘reasons not to smoke’ that I didn’t explore in great detail before deciding to put into my lexicon of tobacco-negations… Looking further into the specific functions of the immune-system, it seems to me that perhaps it doesn’t belong quite as well as I thought…

The immune system is, of course, the system which protects from interference in the course of normal body-function by outside influences such as viruses, bacteria, and other parasitic organisms. As far as I know, none of the constituents of tobacco-smoke are living things that fall into these categories.

In fact, foremost among the informational resources I came across in searching the internet for immune system-related effects of smoking are suggestions that there actually are notable benefits to the immune-system resulting from smoking tobacco – although it certainly remains that the few benefits thereby suggested are far outweighed by the many disadvantages involved in habitually inhaling such a toxic cocktail as tobacco-smoke…

The health-effects/dangers of smoking aren`t like those of parasitic living organisms – instead, the many chemicals in tobacco smoke are simply present in the body, interrupting and influencing other natural chemical reactions going on in the course of ordinary body-function. A virus infects a living cell and usurps its reproductive-power in order to proliferate within the body; a bacterium actively lives it’s life in whatever part of the body of the host-organism it finds suitable, either in a symbiotic relationship to the host, (such as the sorts of pre- and pro-biotic bacteria advertised as being a beneficial constituent of healthy yogurt, aiding in optimal digestion), or as a harmfully exploitative agent, such as occurs when the salmonella bacterium invades the human body from an altogether different origin… (I’d like to be able to discuss in greater detail the various classifications of infectious organisms and the ways that they affect people, but there’s simply too much various information out there to put it all together into a single blog-post concerning the effects of tobacco-smoke on the human immune-system).

Based on yesterday’s discussion of how carbon-monoxide infects red blood cells, the matter of simple chemical-interaction becomes clearer, (at least to me – I sincerely hope I’ve been successful so far in relating my growing understanding to you) – the various operations of various cells and the like in the human body are driven by the naturally occurring chemical reactions of the constituents of those cells, which is why the lungs cannot do much to prevent CO from binding to the hemoglobin in the red blood cell, even though the whole organism obviously prefers that the blood cells perform their ordinary function unimpeded… Similarly, the effects that the constituents of tobacco-smoke have on the operation of the human immune-system are likewise chemically-autonomous in nature – it is not a particularly ‘willful’ effect of the poisons in tobacco-smoke that causes it to threaten the normal operation of the immune-system, it is simply a natural chemical-process that the body cannot intrude upon. Indeed, the body relies on these sorts of autonomic chemical-interactions!

The various exchanges performed by the various cells of the body are only made possible by those cells’ being composed in such a way as to facilitate or inhibit the autonomic chemical interactions unavoidable when suitably reactive chemicals come into contact with one another. Hence the cellular membrane of some particular cell is composed of such material as to inhibit the intrusion of unsuitable material, until the suitable material comes along, (which the cellular membrane is capable of recognizing, given the nature of the cell’s own arrangement of the constituent molecules of that membrane…), whereupon a needed nutrient is accepted into the cell in exchange for waste materials, (these sorts of things go on constantly in regard to the exchange of O² and CO², and also with proteins needed for maintaining the physical structure and general constitution of the cell itself).

Anyway, we’re getting too far from the central point here…

It seems as though, considered by itself, the immune-system is somewhat unaffected by smoking cigarettes, given the fact that the constituents of tobacco-smoke are non-living and thus not falling under the jurisdiction, (if you will), of the agents of the immune-system… But what of the side-effects of smoking on the immune-system? I cannot go into greater detail at this time, I’m disappointed to report. Suffice to say that the presence of toxic chemicals in the body causes many different chemical-interruptions, perhaps inhibiting the types of cellular communication that enable the immune-system to respond properly when and where it is needed. I can certainly report from direct experience that I`m more vulnerable to colds and flu when I`ve been smoking too much over two or three days.

Anyway, the discussion being thus unsatisfactorily concluded, let me get back to the more temporal report of my progress – I didn’t make it today in spending six waking hours between first waking and smoking my first cigarette. Needless to say, I’m even more disappointed in reporting this unfortunate truth than I am about the inconclusiveness of this day’s cue-card description – but the day’s experiment was merely a testing of my gradual progress in coming to give up the habit, and my other reports on how my tobacco-addiction manifests itself remain unaltered. I skipped breakfast this morning, and found myself less occupied with day-to-day affairs as I expected to be – all of which culminated in my breaking down and smoking a cigarette by myself on the balcony of the apartment I live in with my third small cup of coffee…

As I’ve maintained, my continuing habit of smoking cigarettes takes more the form of routine habits than the compulsive striving for a “fix” that typically characterize the tobacco-addict (as I further consider this fact, inebriated as I am with alcohol and concomitant sleepiness, I wonder whether I might be kidding myself a little, projecting the expected effects of my efforts further than the effects they`ve thus far had of their own), but I must report that the conscious effort of trying to use a cigarette to feel at ease not only doesn`t work anymore, but isn`t expected to – a sure-enough sign that the technique is working as expected… As I`ve said earlier, my natural problems with addiction in general tend to encourage me to pursue activities (such as smoking cigarettes and drinking way too much beer), are issues that significantly underlie the simple matter of my lifelong relationship with tobacco. Or maybe they stem from my pre-disposition to tobacco, or, (as I`m more inclined to believe), they find their origin deeper than any particular substance-association.

Smoking Causes Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

The cue-card for today is not ‘smoking can cause carbon monoxide poisoning’ – because CO-poisoning happens every time you smoke. Carbon monoxide is caused by burning something without there being quite enough oxygen available for it to burn properly, like when dried tobacco leaves are burned in a paper tube.

What happens is that the hemoglobin in your red blood cells, having picked up normal O² molecules from the lungs, carries those molecules to oxygen-burning cells throughout the body, and picks up the resultant CO² molecules. Upon returning to the lungs, the CO² is released and the blood cells try to pick up more O² in order to keep doing their thing. But when there’s carbon-monoxide present in the lungs, it will bond approximately 230 times more readily to hemoglobin than oxygen will!

Hemoglobin has four ‘binding’ sites, and thus can carry four O² molecules at a time. When a CO molecule binds to one of these sites, the chemical attraction of oxygen to the other three binding sites is increased, resulting in that hemoglobin molecule being unable to release the O² molecules to oxygen-hungry cells.

Essentially, a red blood cell infected by carbon monoxide becomes useless to the body, and stays that way until it dies and is replaced by another one. The average lifespan of a single red blood cell is about four months. For people severely afflicted with carbon-monoxide poisoning, this basically amounts to suffocation on a cellular level – even while the lungs are taking in and expelling plenty of air.

There’s a lot of other horrible damage done by carbon-monoxide poisoning besides its affinity for binding with hemoglobin. For more information check out Wikipedia’s page on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO_poisoning

Benjamin Chun

I’ve still been putting too much carbon-monoxide into my lungs by burning little paper tubes of tobacco. As I said yesterday morning, the way that I’ve been smoking hasn’t been the same as it used to be – it’s become much more about simply doing what I’m used to doing and engaging in whatever social elements remain in smoking with others out on the balcony here…

I recall from earlier success (even as temporary as both occasions turned out to be…), in becoming a non-smoker that having other things to put my attention into helps a great deal to avoid obsessing over the cigarette I could be smoking right now if only I wasn’t – but to rely on that sort of thing in order to make the simple act of not smoking a cigarette easier seems ultimately self-defeating. I’ve got so many things demanding my attention now that the idea that it would be easier not to smoke if my attention was devoted elsewhere just doesn’t make sense.

Walter’s Special Technique promises that, rigorously applied, the reading of those daily cue-cards will result in the desire to smoke cigarettes disappearing altogether… The two times I used it and easily stopped smoking, it certainly wasn’t as though I’d never been a smoker and didn’t have the idea of cigarettes in my mind or anything – so I imagine that when the day comes again that I give them up, I’ll go through a week or two of weirdness… But if it’s going ot be the same as the last two times, that weirdness will be a lot more about understanding how easy it would be to smoke, and sort of marvelling at the fact that even knowing that I don’t feel any sort of compulsion to.

I’m toying with the idea of just trying to delay my first cigarette of the day by six hours. It’s been easy for awhile now not to smoke for an hour or two after waking up – but when I started using this technique again awhile ago I resolved to really hammer it home and let it sink in and keep sinking in… I remember the first two times the effects I noticed in the weeks before stopping were that every cigarette I smoked tasted awful, (suggesting that there’s some psycho-somatic elements of enjoying the flavour of tobacco-smoke in the first place), and that slight but manageable feelings of nausea and dizziness appeared even as I was unthinkingly smoking less frequently than before…

I’ve noticed some of that this time around, but the difference is that this time around I’ve been drinking just about every day as well… Well, that’s one of the differences anyway. Another is that I don’t have a girlfriend upon whom to psycho-defensively project my obsessions, and it feels like that’s the way it ought to be.

So that’s it then – I’ve decided. Tomorrow morning, when I wake up, I’ll have coffee as usual, breakfast as usual, and go about my business as usual, and I won’t smoke a cigarette until at least six hours after waking up – just to have a better gauge of how far along Walter’s Special Technique has brought me so far, this time. After that, I’ll have a better idea of what quit-date to set, or whether I’m even at the point where setting one is appropriate.

Naturally, I’ll report on the results before the day is out.

Smoking can cause Sinus-Infection and Inflammation

As of this day, I am still a smoker, (though hopefully not so terribly unattractive a one…) but have been employing “Walter’s Special Technique” for about a month and a half now. The description linked to in the header for this blog doesn’t mention an approximate timeline for the subliminal re-adjustment to fully take effect, but I seem to recall Walter suggesting it would be a couple of months or more. The thing is, he was talking to a room full of drug-addicts and alcoholics when he related this method to us, (I needn’t mention that I wasn’t absent from the room that was filled with addicts, and neither was Walter himself…), so any such simple method of removing the desire to smoke a cigarette must be of a sort to have its effect gradually.

To be truthful, I’m not at all distressed by the fact that I’m still smoking even after faithfully following the method for these last six or so weeks. In fact, this isn’t the first time I’ve employed this technique to stop smoking. It isn’t even the second. Now I’m sure the average person reading this might take that as a sign that the method doesn’t work, so give me the benefit of the doubt here and read on. I’ll explain.

The first time I started using these little cue-cards, smoking away as I did so, faithfully trusting that the assertions being processed by my subconscious mind would build to greater and greater conviction to the point where my compulsive desire to smoke cigarettes would be gone, I stopped smoking fairly effortlessly within two months. What I also did was to stop using the method right after giving up the smokes – something that I didn’t believe then (and actually don’t believe now) should necessarily have contributed to my taking the habit back up again. Actually, what made me take the habit up again was a thing very like what had made me develop it in the first place – I’m an addict, and being an addict isn’t something that depends on the chemical actions of any drugs one takes into the body.

Long before I’d smoked a cigarette, tasted alcohol, smoked a joint, ground up a neighbour’s prescription Ritalin and snorted it, eaten mushrooms, dosed ecstasy, railed ketamine, dropped acid, smoked salvia, sampled oxycontin, or been relieved to find that cocaine didn’t cause unpleasant cravings the day after, (or even difficulty sleeping when what I had ran out), I’d been the sort of person who compulsively and obsessively pursues whatever form of immediate gratification I can set myself to. It might have its origins in the divorce of my parents, it might very well have been a latent part of me from my conception – I don’t know. It is, in fact, eternally beyond my grasp to completely understand. Believe me, I’ve tried. And in trying, I’ve learned a great deal – but the subtleties of my addiction lie beyond the scope of my possible understanding, they evolve as I do.

It’s for reasons like this that, some six months after having an extraordinarily easy time learning to go through my daily life without so much as thinking of smoking a cigarette, my then un-troubling use of Psilocybe mushrooms led to the rationalization that I’d likely be able to smoke marijuana with a similar maintenance of self-control. Take a wild guess at how well that idea worked out for me…

It was the familiar feeling of long-beloved, aromatic marijuana-smoke hitting my lungs that did me in. I know a lot of people who smoke weed and don’t smoke cigarettes – people who function perfectly well as daily potheads, living their own lives according to their own values, goals and expectations. But on that day, after gleefully overdoing it with 8 grams of bone-dry magic mushrooms (of well-above average quality, if without anything extra special about their strain), and finding myself returned to reality with the rest of my weed taken from me by a confused and angry girlfriend, I convinced myself easily that I’d come far enough in learning to manage my substance-use that smoking a cigarette or two wouldn’t likely result in my becoming a full-time smoker again… Incidentally, it was another 2 weeks or a month before I did start smoking again regularly – it was the rationalization that made it so easy to fall back. A steadily growing series of supportive rationalizations leading me right back into generally self-destructive, gratification-seeking behaviour without proper regard for the long-term repercussions of any of it. What those of you with experience in such matters will recognize as classic addict behaviour.

But this blog isn’t about all my past experiences with addiction, either to tobacco or anything else. It’s about my present, ongoing experiences in trying to permanently overcome this addiction. I’ll not be evasive about matters relating to other objects of my obsessive nature as days and weeks go on, but the main idea is to provide a consistent series of reports on what this very effective technique does for the smoker, as well as what it does not.

‘Walter’s Special Technique,’ (a name I gave to it, Walter having either not named it himself or not informed me on what he calls it), promises to gradually come to remove the compulsion to smoke cigarettes. It doesn’t promise that, once removed, the compulsion can never come back.

As I said earlier, this is actually the third time I’ve employed this method to combat my problem with cigarettes. The second time had much the same results as the first, though the catalyst by which I returned to the habit that time was the growing problem created by making sex the object of my compulsive obsession – an addiction which tends to sour quickly when pursued with a single lover…

I’m therefore quite confident that this time around I’ll have the same ease and comfort in giving up the cigarettes on the day that I choose to. Already I’ve found myself only lighting up because I’m accustomed to doing so, smoking with the other smoker I live with, and not out of a compulsive need to get my fix. I’m also aware that, if left unchecked, my addictive nature will work to the effect of eventually compelling me to seek gratification in a cigarette, and I believe that for someone such as I, the single reliance on this technique cannot suffice to keep me out of danger permanently.

Walter himself spoke of the need for a much deeper and consistently followed program of addiction-recovery if the addict is to live a healthy, normal life. I am certainly with him on that! But none of this degrades the validity of this special technique. I fully intend to maintain my use of the 51 anti-smoking cue-cards I’ve put together long after the day I smoke my last cigarette, and I also intend to continue to pursue a spiritual approach to living within present circumstances without resorting to the sorts of obsessive-compulsive behaviours that characterize my addiction.

In addition, (of course), I intend to make public the progress I make as I go along in this regard. If any of you feel inclined to apply this method in overcoming your own addiction to tobacco, please feel free to contribute your own experience with it here. My intention in creating this blog has been to share a viable solution to the problem of tobacco-addiction, without wild gimmicks or unlikely promises, and to continuously provide whatever information, insight and support that I can from my experiences with it. If you smoke and want to stop, or if you know someone who smokes and wants to stop – join me!