It really does.

Even better, it gets easier quicker once you know what to expect and how to react.

1. Nicotine withdrawal.
It’ll be gone from your system over a couple of days and you’ll feel like you’re coming down with a cold. If you want to avoid those minor feelings at a time when you’re dealing with the mental side then take some NRT and withdraw over whatever timescale you’re comfortable with. Cravings are not withdrawal symptoms. Don’t confuse the two. If you subscribe to NRT you will still want to smoke regardless of what the TV, nurse or NHS tell you. Conversely the psychological effect of taking a ‘medicine’ may reduce your desire to smoke.

2. Stopping Smoking (physical)
Not inhaling smoke increases the oxygen levels in your blood making you feel odd, intoxicated and spaced out. Many report insomnia and weird dreams. Taking NRT, particularly 24hr stuff can intensify this. The resulting repair of your body throws up all manner of things like ulcers, acne, lethargy and so on.

3. Stopping Smoking (mental)This is your actual quit.

Every time a smoking opportunity arrives your subconscious will prompt you to smoke. It doesn’t make the blindest bit of difference whether you’re sucking on an inhalator or whether you’ve smeared peanut-butter on a piece of sellotape and slapped it on your forehead. You will be prompted continually until you decide to light up. You don’t even have to smoke, just lighting up will kill the prompt. The prompt isn’t a need for nicotine, it’s purely a need to smoke.
The prompts don’t happen when there is no smoking opportunity. Flying is a classic example. I believe that traditional flight smoking etiquette is to try not to think about smoking until about 30 minutes before landing, panic through customs and baggage retrieval and then rush outside and smoke 2 with the cab drivers.
If you can convince your brain that you’re on a flight that’s never going to land then the prompts will be non-existent.
OK, that sounds a bit weird but we know that prompts don’t occur when smoking is not permitted so the trick is to convince your subconscious that from now on that it’s prohibited continually.

If you can out-stare a mental prompt that manifests itself as a physical need you’re laughing and each little battle gives you better ammunition for the next one.
The craves come thick and fast in the early days but slow down due to the prompts being less regular. For example you get the morning prompt every morning whereas the lying on a beach in the sun prompt is a little less frequent!

Never forget that it was YOU who forced your subconscious to allow your lungs to admit smoke into them when the natural reaction is dramatically the opposite and it is YOU who has to put a stop to it.

A note on Willpower

“A conscious application of effort against a subconscious desire to smoke is unlikely to be successful.
If we imagine a burglar trying to crack a safe with a combination lock we can all appreciate the futility of grim determination and continual attempts. Sure, he might strike lucky and mathematically, given enough attempts, he’ll crack it.
However, turn up with the combination in his pocket and he’s out of there with the contents.
Unfortunately far too many of us seem to get bogged down with the make of the safe, the burglars choice of mask and stripy sweater, what time of day the burglary was, what car he drove, what picture the safe was hidden behind etc etc and we forget that all we need is the goal, the combination and the opportunity.”

Very few of us have the inner strength to maintain the effort necessary to consciously ignore the desire to smoke.
We can all summon the willpower to leave the sofa and empty the dishwasher or take the dog for a walk in the rain but we can’t do that for months on end. There are far too many demands on our conscious to keep the finger in the dyke and before you know it the habitual behaviour has returned.

If our conscious mind truly had control then a conscious desire to do anything would require no effort at all to achieve it whether eating less, or quitting fags.
Irrespective of how flamboyant we make our conscious desire to quit and who we tell or what we plan, failing to let the subconscious in on it will rarely prove successful.

People who quit, “just like that” aren’t hit with a massive dose of willpower one day or some super inner strength, they have something more akin to a change of heart rather than a change of mind.

I really wish I could tell you what it is and how to make it happen.
Many expectant mothers seem to manage it, a major bombshell from your GP or a genuine appreciation of our own mortality sometimes does it. For many others there comes a sudden realisation that they no longer want to smoke, the subconscious has in effect ‘changed its mind.’

If you plan to quit, but really want to smoke, willpower will keep you off the fags until either you achieve the change of heart or run out of willpower.

Failing that, read widely and there’s a good chance your subconscious will find something that brings it in line with your conscious desires. Bear in mind that your subconscious doesn’t necessarily (or usually) read what your conscious reads!

We are also our own worst enemies. Even if we’ve managed to quit, by either stubbornly hanging on or we’ve had a change of heart, we can still stumble when faced with a new dilemma that makes us open up the big bag of smoking clichés and pull out a corker.
I’ve fallen off the wagon at 6 months because I was stressed and we all know a fag “calms us down.” That might have been my proper quit if I hadn’t had that nugget of codswallop tucked away in my head…

Education is the key, it really is!