The most common quit smoking symptoms are:
1) Restlessness
2) Irritability
3) Anxiety, nervousness
4) Sweet tooth
5) Lack of concentration, fuzzy thinking, inability to focus
6) Increase in appetite
7) Time distortion
And of course the major one is that you will experience an almost overwhelming urge to smoke, and it will seem constant.
Now take a look at symptom number 7 on the list there: time distortion. What the heck is that?
Time distortion occurs when you are craving a cigarette because you just quit the day before and you are going through serious nicotine withdrawal and you want a cigarette very, very badly. This is a craving. You experience it with your entire mind, body, and soul. Your entire being is screaming out for a cigarette.
Now if you happen to make it to the end of this tortuous day without smoking, and you look back on it, you would probably say that it was just one big long cigarette craving. You would imagine that you were constantly craving cigarettes.
This is not true. You do not crave them constantly, instead, the cravings do pass. They always pass and we become distracted and keep on about our business. But because of time distortion, we actually believe that our cravings are continuous, and that there are no gaps in between them. This is crazy.
If you want to test out how badly time distortion is affecting you, then get a stopwatch and the next time you get a craving, start the timer. Then, when you notice that you are not having the craving any more, glance at the timer and see how much time has passed. If you do this, you will notice that the cravings are very short, and also that you will forget to check the stopwatch, because you did not notice that your craving actually passed and then you got distracted with life again.
Either way, this can help prove to you that you are suffering from time distortion, and that your cravings are not really so bad as you though they were. At least they are not as continuous as you believed them to be.
Now as for the sweet tooth, I recommend that you sip juice throughout the day. Don’t slam it, sip it. Keep sipping it. Do NOT eat a bunch of candy and junk, or you will make yourself sick and then you will really want a cigarette. Instead, sip juice.
