Well, I’m still surviving so far, the patches give me the incentive and the power not to put more tar in my lungs. I seem to be trying to cough all the tar that’s already in there up at the moment - yay for a hacking cough that hurts like I’m on fire when it happens. I’m nearly through both the week-long packets that I bought, and I went a couple of days without a patch, and I survived fine. I don’t think I could go a day at work without them, it’s a high-stress environment, and I can’t deal with it at the moment without a patch. There was a day that I forgot, and I nearly tore a workmate’s head off after a frustrating call from a customer.
I’m getting better, and when I’m done with another packet of them, as per the instructions, I’ll step down to a lower “dosage” and see how I go. At the moment, they are supposedly delivering ~24mg of nicotine into my system in 24 hours - roughtly 24 cigarettes going by the markings on the Malboro Red packets that I smoked (see! smoked not smoke) I’ve decided not to wear them when I’m sleeping anymore after realising that I was having some really disturbing dreams. Dreaming was weird enough, but it was messing up my sleep patterns horribly, and making me rather irritable at work and in general.
I don’t refer to it as quitting - more as making a concious decision to stop smoking. Reminding myself and others of this fact reinforces that point in my brain - standard practise for convincing someone of something is to use code words and phrases to emphasise the outcome. Rather than saying “I can’t forget to go to the shops” one should use “I must remember to go to the shops.” This puts the emphasis on remember, rather than forget. Same with this situation - remembering the phrase “I have made a decision to stop smoking” puts the emphasis for me on stopping smoking.