DON’T CONFUSE ADDICTION WITH ENJOYMENT
From gummer on 01/24/2011
Yes, smoking felt good. The intense need followed by the rush of satisfaction felt really good.
And for years I interpreted that intensely good feeling as liking cigarettes. In my mind, I loved smoking.
No question.
It is interesting that after being quit many weeks I started to rethink my position. Why? Because just as smoking had felt so good, NOT smoking felt really bad. I mean awful. I could not focus, I was irritable, I was exhausted, and I had insomnia...
There are many things in life that gave me pleasure, but not one made me feel this way when I gave it up, and it occurred to me that perhaps I had been wrong all those long years... that perhaps I had been smoking not so much because I liked it, but because I hated how I felt when I abstained.
You see, prior to my quit, I never went long enough without smoking to really understand what was going on with my smoking… to comprehend what I was reacting to. I always thought I was seeking pleasure when, it turns out, I perversely was just avoiding discomfort.
Ironically, it took NOT smoking for a long time for me to even consider the point; not smoking has ended up teaching me far more about cigarettes than smoking them ever did…
So as I sat there yearning for what I was trying to avoid (that`s a red flag right there!) I thought to myself... WHAT does smoking give me? Exactly WHAT?
Does it give me that lovely pleasure? Or does it give me that hideous, crawling need?
And that is when I realized that every time I inhaled a cigarette, I was not getting relief at all... Instead I was getting more and more infected with the need, further and further addicted.
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