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.
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| 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!
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