Someone asked for this, so here goes.
When I was a year sober, I stopped smoking, easily. When I
was seven years sober, I started again, and couldn't stop. When I tried to
stop, I wanted to kill myself, literally, and could not think about anything
but smoking or suicide. So I carried on smoking for another seven years.
Clearly, lack of information was not my problem; lack of power was my problem.
I was trying to tackle it like I had alcohol: cold turkey.
It didn't work.
When you smoke, I’m told, the body adjusts, stops producing
certain neurotransmitters, and depletes the number of neuroreceptors receptive
to nicotine. When you stop, you're imbalanced. In my case, nuts.
This means you have a problem. Continuing to smoke is nuts.
Stop, and you go nuts.
The solution was twofold:
Firstly, to recognise that smoking did not supply me with
any benefit other than the temporary relief of withdrawal symptoms. Any other
'reason' the mind gives is delusional. I practised this for weeks, realising
with every cigarette that anything good I thought it was doing was illusory:
the cigarette was merely providing chemical relief from a chemical withdrawal
symptom caused by the chemical itself.
Once I was clear about this, I switched to gum. I had now
solved the problem of smoking forever. I need never smoke again. I had
separated smoking from the addiction. I let myself chew as often as I wanted.
No sense of deprivation. But 100% solving the cigarette problem, leaving me
with a smaller problem: the nicotine problem.
Here's the trick: you can taper with gum in a way that you
can't with cigarettes. I understand this is to do with how the nicotine hits
the system.
With gum I tapered not by reducing the number of gums but by
dividing the gums. So I never needed to deprive myself if I felt
'withdrawal-y'. Whenever I satisfied the desire but still felt like a
cigarette, I recalled that a cigarette would not then remedy whatever it was I
was feeling because the feeling could not be coming from the withdrawal: I had
already dealt with that.
I very gradually accustomed myself to reducing doses, namely
to 1/16 of a lowest-dose gum.
Eventually, over about six weeks, I found I was totally OK
and forgot about the gums altogether. Apparently this is approximately the time
it takes for the body to restore its endogenous production of the relevant
neurotransmitters and repopulate the relevant neuroreceptors.
It was easy as pie and entirely painless. That was all about
13 years ago.