The Giving Up Smoking Thread!!

mumzyof2

Hello everyone well i havent stopped smoking, i am currently misscarrying the baby..i started bleeding in kfc on thursday went hos and kept me in till yesterday as i was bleeding heavy and clots etc (sorry to sound grumsome) but home now and bleeding stopped even tho there is still the sac to come out and more clots (sorry again) im feeling ok..not sunk in yet i dont think.. just thought id let u all know. and also they knew at my scan i had and didnt bother telling me as when i had scan yday am i measured 5 weeks which was same when i went for 1st scan. im so mad with them. anyways hope everyone ok xx

JoeHel

mumzy I am so sorry, you poor thing. It's just nature's way of saying that this time it wasn't right hun. It's so common but lots of women don't even know that they are pregnant at that stage and so don't know its anything other than a heavy period... Sending you a big hug and hope you're okay chick xx

tattycath

Hi Mumzyof2, I am so sorry to hear about your loss hun.
I'm not surprised you are cross with them if they knew and didn't tell you. I really don't know what to say, but I'm sending you ((hugs)) Hope you are feeling more recovered soon. Take care

mumzyof2

Thankyou so much xxxx

hayley1471

I'm struggling tonight, its only day 3 for me.

Does anyone else feel lonely without their smokes?

JoeHel

hayley, how are you quitting? Are you going cold turkey or are you using a nicotine replacement product? Only asking because if you're going cold turkey and you're on day 3 you are pretty much right at the time when you are suddenly going to feel a WHOLE lot better when the nicotine is out of your system and the physical withdrawal pangs stop!! It's a great feeling!!!

My best ever discovery was WhyQuit.com and it has made my quit SO EASY it's unbelievable. I expected quitting to be hard and miserable and I thought life would never be as fun again. I was SO WRONG! And the positive thought pattern I have got myself into is mostly due to the fantastic articles on that site. Education is the key to an easy quit. Just take it one day at a time and read as much as you can to help you realise how you are NOT depriving yourself of anything - exactly the opposite! Good luck.

I have been quit for 1 Month, 1 Week, 4 Days, 47 minutes and 56 seconds (41 days). I have saved £298.71 by not smoking 1,148 cigarettes. I have saved 3 Days, 23 hours and 40 minutes of my life. My Quit Date: 04/11/2007 23:00

hayley1471

Cold Turkey Joe. Thanks for the website suggestion.

JoeHel

Cold turkey is absolutely the best way in my opinion. I've tried NRT and patches/gum just didn't work for me. The thing I loved about cold turkey was that you feel the changes in your body so quickly - it's such an incentive to carry on!!!

Read the "first 72 hours" stuff on the website. It will explain everything you are going through at the moment.

As I've already said before on this thread, I was dreading quitting. I thought it would be the hardest thing I'd ever done and I honestly expected to NEVER get over not being able to smoke. I accepted that I had to quit if I wanted to live a relatively long and healthy life, but I didn't expect to ever be happy with that decision. If I'd known before how wrong that assumption was I'd have done this years ago. If I'd just stopped smoking for one week I would have realised how lovely it feels to be calm, nicotine free and so less stressed!! Sunday at 11pm will be 6 weeks and I'm astounded how much better I feel. I can breathe deeper and my permanent little throat-clearing cough has gone completely. I sit here in my flat with my OH smoking and it doesn't bother me at all. I've been out and been drunk and still haven't thought twice about smoking. That is ALL down to educating myself into why I was a drug addict and deciding that wasn't how I wanted to be any more. I'd say the best steps towards a pain-free quit are:

1. Read about nicotine and understand your addiction.
2. Quit nicotine full stop - don't replace your ciggies with another form of the drug!
3. Be kind to yourself, take it one day at a time and if you feel scared/fragile or unhappy then keep reading 'til you find something to re-strengthen your motivation.
4. Never take another puff! Never let that drug back into your system. Your body is so much happier without it!

tattycath

JoeHel wrote: »

Hi Cath! You are doing so well. The only advice I can give you is recognise that, after 2 weeks off the dreaded nicotine, it is NOT any sort of withdrawal that is making you feel in a rubbish mood. All nicotine will have been out of your system in the first 3 days. We ALL have times when we feel in a rubbish mood, whether we smoke or not. It's life! Lack of ciggies haven't caused this bad mood and having a ciggie won't cure it either!! But you already know that. Do whatever you find works to get through it. Do you get PMT? What works for that?! Just take a few deep breaths, go for a walk, have a bath, put some soothing music on, if you have a TV in your bedroom get into bed and put a chick flick on. I find a great stress-reliever is having a spring clean and my OH likes to put a shoot-em up game on the XBox and take his frustration out on that!

I think the main thing to realise is that good and bad mood are completely NORMAL and don't need fixing with drugs or chemicals! Your body is equipped to protect you from pretty much everything with natural chemicals like adrenaline and for the first time since you started smoking you're letting your body deal with emotions in a natural way. Just do what feels right!

Just, whatever you do, please don't give up and think a ciggie will help you feel better. It won't, and you'll feel in an even worse mood because you'll be so disappointed with yourself!

Good luck!

Thanks JoeHel, you talk so much sense, it hadn't actually dawned on me that my mood was not actually down to stopping smoking but down to how I used to deal with it. Obviously I used to go and have a smoke, and I hadn't considered what to replace that with in order to handle the different situations that arise. You are a godsend to this website, you manage to put so many things in perspective for so many different problems/issues. Thank you so much, you have helped me enormously already. :A !!

JoeHel

tattycath wrote: »

Thanks JoeHel, you talk so much sense, it hadn't actually dawned on me that my mood was not actually down to stopping smoking but down to how I used to deal with it. Obviously I used to go and have a smoke, and I hadn't considered what to replace that with in order to handle the different situations that arise. You are a godsend to this website, you manage to put so many things in perspective for so many different problems/issues. Thank you so much, you have helped me enormously already. :A !!

What a lovely thing to say tattycath, thank you.

One of the really useful things I learned from that site was that when you have a ciggie during a "stressful" situation, all that ciggie actually does is temporarily reduce your drug craving. It doesn't do anything about the situation you are actually stressed about and you still need to deal with that anyway!

If you've been nicotine free for 2 weeks you will already have physically felt that the usual day to day stressful things are easier to deal with when you DON'T have the added hassle of feeding a drug addiction!! But you probably haven't really thought twice about it. In my first month of quit I made myself think properly about EVERY situation I used to smoke during, and how I would deal with that situation without a ciggie. In most cases it's pretty simple - just don't light up!! I never try and stop myself thinking about ciggies, but when I do think about them I make sure I think really positively about not needing them anymore. I give myself a huge pat on the back and then just get on with whatever I was doing.

The only thing that nobody will EVER be able to convince me of again is that there is a single, solitary legitimate excuse for going back to being a drug addict once you've got it out of your system. I try and imagine the worst possible thing that could happen to me (losing my partner, home, job) and still I know there isn't one thing about that devastation that would be improved by becoming a drug addict again.

You have potentially just made the best decision of your life and you should be so proud of yourself.