Day 26 of 365: RE-Thinking Quitting Smoking

[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][custom_headline type=”center” level=”h2″ looks_like=”h2″ accent=”true”]Re-Thinking Quitting Smoking[/custom_headline][text_output]It was sort of luck that I managed to check my blood-pressure multiple times during the last week of me quitting smoking.  It was Sunday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday (today-ish) that I managed to check my blood pressure.

Now, quitting smoking raises your blood-pressure – heck, modifying in addiction raises your blood-pressure.  Problem is, I was seeing high 140’s and even 150.  On Sunday and Wednesday I was OK with that.  When Friday rolled around, and it was still 148, it was time to re-think things.

The highest I’ve ever seen my blood-pressure was 140.  For the most part, I don’t have any high blood-pressure issues, and even seeing something in the 130’s is uncommon for me.  And, as a one off measurement, a high blood-pressure reading isn’t that big of a deal.  But, a week of sustained elevation is bad.

So, what went wrong?  Hard to say, really, but I have a suspicion.  I had been huffing down the eCigs pretty hard, which means while I had to go through withdrawl for quite a few of the things in there, it still didn’t remove the nicotine portion of the addiction (which is the downside to using eCigs anyways – sure, you beat part of the addiction, and you have improved your health, but it’s easy to think moving to an eCig is good enough.  You’re still dealing with the worst of the bundle of addictive substances in a cigarette.)  Smoking a cigarette has a beginning and an end: you light it, you smoke it, you toss it.  It’s easily monitored – you see how many are in your pack and you know how much you smoked.  Pretty simple.

Electronic cigarettes, on the other hand, are a lot more fluid in their use.  You can use it at any point, and there’s no beginning or end to that process: you can sit there and puff on one non-stop until it either runs out of battery power, or, runs out of juice.  The amount of juice you go through feels disconnected from the amount you used to smoke, too.

Simply put, I’ve modified one addiction in exchange for another addiction that could potentially be causing further problems.  Sure, after a week of not smoking my lungs were clearing up, so I had better breath.  But that whole blood-pressure thing concerns me.

Friday night I decided that maybe I should reconsider this.  Not that I don’t need to quit smoking – I do – but that I need to just drop the whole thing, eCigs included.  I just spent a week modifying my behaviors, so, I’ve got that going for me, which is good.  If I was going to drop eCigs too, already having completed the first 72 hours of modification the previous week would help.

But, how could I make sure I wasn’t just chasing a problem that didn’t exist?  Well, I said before that on Saturdays I wasn’t going to struggle with problems like this.  So I bought a pack of cigarettes, and proceeded to smoke for the day.  Sunday, I was planning on dropping the cigarettes and eCigs, though I decided to err on the side of household peace; if I quit and was REALLY grumpy, I’d rather do it Monday when Kat wasn’t home during the day.

Sunday I did get the chance to take my blood-pressure again.  130 – I had dropped 18 points by going back to smoking cigarettes.  Allllrighty then.  Fine, sounds like I’m going to have to drop the nicotine thing entirely.  *SIGH*

Now, there’s a fun little thing that happened during this.  On Friday I put my eCigs on the desk.  On Sunday I went to pick them up, and both of them were empty – they now both leak out their juice.  Previously, one of them had started leaking a little, but now both of them are screwed up 🙁  I’m going to take that as a sign to move past the need for them :-)[/text_output][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][line][custom_headline type=”center” level=”h2″ looks_like=”h2″ accent=”true”]Today’s Stats[/custom_headline][text_output]

• Workouts: 0
• Cigarettes Smoked: 10
• Healthy Eating:  Unhealthy breakfast, healthy supper

Projects Worked on:

• House stuff

[/text_output][/vc_column][/vc_row]