also shifted her cigarette addiction into overdrive.
“I associated cigarettes with healing,” says Abou-Zaki, now 28 and a graduate student in psychology. “I told myself: I can quit drugs if I smoke.” So she did — more than a pack a day, sometimes a whole pack in an evening.
It took Abou-Zaki a year to realize that cigarettes were holding her back from achieving her dream at the time: recording an R&B album. “My range had changed. I couldn’t hold notes anymore,” she says. “After singing for an hour, I’d be exhausted, and my throat would get tired. People would say, ‘Have you been smoking?’”
Having quit cocaine and meth, Abou-Zaki figured she could fairly easily kick cigarettes. She couldn’t. “I realized I was super-emotionally attached to my cigarettes. I associated drugs with one emotion: wanting to escape. But cigarettes I associated with all emotions. When I wanted to celebrate, I smoked. When I was stressed or angry, I smoked.”
She smoked out of sheer habit, too. She’d done drugs once a day, in one or two places; she’d smoked twenty to 30 times a day, everywhere. “You start to associate smoking with everything: You wake up; you smoke. You eat a heavy meal; you smoke. You get into your car; you smoke.”
Adding to the challenge, smoking seemed to have no obvious, immediate downside. “When you’re coming off coke, your head hurts, you get hot flashes, your palms are clammy, you have a migraine. You feel like crap all day. But with a cigarette, you never say, ‘I smoked too much.’ There’s no comedown. It’s more subtle. You’re stressed out and irritable, but to fix that, you just go smoke.”
The first two weeks after she quit, Abou-Zaki was cranky and impatient. “I’d yell, ‘You’re in my chair — get out’ like a kid screaming, ‘Don’t play in my sandbox.’” To mark a fresh start, she splurged and got her car detailed. To sort through her emotions, she started journaling. To ease her stress and build stamina, she took up jogging. “Pretty soon, I could sing longer and hold notes longer,” she says.
One afternoon three months after she quit, Abou-Zaki jogged her favorite trail, near her home in Lynnwood, Washington. “The trail ends at the beach, and I remember standing at the water’s edge and taking this wholehearted, from-your-gut breath. I could actually taste the fresh air and smell the water, the sand, and the trees. I thought: You don’t get to do this when you smoke.”
“You can’t go to a gas station and buy cocaine, but cigarettes are everywhere. You don’t have to hide it like you do illegal drugs.”
2 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Quitting Smoking among Adults—United States, 2001–2010. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report [serial online] 2011; 60(44):1513–19
3 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19717241
Overcoming Your Fears About Quitting
• Fear: Withdrawal will make me miserable
• Fear: I’m going to disappoint my family and friends
• Fear: Without cigarettes, I’ll fall apart under stress
• Fear: I don’t have the willpower to give up cigarettes
• Fear: I’m too addicted to quit
• Fear: The cravings will never go away
• Fear: The stress of quitting is going to trigger an illness
• Fear: I’ll feel lost without my “best friend”
• Fear: I’m going to sacrifice my social life
Fear: Withdrawal will make me miserable
Christine Burke smoked in bed first thing in the morning and planned her workdays, as a church custodian, around smoke breaks. Almost every night, she’d wake up around 2 a.m. to smoke. If ever her lighter didn’t work, she’d panic. So when Burke contemplated quitting, after her epiphany at the Atlanta airport, she was consumed by fear of suffering from withdrawal. “People were always telling me, ‘You won’t believe how bad it is,’ ” says Burke, 50, a smoker since age 12. “It was like hearing horror stories about someone’s 37-hour labor.”
If you haven’t yet committed to quit, or your confidence is shaky, fear may be what’s holding you back. Fear of pain or discomfort, of failing and disappointing your family, of gaining weight, of alienating friends who smoke — there’s no shortage of worries that can surface when you think about giving up cigarettes. Maybe you’re wondering: How will I cope with stress? How will I survive my morning commute? Who will I be if I don’t smoke?
These worries are normal, and we take them seriously. It’s nerve-racking to give up a behavior that has been integral to your life probably since before you could drive. In this chapter, we tackle your fears one by one, helping you separate anxiety from reality. (For starters, no, cigarettes are not your best friend!) By examining your fears and putting them in perspective, you will find that you can be more receptive to the strategies in this book.
As for Burke, her fear of withdrawal proved largely unfounded. She did ride a wave of emotions at first. She cried easily and snapped at her daughter. But to Burke’s surprise, her mood swings and intense cravings stopped after a few days. She wore the nicotine patch to ease withdrawal, sucked on hard candy to keep her mouth busy, and practiced deep breathing to cope with stress. “You think you can’t make it another minute and that nothing will work,” says Burke, “but something always does, and the cravings go away. My fear of suffering was far greater than my actual suffering.”
Fear: I’m going to fail
Have you tried to quit smoking five times and failed with each attempt? Terrific. Have you failed ten times? Even better! We’re not kidding. A history of failure can actually
