I am a very private person. I like to share ‘edutainment’ or an editorial political piece, but I have put very little out about myself personally. Today, I want to write about addiction. I want to put it into an abstract way so as to be approachable to others. I also cannot claim that I know everything, just my brand of problem.

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a well established fact that tobacco caused health problems. That being said, every man I knew was well into his addiction of nicotine. Some later beat it and some did not. My generation was at the crossroads of medically wrong but socially acceptable.

In high school, I had a friend that I used to joke around with. It started with a ‘ha ha, look at me chewing this tobacco’ to lets get together and do it some more. This progressed to not a huge deal physically but mentally I started looking forward to this and associating tobacco to fun and reward. My first physical symptom that I was heading toward a problem was I was in math, the first class after lunch. I literally could not keep my eyes open. This went on for about a week and somehow I associated nicotine after eating as the solution to nearly falling asleep in class.

My other problem was that this behavior wasn’t legal. It drove that activity underground so to speak. Pretty early on I learned that if I spit my first mouthful out, I could swallow the juice the rest of the day. I even learned that I can swallow the tobacco. So, now this became like a candy. In my twenty some years of tobacco, there have been very few people that I have ever visibly used around, even though it has been constant for that entire time.

I tried smoking for a little while, but I couldn’t deal with the smell. The buzz was more intense, but it was also shorter. That led to smoking more but it was harder to hide and required more effort. Eventually, I moved exclusively to smokeless tobacco.

You tell yourself that you can quit if you want to. To a degree that is the absolute truth. You will only quit if you want to, and some days you really have to want it. You of course try half-hearted efforts to quit. Ironically, I think that it is harder to quit when no one knows that you are doing it in the first place. But, every time you fail it is some excuse you tell yourself that is the reason that cant do it. I made it thirty days once and to celebrate I bought some tobacco. A lot of the time, it was something to focus your energy.

What is the psychology of addiction look like? A coping mechanism – What I realized is that this is how I have been functioning for the last twenty some years.

  • Don’t know what to do…
  • When I am done with this…
  • I am glad that is over…
  • This is going to be very hard/stressful…

I believe that this why quitting is so hard, you cant undue all those years of training overnight. I have felt mental fog, a shaking like being cold and a sudden urge to use the toilet. The consistency of the symptoms fade and I have observed acute triggers like stressors. There has been some cases where I have told myself, ‘I don’t have time to quit’ because I didn’t want to attempt with withdrawal symptoms for a particular day.

I have tried patches, gum and cold turkey. After trying to calculate how much nicotine I consumed, I tried the 1st step patch (21mg) and supplemented with 4mg gum. After the patches ran out, I went to straight gum and was using 32mg daily. That lasted three weeks, during Christmas and New Years.

Recently, I went straight gum for nine days (24-40mg) and went cold turkey. This morning is day six. I am definitely not out of the woods on this. I am having strong urges still at times but I know that giving in today means going through this again. So, I am inclined to make this one stick. I suppose that this is one thing about quarantine has been a positive.