Do I really want to do this?

In my mid-30s, it became apparent to me that I ought to start doing some proper exercise.  I'd just quit smoking (how many times is that...?) and put on a bit of weight (10kgs, if I'm honest) and I figured that if I didn't do something about it I would turn into one of those couch potatoes whose only possibility to lose those kilograms was to not have the energy to go to the kitchen to find something to eat.

So I joined a health club.  It was called Renaissance, which seemed fitting, and on joining I received a white, eponymously monogrammed, towelling bathrobe.  I bought myself a few things to wear in the gym and threw myself into a routine that sent me off there three lunchtimes a week.  Over the next few months, I sweated on a rowing machine, on a stepper, and on the bikes.  I descended to the weights room when there was nobody else there to witness the ridiculously low weights on which I started out, I eyed the treadmills with a mixture of apprehension and anticipation for the day when I would feel comfortable getting onto one and passing twenty minutes or more running.  I had never been able to run any distance - to the point where one morning in the past I distinctly remembered waking after a dream in which I was running a few miles and thinking "wow, if only that was real".

One of my work colleagues had suggested that I might start to think about a half-marathon that was happening in a few months.  So one day I decided to try out the treadmill.  I started by walking five minutes and then jogging one, then walking four and jogging two, then half and half, until eventually I could jog for six minutes at about 10kph.  And that meant I could jog a kilometre.  After that, I raised it to ten, fifteen and then, twenty minutes.  It didn't take that long to get there, maybe three weeks or so, and once I could do that, I let myself loose on the roads around my house.  To start with, I got a lift up to the top of the moors, and then followed a three-mile path downhill back home.  Then I tried doing the same distance on the flat.  The next village to mine was three miles away, and it wasn't too long before I could get there in half an hour, and walk back.  A few weeks later, I could do seven miles, starting and finishing at my house, and taking in a few hills on the way.  Success!

And then, I stopped.  Someone I knew, the same age as me, dropped dead of a brain haemorrhage.  It occured to me that I was maybe pushing myself too hard.  I had become accustomed to running seven miles, but for a half-marathon I needed to run thirteen.  I didn't really like running, and I started to wonder whether the exercise was actually making me fitter, or whether it was just making me less aware the pain of exerting myself.  The question nagged at me.  Probably a bit of both, I decided in the end, but having started to feel some discomfort in my shins, I resolved to give up the running and to use my bike instead.  I also stopped running on the treadmills at the gym, and opted for the cross-trainer.  No impact on my bones and joints, and some serious calorie-burning.  After a few months, I could burn 900 calories in half an hour.  A mile from my house, there was a road that climbed 1000 feet in less than a mile.  Parts of it were a one in three gradient.  My record was getting to the top on my bike only stopping once, but by the time I got there my pulse was doing about 170, and that was probably too much. I was, by then, pushing 40.

I generally started work around 8.30, and as the gym opened at 7. I found that I could get up at 6, get to the gym when it opened at 7, do 45 minutes of hard graft on the cv machines, a quick turn in the steam room, a jacuzzi at 8, some toast and marmalade at 8.15 and in the office at my usual time.  I slid into a routine of doing that three times a week, and two lunchtimes spent doing weights.  Sometimes I went to the gym twice in the same day.  The endorphins were oozing around my body - it was as addictive as eating chillies or, dare I say it, smoking.  For the first time in my life I was really fit, and I loved the feeling of being alive and aware, and I loved looking at myself in the mirror in the changing rooms and seeing the difference I had made to myself.  It went on like that for a few years.

And then, big change.  I moved to London to work, and the only gyms I could find were so busy that you couldn't count on getting on the machine that you wanted, or even on there being a space in the changing room to hang your clothes.  And instead of the changing room smelling of the eucalyptus from the steam room, it smelt of sweat and unclean bodies.  I gave up.

In the twelve years or so that have passed since then, despite a fair bit of relaxed cycling, my shoulders have grown narrower, my thighs and calves are no longer rock hard, my resting pulse has gone up from 45 to nearer 60.  I'm also 55 years old, and I weigh a few kgs less than I did back then.  I walk a fair bit, mostly in London, but my bike hasn't come out of the garage for about a year now.  I feel a crossroads coming.  Am I going to start again, when I have the time (which won't be too long now) or am I going to grow old gracefully and contentrate on the cerebral and the artistic, rather than the corporeal?

Truth is, there's nothing I like more than the feeling of being out on my bike, meandering along some country lane, with the countryside around me.  It makes me feel like I'm a part of me, rather than being someone who looks on and criticises.  This week, a colleague of mine told me that after a week in the US, and then three days of having to take aeroplanes to more local meetings around the UK, he had to go out and ride a few hours on his bike to get his composure and equilibrium back.  Something in me empathised with him - maybe the bug is still there.

Maybe I'll start tomorrow, but for the moment, I'm too comfortable sitting in this chair and letting the world go by.

Under the influence

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.

Outside of Paddington Station in London is the approach road which comes down from Praed Street.  It's lined with people smoking, because it's obviously banned in the station.  Before I stopped, I always aimed to get to Paddington in time to a) go to M&S for something to eat on the train and b) to smoke maybe three cigarettes, one when I arrived, then two after M&S, before catching the train.  When I'd arrive at Taunton on a Monday morning, I'd have one cigarette in the car park before the café opens at six, then buy a coffee and take it back outside the station entrance to smoke a cigarette with it before rushing back in to catch the train.  

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...