Hello Rena:

You need to focus on why you are thinking you want a cigarette now. You are scared and apprehensive about making a real life change. Your thought is not that you want to be a smoker; your thought is that you want to calm down. Your thinking that a cigarette can help you accomplish this goal. Your logic is all wrong though. A cigarette can't do what you are asking of it.

When you were an active smoker under stress cigarettes did calm you. But the mechanism they calmed you with was insidious. It was never reducing your stress ore resolving your stressful situations, all it was doing was pulling you out of withdrawal that stress was inducing. The simple fact is that you are not in withdrawal now. You are not feeling bad from a low nicotine level; you are feeling bad for altering of life circumstances.

So what will a cigarette do for you now? It will put you back into a peak drug withdrawal state. Then you will have to smoke, chain smoke in fact to get your nicotine level back to its optimal high level. Then you will have to smoke one cigarette every 20 to 30 minutes for the rest of your life to avoid withdrawal again. On top of all this, you will still have your original dilemma.

I am going to bring up a few articles on smoking and stress. Accept the fact that you are under some real earth shattering changes here and anxiety is a real factor. Try to find some real anxiety busting skills, I am sure some people will be bringing some up here shortly. Just know that cigarettes don't solve stress. They in fact will over time induce life altering circumstances that can make even the changes you are going through now seem minimal in comparison. For while possibly falling behind in a career can be scary, falling behind in your health or in your ability to breath and eventually your ability to live is scarier. Most changes we make in life are scary, but even if we do make bad moves we can change courses numerous times and still land back on our feet.

But cigarettes cause problems that are irreversible. While it is impossible to predict if some of the changes you are undergoing are going to be good or bad over a lifetime, one change we can predict with certainty would be a bad move--a relapse to a drug that will cripple and kill you given time. Stay free--never take another puff!

Joel