Every morning I post the current Threat Level. When I arrive at work, I assess the situation and post the days level prominently on my office door. This threat level has nothing to do with terrorists.
It’s all about me.
I have really good mornings most of the time. Today was not one of them. I normally use the real color-coded threat level sign. But that seemed too ordinary to express the condition I had elevated to in the 3 hours between getting out of bed and starting to work. Every joint in my body hurt, my fasting blood glucose was 314, meaning two injections instead of one. I felt feverish, sweaty and grumpy. My skin itched and crawled.
I did not want to go to work. I wanted to scream, throw a tantrum, and go back to bed. But being the dedicated employee that I am, I sucked it up and went to the office. Where I found more crap to irritate me, just reading my email.
<—Today’s Threat Level
Someone said “A picture is worth 1,000 words”. I have no clue who this little girl is, but she looks how I felt today. And still feel tonight, so I am sending my grumpy ass to bed now.
Dear Diary,
I know I said goodbye at the end of June. I also said I wanted to move on to other topics because I was bored, blah, blah, blah.
The Bitch
The truth is I needed to stop blogging about quitting because I was thinking about smoking all the time. I needed to break away before I drove myself crazy or to the liquor store for a pack of cigarettes.
I recently figured out that the hardest part of the journey has begun, and it would be down right selfish of me to not mention this last phase that is the most important one of all – Phase III: Maintenance.
In other words, staying quit. Watching out for my addiction (a.k.a. “The Bitch”) because she lurks and patiently waits to catch you in a weak moment. You know it’s her when a craving smacks you right between the eyes, and you weren’t even thinking about smoking. The sudden interruption of your thoughts is jarring, and upsetting because it’s been x many months now, damn it! Withdrawal is over! You want to throw a tantrum like a little girl.
Take immediate action. STOP THINKING! NOW!. Before you start to rationalize. Before you justify (to yourself), why it’s OK to have a cigarette. You deserve one. Or two… The longer your mind travels this destructive train of thought, the more logical your thinking seems to you. But it’s not your thinking anyway, it’s your addiction‘s thinking.
A psychologist, I know personally, taught me a technique called “Stop Thought”. It sounded too silly to really work, but in the spirit of cooperation, and the fact I knew no other techniques, I gave it a try. (I used to try reason. But that Bitch is SO unreasonable.)
“STOP!!” is the simplest and fastest one. I visualized the word STOP in bold, bright red and font-size 14K, as I screamed (very loudly inside my head) “STOP! STOP! STOP! STOP! STOP!” . Very cathartic .And it works. Your brain switches over to defensive mode and your only focus now is slamming the door in the Bitches face.
Other Stop Thoughts that help me are: “GO AWAY“, “UP YOUR NOSE WITH A RUBBER HOSE“, “CA-CA“, “KNOCK IT OFF“, and “NOT TODAY“
And don’t be shy – throw that tantrum like a little girl if you want, by stomping (as loud as you can) in circles, flailing your arms about, with your fists tightly balled up. Then you add in shrill whining and hiccuppy* sobbing. If you are the adventurous type, try the rolling around on the floor version. I’m too old to do that anymore, but I think the vertical tantrum is more fun anyway.
OK. You slammed the door against your Bitch. So what now?
You can do whatever. Continue on with your day like nothing happened. Good News: Cravings only last one or two minutes and you handled those minutes beautifully. There will be other minutes down the road. Some worse than others, but do not be afraid of them. You don’t have to listen to the Bitch’s lies anymore.
For the past 24 days I have had a scapegoat to blame all my difficulties, mistakes, sins, dumb ideas, and evil thoughts on. Best of all – it probably is the cause of those things, to some degree, so I’m not lying .
According to the The American Heritage® Medical Dictionary, the definition of a withdrawal symptom is:
withdrawal symptom: Any of a group of physical and psychological symptoms occurring in an individual deprived of an accustomed dose of an addicting agent.
Read the definition again.
Get it? ANY!
This is a huge relief to me especially since the weirdest things have been happening to my mind and body. Like sudden onset dementia- I could not remember my best friends name yesterday which was a bit embarrassing because I was introducing her to someone at the time.
Having an excuse for them is OK. But what I really wanted to know is when are they going to stop? So, I started going to medical websites to research this topic and I discovered a couple things.
The Mayo Clinic told me:
Just 20 minutes after your last cigarette, your heart rate goes down. Twelve hours later, levels of carbon monoxide, a toxic gas, in your blood return to normal. Your lung function improves and your circulation starts to get better within three months.
Cool. My body has already started healing from all those years of abuse. I hope it can forgive me.
The Kaiser Permanente told me:
The withdrawal symptoms are worst during the first week or so, but they may last a few weeks. For some people, the first couple of months can be hard.
Since mine are lasting over 3-weeks, I must be one of “some people”. Looks like I’m going to need an excuse for myself a bit longer…
<—Today’s Threat Level 
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