Quit Smoking Pills Ease The Pain of Quitting
February 7th, 2010
- Image by elycefeliz via Flickr
I’ve never known anyone who has smoked more than a couple of years that didn’t want to quit. You want to quit or you wouldn’t be reading this post.
The trouble is, we’ve all bought into the idea that its hard to quit smoking. Cigarettes are more addictive than heroin we’ve heard. There are jokes about it: Quitting smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I’ve done it dozens of times.
I wanted to quit because of health concerns and because of the financial drain. I was spending over 10% of my take-home pay on cigarettes. They were just always an unquestioned expense. A die hard smoker will go without food before he’ll go without smokes. But, the thought of quitting fills us with dread. We really don’t want to go through the agony of quitting, especially when it probably won’t take anyway and we’ll wind up feeling foolish in front of our friends and thoroughly disgusted with ourselves. Who needs the hassle?
My wife and I were both committed smokers, but we finally kicked, and the quit smoking pills were the key to being able to do that.
If you could simply take a pill and be able to quit smoking right now, wouldn’t you do it? Be honest now.
Well it is possible. It ain’t quite that easy, but it isn’t that hard either. Quit smoking pills work. Really.
There seem to be three types of quit smoking pills out there.
1.Zoloft and Zyban. These were both first marketed as anti-depressants and only later were used to help stop smoking.
2.Herbal supplements – Smok-Ox is one well known brand. They alter your body chemistry to make cigarettes taste disgusting and repellent.
3.Chantix or Champix depending on where you live. These pills occupy the same receptors in your brain that nicotine does. Since the receptors are already occupied the nicotine can’t act on the brain any more and simply flushes out.
Marilyn and I chose door number three, because several of our friends had used Champix and gotten the results they wanted. Another reason was because the way these quit smoking pills worked made sense to us.
Cigarettes are so addictive because of how nicotine works. It attaches to certain receptors in the brain and cause a brain chemical called Dopamine to be released into the blood stream. In a nutshell, Dopamine makes you feel good. Its natures way of letting us know we’ve done something right. Anything that causes Dopamine to be released into the blood is something we’ll go back to over and over again. This mechanism is supposed to give us positive feedback so we’ll keep doing things that are good for us. Unfortunately, other things can hi-jack this mechanism and we wind up thinking that something which is bad for us is actually good. Smoking is a really good illustration of this.
The Arabs have a story about camels and thorns that illustrates this beautifully. Apparently, camels love to eat thorn bushes. The thorns tear the camel’s lips and wreak all kinds of havoc and people couldn’t understand why camels would eat thorns and hurt themselves like that. A Sufi philosopher explained that camels don’t really like thorns and they don’t like having their lips cut either. What they do like is salt, and blood is salty. So the poor camel is actually trying to get some salt. Its just that the quickest way it knows of to get that salty taste is to eat some thorns and make their lips bleed.
By the way, another chemical that has a similar effect is caffeine. Caffeine itself doesn’t have any taste, yet you find it used as a supplement in all kinds of things, especially soft drinks. The reason is that caffeine triggers a reaction of making you want more. More of whatever it was that has the caffeine in it. As soon as you consume anything that contains that chemical you want more of whatever that is. Basic marketing based on brain chemistry. Its like chemical subliminal ads. Thats why you find ginger ale has caffeine in it, even though it adds nothing to the taste.
Champix quit smoking pills attach to the same brain receptors that nicotine does and causes the same release of dopamine, so the chemical cycle is completed without cigarettes coming into it. Very cool, actually.
Champix is the only stop smoking pill I have had personal experience with, and it worked. Zyban and Zoloft are supposed to be very good as well. That just leaves Smok-ox.
The only other thing I know of that employs a similar mechanism is anti-buz. For those that don’t know what that is, anti-buz is a pill that makes you violently ill if you consume alcohol, so its used for treating alcoholics. I knew one real drinker who was trying to quit drinking using anti-buz. He had basically lost everything in his life and the treatment was court ordered to keep him from going to jail. Unfortunately, it didn’t keep him from drinking. He still drank like a fish, but when he got home he had to spend hours in the bathroom puking his guts out.
I can see where taking something that made smokes taste disgusting would work for some people, but it doesn’t do anything about the nicotine-dopamine cycle.
Here’s the weakness in all these approaches. They only take away. They don’t replace. Smoking works in a predictable manner. Suck on a butt and get a dopamine rush. Quit smoking, by whatever means, and you are left with no way to get that dopamine effect, and you want that. Even when you quit successfully, it leaves a hole in your life that nothing else quite satisfies. If only there was some way of getting that rush without the health risks and the expense. That would be an instant best-seller.
I’ve never known anyone who has smoked more than a couple of years that didn’t want to quit. You want to quit or you wouldn’t be reading this post.
The trouble is, we’ve all bought into the idea that its hard to quit smoking. Cigarettes are more addictive than heroin we’ve heard. There are jokes about it: Quitting smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I’ve done it dozens of times.
I wanted to quit because of health concerns and because of the financial drain. I was spending over 10% of my take-home pay on cigarettes. They were just always an unquestioned expense. A die hard smoker will go without food before he’ll go without smokes. But, the thought of quitting fills us with dread. We really don’t want to go through the agony of quitting, especially when it probably won’t take anyway and we’ll wind up feeling foolish in front of our friends and thoroughly disgusted with ourselves. Who needs the hassle?
My wife and I were both committed smokers, but we finally kicked, and the quit smoking pills were the key to being able to do that.
If you could simply take a pill and be able to quit smoking right now, wouldn’t you do it? Be honest now.
Well it is possible. It ain’t quite that easy, but it isn’t that hard either. Quit smoking pills work. Really.
There seem to be three types of quit smoking pills out there.
- Zoloft and Zyban. These were both first marketed as anti-depressants and only later were used to help stop smoking.
- Herbal supplements – Smok-Ox is one well known brand. They alter your body chemistry to make cigarettes taste disgusting and repellent.
- Chantix or Champix depending on where you live. These pills occupy the same receptors in your brain that nicotine does. Since the receptors are already occupied the nicotine can’t act on the brain any more and simply flushes out.
Marilyn and I chose door number three, because several of our friends had used Champix and gotten the results they wanted. Another reason was because the way these quit smoking pills worked made sense to us.
Cigarettes are so addictive because of how nicotine works. It attaches to certain receptors in the brain and cause a brain chemical called Dopamine to be released into the blood stream. In a nutshell, Dopamine makes you feel good. Its natures way of letting us know we’ve done something right. Anything that causes Dopamine to be released into the blood is something we’ll go back to over and over again. This mechanism is supposed to give us positive feedback so we’ll keep doing things that are good for us. Unfortunately, other things can hi-jack this mechanism and we wind up thinking that something which is bad for us is actually good. Smoking is a really good illustration of this.
The Arabs have a story about camels and thorns that illustrates this beautifully. Apparently, camels love to eat thorn bushes. The thorns tear the camel’s lips and wreak all kinds of havoc and people couldn’t understand why camels would eat thorns and hurt themselves like that. A Sufi philosopher explained that camels don’t really like thorns and they don’t like having their lips cut either. What they do like is salt, and blood is salty. So the poor camel is actually trying to get some salt. Its just that the quickest way it knows of to get that salty taste is to eat some thorns and make their lips bleed.
By the way, another chemical that has a similar effect is caffeine. Caffeine itself doesn’t have any taste, yet you find it used as a supplement in all kinds of things, especially soft drinks. The reason is that caffeine triggers a reaction of making you want more. More of whatever it was that has the caffeine in it. As soon as you consume anything that contains that chemical you want more of whatever that is. Basic marketing based on brain chemistry. Its like chemical subliminal ads. Thats why you find ginger ale has caffeine in it, even though it adds nothing to the taste.
Champix quit smoking pills attach to the same brain receptors that nicotine does and causes the same release of dopamine, so the chemical cycle is completed without cigarettes coming into it. Very cool, actually.
Champix is the only stop smoking pill I have had personal experience with, and it worked. Zyban and Zoloft are supposed to be very good as well. That just leaves Smok-ox.
The only other thing I know of that employs a similar mechanism is anti-buz. For those that don’t know what that is, anti-buz is a pill that makes you violently ill if you consume alcohol, so its used for treating alcoholics. I knew one real drinker who was trying to quit drinking using anti-buz. He had basically lost everything in his life and the treatment was court ordered to keep him from going to jail. Unfortunately, it didn’t keep him from drinking. He still drank like a fish, but when he got home he had to spend hours in the bathroom puking his guts out.
I can see where taking something that made smokes taste disgusting would work for some people, but it doesn’t do anything about the nicotine-dopamine cycle.
Here’s the weakness in all these approaches. They only take away. They don’t replace. Smoking works in a predictable manner. Suck on a butt and get a dopamine rush. Quit smoking, by whatever means, and you are left with no way to get that dopamine effect, and you want that. Even when you quit successfully, it leaves a hole in your life that nothing else quite satisfies. If only there was some way of getting that rush without the health risks and the expense. That would be an instant best-seller.
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