Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

Recovery effects – also known as withdrawal symptoms – are the physical and psychological effects that some people experience when they stop smoking. Here are some suggestions (expanded from my free smokefree brochure) on ways to deal with these effects.

(If you came here looking for the effects of smoking on the body there’s a Flash movie here along with lots more information, and information on how your body recovers from those effects when you stop is here.)

photo credit: Hazel Motes

Smokers’ bodies adapt to being regularly poisoned when they start smoking. (This is why the first few cigarettes are usually so disgusting – the adaptation takes a few exposures for the brain to be fooled into thinking the experience is positive and override the body’s protests). When they stop, the body adapts again and goes through a “detox” for about 1-2 weeks. During this time some people notice irritation, anxiety, depression, trouble concentrating, sleep difficulties, coughing, sore throat, constipation, or the desire to eat more.

To deal with this:

1. Breathe deeply to help your lungs clean out.

Since some of the “alertness effect” of smoking comes from the extra oxygen gained by breathing in when you inhale, this is also one of the suggestions for giving up. Deep breathing has many physical benefits for anyone, not just an ex-smoker.

2. Drink less coffee, tea and caffeinated soft drink (including energy drinks), and more water and fruit juice.

photo credit: emdot

Nicotine reduces the effect of caffeine, so you don’t need as much when you’re not smoking. If you continue to drink the same amount you will probably get jittery, even anxious, and you may attribute this to the fact that you aren’t smoking (which is true, in a way, but indirectly). Dropping your caffeine consumption should help. Drinking coffee is also frequently a smoking trigger, which is another good reason to give up in favour of another beverage.

Water and fruit juice help the detox process. Water, of course, is used to carry toxins out of the body that have been processed through the liver and kidneys. Fruit juice contains vitamins which your body uses to repair itself and to neutralize the charged particles (free radicals) that smoking produces, which are a large part of the carcinogenic effect. Orange juice, kiwifruit juice and other juices high in vitamin C are particularly good for this.

photo credit: Steven Fernandez

3. Eat fruit between meals and at the start of meals to help you detox and reduce your desire to eat sugary foods. Also try sugar-free gum, carrots or celery sticks.

Because a cigarette stimulates your body and shifts it into flight-or-fight mode, it causes the release of sugar into your blood. This is why ex-smokers often find themselves craving sweet things; their bodies have become used to the regular lift in blood sugar and are asking for it. If you provide it in the form of fruit, not only is the sugar absorbed over a longer period (because fruit sugar has to be processed through the liver, and because the dietary fibre in fruit delays absorption), but it is accompanied by vitamins and minerals which will help your body to recover.

One woman I spoke to gave up smoking entirely by eating oranges. Peeling the orange gave her something to do with her hands, eating the orange gave her something to do with her mouth, she was getting a blood-sugar lift, the vitamin C was helping her detox, and the time she spent peeling and eating the orange allowed any cravings to pass off. Buying a bag of mandarins or oranges is also cheaper than buying a pack of cigarettes, in most places.

4. Move around if you feel cravings, anxiety or anger. Exercise will increase your oxygen flow, distract you, and help your body throw off the poisons.

photo credit: Ernst Moeksis

See my previous post 7 benefits of exercise I can believe in for the full list of benefits from exercise, including stress management, improved mood and lessened addiction risk.

5. Do something else with your hands if you’re restless.

Peel and eat an orange, for example. Or knit, use prayer beads, tinker with something mechanical, whittle, screw and unscrew nuts on and off bolts, whatever works for you. If your hands are busy they can’t be taking out a cigarette and lighting it.

6. Change your routine so that you don’t fall into old habits.

Many practitioners treat smoking as a habit more than an addiction, and its link to other habits is part of what you need to break. Paying attention – not being mechanical about your day – is one important way to shift this, and so is planning the change in advance. There’s more in my blog article Why it’s hard to change habits, and how you can change them anyway, and both of these, and more, are in my free PDF ebook Change Techniques.

7. Notice what’s happening with your body, mind and emotions. Let the feelings come and then let them go. They will usually only last a few minutes.

photo credit: paul goyette

This is, again, about paying attention. If you’ve ever spent much time around little children you will know how they will become louder and louder until their mothers pay attention to them. Your emotions are much the same. Change Techniques includes several simple techniques for emotional management, and this is one of them: learning to simply notice the feelings and let them go.

For at least some people, a behaviour like smoking is a way to avoid paying attention to distressing emotions. If you’re ever to be free of the behaviour, you need to have the courage to face the emotions – you will find that you can do it and it’s really not as bad as you may have thought. This realization then sets you up for even more success in life.

8. Think about your reasons for stopping. Think of nicotine as the poison it is.

Another good way to deal with an automatic behaviour: think about it. And a good way to change it is to think about it in a new way. If you find yourself smoking, ask yourself: What am I doing? Why would I do this? What can I do instead?

9. Talk or write about how you feel. Putting feelings into words reduces their power.

photo credit: JeanPierreG.

I wrote about the brain science behind this in One simple step towards managing emotion, which is also included in the free Change Techniques ebook. Basically, by using words you shift the activation of your brain away from feeling the emotion (and being driven by it to habitual behaviour).

10. If you start again, stop again. Perhaps try a different method of giving up – there are several.

Falling down is not failure. Falling down and not trying to get up again is failure. Many people need multiple attempts to stop smoking – it is a difficult behaviour to change. But millions of quite ordinary, unremarkable people around the world have succeeded in changing it. If you are ready to stop, you can – it may take several tries and several different methods, because no one therapy works for everyone. But you can do it, and the benefits of being smokefree are well worth persisting.

photo credit: shoothead

NOTE: Nicotine Replacement Therapy can also help to reduce the severity of the symptoms experienced during recovery from smoking. I’ve abandoned my former strict anti-drug position and now recommend NRT, correctly used, as an important tool for those who want to free themselves from dependence on smoking.

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