Whenever we see that expression "under the influence" we tend to think immediately of alcohol or drugs. "Driving under the influence..." is I believe the legal term for drunk or drugged driving.
So what about tobacco?
On 2 July 2013, I became a non-smoker. Painlessly, easily and relatively cheaply. It cost about the same as smoking for ten days. Despite the ups and downs that life has thrown at me since (which to be fair haven't been too severe) I have never felt the need or really the desire to light up. I still go to the supermarket and buy tobacco for Ticia, it doesn't affect me at all. I can even roll a cigarette, still no compulsion to put the thing between my lips and reach for the lighter. I am what might be called cured. And yet, I don't feel any antipathy towards smokers, I don't find the smell of tobacco smoke offensive.
Of my fifty-three years, I've been a smoker of one thing or another most of the time since I was fourteen. On the 31st December 1994, after suffering a bout of pneumonia in November of that year and having had a chest x-ray which gave a clear result, I decided the time had come to stop. I went from smoking maybe 30 a day to zero. As an aid against the cravings, I bought one of those nicotine inhalers which were available then. All the same, in the first month, I went from just under 13 stone (82.5kgs) to 14 stone (90kgs). Whilst I didn't smoke a cigarette for the next nine years, I did venture quite heavily into the "ex-smoker"s cigar trap. In the beginning, it was maybe one big Havana a week in the garden on a Saturday evening after a good dinner. Then I progressed to the Hamlets and the Café-cremes. You tell yourself, of course, that these cigars are better for you than cigarettes, because you don't inhale. But of course, you do inhale, and the more you smoke them, the more you inhale. And whilst the smell of cigarettes sticks to your clothes, hangs around in the house, gives you that badge of smoker to the outside world whether you notice it or not, the smell of cigars is at least three times worse. As I had joined a gym to try and do something about my weight, and I'd taken up running, I had a little rule with myself that for every cigar I smoked, I would run a mile - not necessarily at the same time of course! So that made me feel a bit better, but in the end, I was still a smoker who probably smoked between ten and twenty little cigars every week, even if I thought it was better than the cigarettes, and I ran between ten and twenty miles.
And then, after moving to France in 2004, when life hit really some ups and downs, I dropped the cigars, came clean with myself and started smoking cigarettes again. And how I smoked!
When you buy packets of cigarettes, you can count relatively easily how much you smoke. If you open a new packet in the evening, you'll probably remember whether you opened the previous packet that day or the day before. When you light one, it burns through to the end whether you smoke it or not, you have a relatively short period of time in order to get what you need out of that cigarette.
When you smoke roll-ups, they go out all by themselves when you don't puff on them, so you smoke pretty much all of each cigarette you roll. It's more difficult to keep count, because you don't always put the same amount of tobacco in a roll-up, a pouch of tobacco will last maybe two or three days, making it less obvious to you when you opened it, and papers come in packets of 50, 75 or 100, which also don't help if you're trying to keep count.
Whilst they can't be said to contribute positively to the atmosphere in the house, the odour which clings to the room from yesterday's smoke and the day before's isn't as strong or as ingrained as the smell of ready-rolled cigarettes, or "blondes" as they are known in France. I smoked lots. For the last couple of years, I used filters in them, but all the same, I smoked a lot.
Last year, I went for my annual MOT test in June and the nice lady doctor from Nuffield thought that she heard something in my lungs through her stethescope. She packed me off to see a thoracic surgeon / specialist at London Bridge Hospital two days later. For a period of 48 hours, a little voice inside me was telling me that I had cancer. It told me how stupid I was to have let this happen, it told me that the rest of my life was going to be a pretty miserable existence, how could I do this to Ticia, to my family - it was going to make them miserable too. In fact, my relationships with everyone would never be the same again because the fact that I had that horrible disease would always be there in the background..
I saw the specialist, he listened to my chest. He heard nothing. He said maybe it was a bit of phlegm which had now disappeared, but did I want a chest x-ray just to make sure? Now I know that chest x-rays are not a great idea, but I had been really scared by all of this, so I said yes. The x-ray was done and fifteen minutes later he showed it to me and told me it was completely clear. It was like a re-run of 1994.
I made up my mind at that moment that I was going to stop. But we were in the middle of moving from France to the UK, looking for a house, trying to sell our house in Bordeaux. And as the summer turned into autumn, I started to become crippled with a bout of sciatica, which became worse and worse as the months went on. So giving up smoking was something to put on the back burner. I did notice all the advertisements for e-cigarettes, which seemed to be a way of reducing the health implications, and also to reduce the sense of the social pariah which seems to go hand in hand with smoking now. But it still didn't seem to deal with the feeling of being addicted to something, so I decided not to try that particular route.
We moved Ticia and the cats over from France in October, and installed ourselves in a rented flat while we waited for the French house to sell. Whilst we were there, Ticia found an advertisement on the net for a stop smoking programme, available in mp3 form. The promise was: no drugs, no replacement, no weight gain, no stress, a little preparation, then one session and you will be a non-smoker. And a 90%-plus success rate with a 60-day money-back guarantee.
It sounded very interesting, particularly with the money back guarantee, even though the price was only about the same cost as smoking for ten days. So what was this miracle programme?
Hypnosis.
Something which I have had an interest in for a long time, in a recreational sort of way. Back in the 1980s I used to try to hypnotise myself, using techniques I read in the Sunday magazines - relaxation techniques. I did seem to have some success back then, it was always just as I was falling asleep - a way of extending that phase of being between consciousness and sleep. I found on rare occasions that it allowed me to be in a dream, but to be in control of everything, rather than the normal dream situation where things just happen to you. However, it sometimes had a different, rather frightening effect on me - an increasing number of times I found myself lying there in a state of panic because my mind was awake but my body was not and I felt unable to breathe. This, I now know, is known as sleep paralysis, and is a relatively common thing and is not harmful at all, but it's incredibly frightening none the less, and the self hypnosis seemed to make it happen more often, so I drifted away from my early experimentation. What it did show me, though, was that I knew I could get myself into some kind of hypnotic state. So when Ticia said - what do you think? -looking at this advertisement on the internet for stopping smoking, I was interested in trying it out.
The programme was delivered through a series of mp3 downloads. There is one preparatory session - a recorded lecture on "the truth about tobacco" which lasts about 75 minutes. You are also encouraged to think in particular about why you want to give up, and to do the programme properly, you need to complete a sort of questionnaire which asks you a few things about how you started smoking and why, and then why you now want to stop. All that takes maybe an hour of preparation, on top of the lecture session.
The package then has an hour-long hypnosis session to stop smoking, and a twenty-minute reinforcement session, which you do each of the first twenty one days after stopping, if you feel that you need to.
It also comes with a "bonus" mp3, which is a half-hour hypnosis session aimed at reducing and managing stress. This is really useful, because it means you can try out the hypnosis state prior to going through with the main session. It had already occured to me that with this type of thing, your inner self / subconscious will probably give you one shot at getting everything right, and if that one shot doesn't work, the confidence won't be there to make it work a second time, because scepticism will start to creep in.
So I found myself a quiet spot, one winter morning, and I put on my headphones, and I did the stress-reduction session. The session starts with a warning - this is a hypnosis session, so never listen to it in the car, or doing anything other than relaxing with your eyes closed. I guess that seems obvious, but it does make you feel a little vulnerable - do you actually want to let go of your consciousness, let go of your control? Well, I decided that I did, and I carried on with it, and pretty soon, I was lying there in a state of hypnosis, which I now know could also be described as a state of very deep relaxation. In that first session, I found that I seemed to drift in and out of consciousness. I'm not sure if I actually did sleep or not. You're told that if you're feeling tired, don't get too comfortable or you will fall asleep rather than into a trance. But in any case, I was certainly conscious when I got to the end of the session, which left me lying there, eyes open, looking at the ceiling and feeling more relaxed than I had done for ages.
After that I was hungry to try it again, and I probably did that relaxation session about twenty or thirty times over the next three or four months. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it really worked, sometimes I fell asleep, but by the time I felt I was ready to give up on the smoking, I knew very well what to expect with the hypnosis session and how to give it the best chance of working.
And why did I want to stop? Apart from the obvious health benefits, I hated smelling stale tobacco on me, on my breath - so I was serial gum-chewer. And every time I went for a cigarette at work, sometimes two one after the other, I chewed gum, and / or I bought another coffee to rinse that tobacco taste out of me. Added to which there was the feeling, stood out there in the "smoking area" beside the office, of being in a goldfish bowl, so I'd go and skulk away to the smoking area of the office over the street, which couldn't be seen from our office building. The feeling that kept coming back to me during a cigarette was that I was being paid a lot of money, and I was out there in the street smoking whilst all the non-smokers were inside, working. And that made me feel kind of vulnerable.
Thinking about that, smoking is supposed to be a relaxing thing to do, but in fact the need to smoke means that your life is more stressed - always looking for opportunities to have a cigarette. In between the train and the tube - smoke - in between the tube and the office - smoke - then have to find a coffee so you don't stink of tobacco, and then the coffee makes you want another one... And then in the morning, in between the hotel and the tube - smoke - then in between the tube and the office - smoke. Leave the office at seven pm on the way to the tube - smoke - then wonder, whilst I'm smoking it, if I'll have the time to smoke another before I get to the tube, so finish that one early so as I can light up another one. And then there's the search for an ashtray in the street, given the presence of the "butt-end police" those people who go around waiting to pounce and fine you £80, eventually the habitual smoker in London has worked out where the ashtrays are and will ensure that he times his cigarette smoking to finish near to the site of an ashtray.
The worst was when I was flying backwards and forwards from Bordeaux every week. In Bordeaux, the whole thing seemed more relaxed - if you're not inside the airport building, then smoke all you want (apart from on the tarmac of course). But at Gatwick - smoking areas only. so you smoke your "last" cigarette before going for the plane, you get through security, and you discover that your flight has an hour delay, and you kick yourself because you're wasting an hour's smoking time - if you'd known, you'd have stayed the other side of security for all that time, with the freedom to walk half a mile to the smoking area and back for a cigarette...
So as is becoming obvious here, I had a downer on smoking, or at least, on the social consequences and the practicalities of smoking. And added to that was the thought that, hey, I'm an intelligent guy, right, and I really care about what I eat, I look for organic wherever possible, but all the time I am taking this carcinogenic poison into my body at regular intervals every day, voluntarily. How do you square that with being intelligent, with the IQ of 157 and all that? The answer is, you can't unless you understand why people smoke. And that, the WHY people smoke, suddenly became clear in the "truth about tobacco" lecture. It became clear because when I had it explained to me, I could feel all the questions in my head being answered one by one, like a very complex key turning in a fifteen lever lock. You smoke because your subconscious has conditioned you to smoke, because your subconscious believes that smoking is good for you, so no matter how much your conscious, or rational, mind tries to tell you it's harmful, it's bad for you, it will kill you in the end, your subconscious resists, to the point where your conscious mind constructs some pretty flimsy reasons why it's not dangerous, why it won't affect you, why there are many more dangerous things in life, why in fact you want to carry on smoking.
You also learn that smoking is not, actually, a physical dependence, an addiction, that's just more excuses. It's actually just a habit, reinforced by your subconscious, and that's what makes it all the more insiduous. And all this is really down to the effect that smoking had on you when you started, probably back in your teens, wanting to appear older, or cooler, or more one of the crowd that you wanted to be associated with.
You learn, before the hypnosis session, that the effect on you is likely to be one of three outcomes. It's likened to using a vaulting pole to get over a four metre wall. You take your run up, you run as fast as you can, and:
- if you're in the luckiest third, you soar straight over the wall and you never look back. Sort of - a cigarette? What's that?
- if you're in the next third, you land on top of the wall, and you maybe take one or two peeks behind you before you let yourself down the other side
- if you're not quite so lucky, then you need to expend a bit more effort to get over. You can see the other side, you know it's where you want to be, but there's still a little bit more pain to get through before you make it over the top.
So on Tuesday 2 July, at 10am, I made myself (not too) comfortable on the sofa in the living room, and I closed the door, and I put my headphones on, and I took two nurofen because my back was hurting me enough to stop me concentrating, and then I pressed play. And about an hour later, I was sitting there staring into the distance, and the words ringing in my ears were "congratulations, you are now a non-smoker".
So, since that time I have been intrigued to notice the reaction in both my body and my mind.
I did pretty much follow the daily reinforcement sessions religiously for the first week, after that I maybe did it twice more, and that was that. It helped, but then again I didn't need a lot of help.
Firstly, whilst I am definitely not in the "what's a cigarette?" camp, it has not been hard at all not to smoke. In fact, the effect of the session is that it has been easier not to smoke than to smoke. That is to say that although my body could quite happily pick up a cigarette, put it to my lips, light it and inhale a good lungful or two deep inside of me, my mind won't let it happen. So whilst physically, I sometimes still feel like I am missing out on something, mentally, there's no way I'm going to light up. That, after nearly forty years of habit, and twisted reasoning, is a weird feeling.
My weight, which had increased a little over the few months before that fateful day in July from 78kg to 81kg, mainly as a result of the forced inactivity of sciatica, has stayed static (that is to say within 1 kg) ever since. That's because I'm not eating more to replace the cigarettes. I'm watching what I eat, sure, but then I always did.
So all of that is frankly, bloody amazing. I have managed to give up smoking without suffering from pain or deprivation, without replacing it with something else, without having to feel completely anti-smoking, without - well without anything, really. I'm completely amazed that after forty years of struggle, it was actually that simple. One thing though, I know that one puff and the whole thing is buggered, so I won't let that happen.
And the craziest thing about it all for me is that all the sessions, the lecture, the preparation, everything, was all in French. And although some of my colleagues and friends in London have asked, almost pleaded with me to share the secret with them, and I've searched high and low on the internet, there isn't an english version available. Which is a shame, because this guy could do pretty well out of it.
So now, I'm no longer under the influence, not of the hypnosis, nor of the nicotine, nor the habit of forty years. I'm really pleased with myself, because I knew I could do it in the end, I'm just so surprised that it was so easy.
Update 5 April 2014
So now, six months later, a quick update:
I learnt somewhere ( I think it was about forming a good habit, like going to the gym for example) that it takes about 35 repetitions of something for it to become habitual. After you have done something that many times, you start to do it automatically.
Well, I guess that not smoking becomes just as much of a habit as smoking. As I sit here writing this, a thread of tobacco smoke wafts across the screen of my laptop. There is a memory there, somewhere inside me, of the sensation that the smoke gives you when it hits the back of your throat as you inhale. It still seems like a pleasurable experience, even though I don't do it any more. And then I hear a cough, and I know why I stopped. You don't realise, when you are a long-time smoker, how little people cough when they don't smoke. You think it's just natural, you think that everyone does it, just clearing your throat, right?
Thank you, Mike Fink, for your mp3s and your insight. If only I'd found out thirty years back what was making me do it, I'd have wasted a lot less of my life looking for places to smoke...
je voudrais bien, moi aussi ...
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