It’s time for my weekly rant about smoking. I normally do it when I dream about smoking and last night was no exception. I still wanna smoke sometimes, but it’s easy to remind myself NO! when I have all this to look over. Sometimes we do know what’s better for ourselves, but we ignore it because we can’t read it over again.

Some of us try to mitigate the risk of our vices by exercising, believing that surely that’s what must be missing and making us sick, while we go shoot up with a drug cocktail that would make Jim Morrison rise from the dead.

Sure, exercise is never a bad thing, especially for drug users, or smokers. just that I’ve always thought it was an oxymoron to smoke and exercise but never said it wouldn’t help the smoker. I’ve tried to exercise when I smoked and just got a profound sense of “WTF” and quit right away. Knowing you can’t have your cake and eat it too, I would always realize that not smoking and getting no exercise was at least moderately better than smoking and getting exercise. My heart disease, stroke and cancer risk would always be lower as a non-smoker no matter how much exercise I did as a smoker.

At least exercising while smoking does appear to mitigate some of your risk, it’s still up in the air for all the other diseases. Smoking and doing treadmill work is just a false sense of security really, thinking that now you can smoke 3 packs a day since you are running 10 miles per day but then finding out that it did nothing for that pancreatic cancer that is killing you.
But I found that by taking stock in what smoking gave me, and seeing what others thought really narrowed it down to what I was achieving while smoking:

• It relieves minor depression.

• It helps suppress little fits of anger.

• It enhances concentration and short-term memory.

• It produces a modest sense of well being.

I found that after quitting Effexor I still had the same feelings I always did, but my smoking levels went up. No surprise then, and no more of a surprise now. It’s a crutch that helps you get around your depression about things that bother you. Depression beats you down into a hole in the ground, but nicotine helps lift you out of it.

I’ve heard by several doctors (or was it some quack website) that studying human behavior was easy: two cats mimic it very well. Docs should see what happen when a husband and wife quit smoking! Supressing those little fits of anger is not so easy when both of you can’t smoke, even worse being that if you are starting the cycle of getting the smoke out of your home, every fight must be outside.

I can’t count the number of fights that we had together, the wife and I, when we stopped smoking. They were hellish, hours on end all because we would fail to recognize the little bits of anger that the other was having: we had our own anger to deal with! Other fights ensue now for sure, but the anger we have at little points during the day are mostly gone, being replaced by clear thinking that isn’t reward based. IE ending the argument for a smoke.
Short term memory and concentration are a by product of many things, practice, will and environmental effects.  This is a hard thing to get smokers to understand isn’t a good reason to keep smoking, and was for me too. It wasn’t too hard when you have a drug like Chantix helping you out however as you get some of the pathways related to nicotine uptake activated, so the extreme foggy head that comes with smoking cessation isn’t so bad.

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta, but nothing can compare to the feeling that you get when you’ve lit that first smoke when you really want one. It really feels that good, it’s almost better than sex, and could rival any other drug I’ve tried during my life thus far.
But it’s all a lie in a cylinder, you only felt better because you’ve stopped the withdrawal of nicotine for just a short bit longer. For those that are depressed or need more control in their lives, smoking gives them what they need.
To me, the smoking effects far outweigh the benefits now, this 3 months and one week later. I feel great since my lungs are finally starting to rid some of the tar that I’d been hoarding in them, and I can do more exercise everyday without feeling like an idiot.

All things considered, our family could buy a Wii easily now: we’ve saved over $500 on not smoking. For anyone that never has any money, or wants more money to spend on yourself or your family, just 3 months of no smoking is enough to buy the hottest game console + 4 games.
So how much is smoking costing you? Time with your family, because anyone that smokes around their kids is killing both, only killing yourself faster. I can’t count the number of times my Doc has told me that, your kids need you and smoking is only taking you away from them.