No no nicotine!

June 10, 2009 6:31 PM

What is the real timeline of nicotine withdrawal?

I haven't smoked in two months and have noticed from time to time that I still get the following physical symptoms:

– tightness of chest
– slight extension of the stomach area (around the lining)
– mild metallic feeling in the jaw

Now it could be that because I smoked for so long I associated the normal feelings of stress with those of wanting a cigarette but I don't think that's true. This is definitely not a psychological craving as I have no desire to smoke. My reasoning is that these are the exact same physical feelings I had when I would crave a smoke, and they were definitely relieved while smoking. It's crazy, but I managed to limit myself to 2 cigarettes a day, but boy did I feel that nicotine craving throughout the day. It's that same feeling that I still get from time to time for about an hour or more at a shot.

I'm using the Allen Carr method, and it's weird, but I wonder if I have little fat deposits of nicotine that are dissolved from time to time which cause my nerve endings to go wild.

Everything I've read online describes 3 days or so as being the amount of time for nicotine to leave your body, but I'm highly skeptical. Perhaps the detoxification process is more complicated than I realised?

posted by fantasticninety to Health & Fitness (15 answers total)

Nicotine leaves your body quickly but there CAN be withdrawal symptoms for several months. It is fat soluble so it COULD redistribute although that seems unlikely to a major degree two months out.
posted by davidnc at 6:36 PM on June 10, 2009

Its just your body repairing itself. It can take months and years, depending on how long and how much you smoked for your body to fix itself. Remember, you were destroying parts of your immune function and digestion function, and you body is still working to replace the nicotine and other chemicals that played those roles while you were a smoker. I have read that it takes about a year for your lungs to get back to moderately healthy.

Congratulations on quitting. I am going cold turkey myself on Monday.
posted by RajahKing at 6:45 PM on June 10, 2009

I quit for 3 months (one of my more successful quits!) and I still felt cravings that long, but they definitely waned as time went by. Sorry I don't have a better answer, but kudos for quitting and hang in there!
posted by cestmoi15 at 6:48 PM on June 10, 2009

These are the normal feelings of stress. When you are addicted to nicotine, the craving for it causes stress. Smoking relieves this stress by temporarily removing the craving causing it.
posted by prambutan at 6:52 PM on June 10, 2009

Quitting smoking is rough, and it seems to be different for everyone. I would get that nicotine crave jitter for weeks after I quit. But, everything I heard or read said that the nicotine was out of your body in a couple days. That withdrawl is BRUTAL. I also had a cold for what seemed like forever while all the contamination cleared out of my upper resperatory system. Man, after a two or three weeks of that, I was determined to quit just so I wouldn't have to go through the horrible process of quitting again.
I constantly wondered, "How long is this going to last?" It's one day at a time, and you might not even notice it getting a little better each day until, one day, months later you'll realize how great you feel.
Mefi helped me get through it, too.
posted by Jon-o at 6:57 PM on June 10, 2009

I quit smoking about ten years ago. Six months later, when I was still experiencing withdrawal symptoms, I asked my father-in-law how long it lasted. He had quit twenty-five years earlier, at age 70 (he would die at 102), and told me that the cravings had never completely disappeared. Oddly enough, this was liberating for me as I could see them (and the accompanying withdrawal symptoms) as a permanent, albeit occasional and certainly diminishing, presence: a fact of life to be endured until it passed, rather than something I obsessively monitored and cursed. This attitude is now helping me endure hot flashes.
posted by carmicha at 7:05 PM on June 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

I quit smoking 4+ years ago, using no particular technique except spending a lot of time on AS3. I did do a few things that were Carr-esque, but I wasn't familiar with his book at the time.

Curiously, I remember having pretty intense (and certainly physical-feeling) cravings at 3 days, then again at 3 weeks, and again at 3 months. The ones at three months were far and away the most surprising, and the ones that I came closest to giving in to. I was fortunate that the newsstand happened to be selling candy canes as well as smokes.

Here's the thing... today, years later, I would still love to smoke a cigarette (though I no longer ever physically crave one). I assume that I always will. I've come to terms with that, and one of the reasons is that I have no desire to quit again.

Good luck, and stick with it (and if you don't, then try again)... the results are so very worth it.
posted by toxic at 7:09 PM on June 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

When I'm stressed, sometimes the physical feelings remind me of / feel like withdrawal (as in haven't had a cigarette for half an hour or so when a regular smoker), and I think about a cigarette to fix the 'withdrawal' feelings. I've been quit 3 and a half years now. I rarely feel like a cigarette, now, and am able to identify those feelings for what they are. However, it took a good year before I was truly comfortable with them.
posted by b33j at 7:15 PM on June 10, 2009

Love the Allen Carr book. I quit cold turkey 2 years ago after reading it.

I definitely still had cravings after a few months, plus a general feeling of my body changing and readjusting itself, which was mostly just uncomfortable. I put on a little bit of weight, but personally I'd rather have a little junk in my trunk if it means not being a slave to smoking.

At 2 years, I do not physically miss smoking but psychologically I do from time to time. But I know that what I want is the ever elusive "just one...." which does not exist, so when I think of smoking I don't think of just one, I think of smoking the whole pack, then needing to buy another one the next day, and the next, etc. I'm with toxic, I just come to terms with the fact that the craving will always be there from time to time...

Good luck!
posted by weesha at 7:21 PM on June 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

The crappy thing about nicotine is that they signal through similar neural pathways as those involved with "reward*"/habituation. Being a smoker rewires your brain and it can take a looooong time (or never) to rewire.

The half life of nicotine is about 2 hours. So 4 hours = 25%, 6=12.5, 8=6.25, 10=3.125, 12=1.56, &c&c of your blood serum nicotine levels. 3 days should bring the your blood nicotine levels to effective zero, but yes, nicotine is fat soluble (whether it gets metabolized/breaks down when dissolved in adipose deposits....?).

The number I've heard is that you "need 7 days" to get it entirely out of your system. I think that it's rather the number for your brain to rewire to accept not having nicotine all the time (at least, it was pretty close for me when I last stopped smoking).

So... the detoxification process is more complicated than some people claim, it's possible but unlikely that weight loss through burning fat will reintroduce nicotine into your system, and the quitting process sucks ass.

I'm skeptical of the phenomenon of hypnotism but, seeing how effective placebos are for Parkinson's disease (really effective, Parkinsons is a degeneration of dopaminergic neurons, a similar network that nicotine works on), I could see how treatments like that could be effective.

*more... 'expectation of reward;' dopamine and serotonin aren't really "pleasure" neurotransmitters as the popular press are wont to tout
posted by porpoise at 11:45 PM on June 10, 2009

I think that your 'cravings' are more psychological than physical. I quit ten years ago, I no longer get cravings but do occasionally get nostalgic for the idea of having a cigarette... these don't last long. In fact for the vast majority of the time now I forget even smoked in the first place.

It took me a many attempts to finally quit and the withdrawal was very harsh... except for the final time(s) when I was just so sick of smoking... the final time I had no withdrawal at all to speak of. However I still got psychological cravings, especially at certain trigger points. One I particularly remember was going down the pub and not smoking (back when you could still smoke in pubs). Took me a long time to be able to totally enjoy a pint again (and was probably the main cause of falling off the wagon on my last attempts to give up).

You have to give your brain time to adjust to not having the psychological crutch of cigarettes... getting past the hard-core physical cravings for nicotine on top of braking the psychological need/habit is the hard part... the occasional pangs you get after will slowly diminish and will go away eventually
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:44 AM on June 11, 2009

i'm with fearfulsymmetry above - its probably more psychological than physical. i quit smoking about 8 years ago, after several (year+) unsuccessful quits. simply being *aware* that i may NEVER stop desiring cigarettes (i no longer crave them on my own, but if i watch someone smoking it still makes me want one too, even after all these years) helped me deal with said fact.

i'm sure you know this, but as an ex-smoker i just want to remind you that the payoff (feeling healthier, not hacking half a lung up every morning, saving $2000/year) way outways the harsh realities of quitting smoking. it's very challenging, but SO worth it.
posted by messiahwannabe at 4:33 AM on June 11, 2009

I too found the Allen Carr book(s) a tremendous comfort after I quit. Lots of wisdom there. I still remember one section where he mentioned withdrawal symptoms from some hard drug, heroin I think, quoting an expert who said how terrible withdrawal was, like a 'bad flu" and that quitting smoking was no different. And he said, "Like a bad flu, you mean that's all?
"
I took that to mean I shouldn't obsess about withdrawal symptoms. They come and go like the weather. For me, that cavalier attitude worked just fine.
posted by mono blanco at 7:12 AM on June 11, 2009

The most helpful thing I found in Allen Carr's book was a bit where he mentioned that smoking because it relieves stress is like wearing tight shoes so you can have the pleasure of taking them off every once in a while. In other words, yes smoking relieves stress but the cigarette is actually the source of the stress, not the relief. If you'd never started smoking, you'd never be stressed about about not being able to smoke. When I realized that, it all just "clicked" in my head and I was able to quit cold turkey. All of a sudden I was not denying myself a cigarette, I was giving myself something--freedom.
posted by weesha at 10:00 AM on June 11, 2009

Response by poster: Update three weeks later:

I believe that there are nicotine residues or some other thing in the body as since that time I haven't felt those symptoms except on two other occasions, and there have been other stressful situations. I wonder if it's like the phantom limb syndrome where you feel an arm that is no longer there? Perhaps because the brain is wired a certain way for so long it acts out the same physical symptoms as a short circuit.

But the most important thing is that those physical symptoms do pass with time (even if they may come back and rear their head now and again).

For anyone wanting to quit smoking, Allen Carr's book is THE way to freedom!
posted by fantasticninety at 7:50 AM on July 1, 2009