MANY people say giving up smoking is the hardest thing they have ever done; harder than childbirth, harder than climbing to Base Camp, harder than eating a gravel sandwich on sourdough bread.
I have never attempted any of those things but I have tried to quit smoking and if completing any of the aforementioned tasks would absolve me of my nasty habit I might be inclined to opt for one (Although that childbirth one might be a bit difficult eh? Ed).
Statistics show that stop smoking products can increase your chances of quitting by 25%. The problem with these solutions is that if you are addicted to smoking the likelihood is you will become addicted to whatever device you’re using to satisfy your craving.
Sadly these challenges aren’t, as far as I’m aware, proven to help smokers quit. The options that are available are myriad but essentially boil down to two options: cold turkey or with a little help from our friends at the quit-smoking industry.
I have read in several places that deciding to quit is half of the battle. The only way I can comprehend this statement is if the originator of this claim suffered from crippling dyscalculia.
Deciding was easy.
Bolstered by having already completed half the task I though it logical to stop entirely and weather the storm. I pictured myself as being above the petty reach of nicotine, immune to the siren song of tobacco.
Ah, the arrogance of the smoker.
I ran like Forest Gump, read furiously and ate like those snakes that can swallow hippos to try to keep my mind off smoking. After all these activities, however, I was left with the feeling that after all that exercise I really deserved a cig.
Cigarettes: those little white sticks that you put in your mouth.
Next, following the advice of a friend, I tried to to think of nothing but smoking. This was very easy, in fact I had been doing it unintentionally for the entirety of my first attempt. It was also completely and utterly useless.
I even tested out the theory favoured by parents the world over and smoked until I was sick. Somewhat disappointingly I never turned green, as my dad had promised, and once the wooziness passed I had a much higher tolerance to cigarettes. I smoked twice as much in the following week.
After it dawned on me that I had not only wildly overestimated my willpower but grievously underestimated how much I enjoyed smoking, I decided to test out the big guns.
The products on offer really are overwhelming: patches, chewing gum, lozenges inhalers, nasal spray (nasal spray, what?), e-cigarettes, a plethora of prescription and over the counter medicine as well as a multitude of weird and wonderful alternative treatments.
In an attempt to narrow my scope I applied for the stop smoking kit from the NHS. Imagine my chagrin when I received my bundle and tore it open like a child at Christmas to discover a redwood’s worth of leaflets and a strange tube sort of thing for twisting round when in need of a fag.
Confounded by my massive box of flyers I sought out the closest thing to a cigarette that wasn’t required by law to be accompanied by a mentally scarring image - e-cigarettes.
Even when they aren’t causing a bomb scare on coaches these fake cigs are costly but I found, at least initially, they do keep the hands busy and satisfy the nicotine cravings. Which makes sense as you are just sucking in large quantities of nicotine more rapidly than Bill Hicks in Fast Forward.
E-Cigarettes: Those big white sticks that you put in your mouth.
After a few days, even with the huge doses of nicotine, there was something substantially lacking in each drag from the e-cigarettes. Maybe I needed all that arsenic and formaldehyde to get my fix. This is all ignoring the fact that I was, in no uncertain measures, hooked on the miasma emitted by the strangely elongated £30 tube.
Statistics show that stop smoking products can increase your chances of quitting by 25%. The problem with these solutions is that if you are addicted to smoking the likelihood is you will become addicted to whatever device you’re using to satisfy your craving. Which raises the question of how many people are addicted to nasal sprays, the foul tasting blue tac-like chewing gum or the comically large e-cigarettes?
So far on my journey into the wonderful world of smoking abstinence the only thing that really seems to fulfill my craving for a cigarette is, well, a cigarette.
But what are your thoughts? Have you overcome the cold turkey or have you beaten the monkey off your back with a big fake ciggie?
Follow Alex on Twitter @AlH_HlA
