Archive for the ‘Quit Smoking Pot’ Category
I have a friend who wants to Quit Smoking Pot. He asked me to help him quit. I don’t know how to? How do you quit smoking pot anyway. What do I tell him to do?
hmm, take one day at the time. just like the AA group. smoking less a day, don’t buy a lot. good luck
For more information visit: http://www.smokedeter.com
Like many other people, I’ve lived most of my life with an eating disorder. However, I really didn’t know until recently which one it really was. Writer, doctors, and “experts” will go on and on about the topic through the clinical eyes of an observer. They’ll tell you that there are three different types of eating disorders; anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive eating or bingeing. They’ll define them just like their books tell them as if the three are totally separate diseases and they never mention how most people with eating disorders either combine the three, or trade off and make these disorders their own. I even remember reading articles in magazines about them which instead of dissuading me from continuing in my habits, actually ended up giving me tips and new ideas that I hadn’t tried before. You might even read in those “clinical” diagnosis that eating disorders are directly related to vanity or narcissism. But the truth is, is that they don’t know spit because they haven’t been there… they’ve just read about it.
I used to think that my eating disorder began right before I started high school when I was 13 years old. I had been overweight all throughout middle school and was constantly made fun of to the point of paralyzing fear of going to school and having to hear the word “fat”. So it suddenly came to me as if an epiphany, a concept or thought that I had never thought of before for some odd reason… ‘why don’t I just not eat!’ So I started dieting and became more and more compulsive about it. My mother encouraged it, thought it was a great idea! So the summer between middle school and high school I dropped about 15-20 pounds or so and I had just happened to have grown at least 3 inches.
So I went back to school that year and all of the sudden I was suddenly beautiful and loved and admired! My mom even paid more attention to me and in a different way than she had before. She was always commenting on how good I looked, bragging to her friends and coworkers about me, and offering to go shopping more. Now, she never told me when I was younger that I looked bad or that I wasn’t as good of a person because I looked the way I had or that overweight people were disgusting. However, by suddenly giving me all of this attention and making me feel beautiful and confident because I had become thin… she basically might as well have.
So once you not only stop being tortured for being fat, but are complimented left and right on how you look… you get high on it! It’s a rush that I had never felt before and I never wanted it to end. I never wanted to go back to being that fat, scared and insecure girl again. So those thoughts kept me going… kept me not eating… kept me becoming more and more obsessed with my weight and what people thought of me, because that’s all that mattered. What other people thought about how I looked defined me as a person. Forget the awesome sense of humor, the immense creativity and talent that I had, or the straight A’s that I always got… it meant nothing if I wasn’t pretty.
But, being the same girl that I had been in middle school, just a grown-up and thinner version of her, eventually all I wanted to do again was eat! It became, ‘screw this, I’ve been ‘good’ for this long, I deserve to eat like everyone else gets to, like my friends do.’ So I started indulging in my vice again, making excuses after excuses to myself that it was ok, I wasn’t gaining weight, my jeans were just tight from the dryer… and on and on. And eventually, I gained a lot of the weight back. (Of course I was about four inches taller than I was in middle school so I carried my weight a little differently, but it still had come back.) Suddenly there was this horrible, petrifying, slap-in-the-face moment when I realized that I had been kidding myself for however many months, and I had let myself get fat again.
Now to everyone else I probably just looked a little thicker or more curvy, but to me I looked like that awful, scared, fat little girl from middle school. I felt disgusting in my own skin. ‘How could I have let myself get this way again, I’m such an idiot!?’ Then I think it was somewhere in my junior year of high school that I had another epiphany… I could eat anything I wanted if I just threw it up afterwards! “Duh, why hadn’t I thought of this before!?”
At first it was hard and I physically couldn’t make myself do it (it’s not as easy as some people think). But after alot of practicing and getting my little tips from tv and magazine articles, I became a pro. I knew exactly what it took to make me able to throw up, and that was making myself so full to the point where I felt likeI was going to throw up anyway. So this lead to bingeing, which made me happy again like I was pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes because I could eat all of the “horrible foods” that I loved without actually having to digest them. What a friggin’ miracle!
So I started losing weight again and getting my beloved compliments again and got my confidence back. I even got invited to the senior prom which led to a new and older boyfriend. But then after awhile of this lifestyle of bingeing and purging, it really started to affect and interfere with everything. The whole process took a long time in itself. And I always had to worry about hiding it from everyone. Then it became a problem getting enough food to fill me up (because my stomach had stretched so much), which eventually led to stealing. Eventually I got sick of making myself throw up (no pun intended). It was a process for me. I would take me minutes of siking myself up to do it. Then minutes turned into a half hour, and then an hour and sometimes I would even procrastinat so long that I would fall asleep and wake up in a panic that I had poisoned my body by digesting all of the food that I had just eaten. So as my ability to be able to stand making myself throw up diminished, again my weight would come back.
At one point just before going off to college, I stopped bingeing and purging all together and started exercising. But it just became another excuse to eat what I wanted, what I felt I deserved because I had had it so much harder than the other girls my age who could eat whatever they wanted and it never interfered with their lives. So at that point it wasn’t really about being healthy, it was ,”how many calories do I have to burn off to eat THAT?” I gained even more weight.
So I cycled like this for years, all throughout my early twenties. And I was miserable during the years when you’re supposed to be having the most fun you’ll ever have in your life. I actually tried getting hooked on cigarettes so that I could have a different, more socially acceptable vice… didn’t work! As many times as I’ve tried throughout my life, luckily I can’t get addicted to nicotine for some reason. I had the alcoholism gene coming at me from every side of my family. Don’t get me wrong, I could get hammered with the best of them and party on the weekends, but alcoholism never got me either. I did smoke pot everyday or every other day for a couple of years (I had never had a rebellious period during my high school days, so I thought I’d try to have one in college)… but eventually one night I had just smoked with my friend and then I went onto the computer to do some work. After staring at the screen for awhile and not being able to remember what I was supposed to be doing, I realized…’I’M STUPID! Pot makes me stupid!’ I never did it again. I so desperately tried to find another vice, one to replace the one that I didn’t want to admit I already had. I was addicted to food!
Finally, I had another epiphany, but this time it was a good one, a life altering one… I was a compulsive eater. I was a compulsive eater that was trying to cover it up and make up for it weight-wise in every and any way that I could by compulsively dieting or bingeing and purging but when it came down to it, I was addicted to food. I was so desperate to never go back to being that overweight girl in middle school that got made fun of all the time, went home crying, never voiced any of her opinions or drew any unnecessary attention to herself because she didn’t want anyone to notice and point out her horrible, disgusting body.
So, it wasn’t until I was 26, after a suicide attempt, being in and out of therapy, being on and off of all different kinds of antidepressants that I finally got proactive. I asked my doctor to switch me from my current medication (which was kind of making me less depressed, but not suppressing that need to eat all the time and was making me gain more weight than I ever had before in my life.) I asked him to put me on a medication that I had read up on that was actually prescribed to people who were trying to quit smoking and other compulsive behaviors.
Within the first week or two I felt different. I realized that I really didn’t have the urge to eat when I wasn’t hungry. I actually new for the first time what it felt like to be actually hungry, and not because I was starving myself but just because it was time for my next meal (what a concept)! I actually learned what it meant to just eat when I was hungry… which is something most of the world knows, but guess what, I DIDN’T! I had been so obsessed over controlling my weight and over food and how to eat without gaining weight that I just hadn’t been listening to my body. I was so preoccupied with having the willpower to not eat or to binge and purge that I hadn’t realized it had all turned into a big stockpile of “won’tpower”. I had trained myself not to listen to my body because I didn’t trust myself to know anything on its own. I had let myself trick myself into thinking so many destructive thoughts that had no more ‘will’ at all.
So I started to think back to when I was really young. I went through a lot of crap when I was a kid but I tried to think, ‘when did i start being obsessed with food?, when did I start being that overweight kid?’ And I found it! It was during my mother’s second, very violent and very nasty divorce which left us living in one room of the house for months with locks installed all the way up the door to keep my mom’s soon-to-be ex-husband out. I was only 6 or 7 at the time. I guess I didn’t know how to deal with this horrorthat was happening around me, and I remember becoming obsessed with sweets. And it wasn’t in a cute, out in the open kind of way… I started hiding it right away. I was immediately ashamed of it because somehow I thought it was wrong. And as the years went on and we were poor and living in horrible apartments, my mom would always yell at me for eating all of the food, but I couldn’t help it. It had become my way of coping with our horrible situation. And from then on it became my problem… a problem that almost killed me… a problem that made people distrust me because I was stealing for it… a problem that kept me from being myself… a problem that I tried to kill myself over because I couldn’t stand living life with that problem anymore.
Of course we can all blame it one our moms, or on society, or on the models on the covers of Glamour or Seventeen magazine, or on the measurements of our Barbie dolls. But the truth is, is that everybody has their own combination of things that make them the way they are. And it applies to everyone; drug addicts, alcoholics, obsessive-compulsives, your neat-freak mother, and any other label you can think of. In the end you just have to figure out what made you the way you are or made you have the problems that you are having. And not so you have something to blame everything on, but so you know it didn’t just come out of thin air, you just weren’t born this way, you aren’t just different from everyone else. And once you know that you feel a little less helpless against it, against your obsession, against your eating disorder.
It took me over twenty years to realize what I had to figure out… it took me about 5 minutes to actually figure it out. So once you know your problem, you can deal with it. I’m not saying its easy from there on. It’s not something you can look up in a book like these doctors and therapists and writers who have never experienced anything even close to a life consuming obsession like an eating disorder. It’s something specific to you, and with some help you can learn how to work with your newfound knowledge and make your life livable… and actual life… one that isn’t overridden with your obsession because you think that it is more important than your actual self… because it’s not. Life couldn’t have been created so that we could torture ourselves. If it was, the whole human race would have killed itself off a long time ago! So, as I always say… give yourself a friggin’ break, because no one else is gonna give ya one for you!
Amanda Julynn
http://www.articlesbase.com/diseases-and-conditions-articles/i-realized-that-instead-of-willpower-i-was-stuck-with-a-whole-bunch-of-wontpower-134417.html
For more information visit: http://www.smokedeter.com
What is thinking out of the box? It is getting outside the usual ways of looking at things (that’s the box) to arrive at new and useful ideas. How do you do it? Here is one of the many ways.
How To Get Your Thinking Out Of The Box
One of the simplest techniques for “out of the box” thinking is to identify each of the elements of the “box” and consider any alternatives that come to mind, even crazy ones. Most of these will not be useful, but work with them and some may be made into ideas that aren’t so crazy after all. Once in a while they may even lead to great innovations. Let’s look at a specific example to see how this works.
Suppose you want to stop smoking, and you are looking for a creative new way to do this? First, you need to identify the ideas, assumptions and solutions that are common. These are the basis of the “box.” They could include:
- It is a matter of willpower.
- This is a personal goal.
- You’ll pay for some program to help you quit.
- You have to stop smoking.
- It is difficult to quit.
There are certainly other common ideas and solutions, but these are enough to show how the process works. Starting with the willpower issue, you might ask, “Why does it have to be a test of willpower?” This leads you to consider the easiest ways to quit. Perhaps hypnotism could help. It also suggests not being around others who smoke for a while, so there is no temptation. There is nothing too creative here, so you move on to the next item.
It is natural to assume that this is a personal goal, but not necessary to keep that perspective. Many people want to quit, perhaps even a few of your friends. Is there some way to make this a group goal? While that thought is in your mind, you challenge the next item with the idea; “What if a program paid me to quit?” That leads to an out-of-the-box solution: A group challenge and bet.
You arrange with three friends who want to quit to each put a thousand dollars in a pot. After one year, those have not smoked a cigarette get to split the pot. If two of you succeed, you’ll each be a thousand ahead. If only one succeeds, he or she will make three thousand dollars. There’s some real motivation, and the competitive nature of the challenge may help as well.
What about the assumption that you have to quit smoking? Is there a way to continue smoking without the health problems? You might switch slowly to cigarettes with less nicotine. You might find that the sensation of the cigarette in your mouth is as important as the nicotine, and you can eventually just “smoke” them without lighting them. These ideas may work, but are not too new, so you move on.
What about the idea that it is difficult to quit? You ask yourself, what if it was easy to quit? That gives you nothing, so you play with the idea and ask, “What if it was difficult to smoke?” Now that is an out of the box question, and it immediately suggests some ideas. How do you make it difficult? Perhaps you and your spouse could pay five dollars per cigarette into a special account to be split at the end of a year. Whoever smokes less will gain the most, and the pain of the high cost will make it tough to smoke much.
The most potentially profitable idea, though, may be that of having a drug that causes you to get immediately nauseous when you smoke. That makes it difficult to continue. It would be something like the drug “anabuse” which makes alcoholics vomit if they drink. It would be even better if it was in the form of an injection that lasts for a month, so you can’t “forget” your pill.
You can see the basic process here. First define the “box,” by listing all the usual ideas and solutions. Then consider these one-by-one. Attack them, alter them, look for opposites, and do anything else to find a new perspective. There are many ways to have more creative ideas, but this is one of the simplest and most systematic techniques for getting your thinking out of the box.
Steve Gillman
http://www.articlesbase.com/self-help-articles/get-your-thinking-out-of-the-box-456172.htmlFor more information visit: http://www.smokedeter.com
I’ve been smoking weed pretty much every day for the last 3 years…I’m 23 now and I really want to stop, but it’s pretty hard to. I know I cant really go to rehab for pot, so what can I do to kick the habit once and for all?
Talk to a therapist of counselor, that’s what I would suggest if you’re able to do that.
The best way I can tell you is to just stop cold turkey. It may seem hard at first, but that’s really the only way to stop. I know that when I was smoking, I would feel like I would get anxious or depressed if I stopped (and a lot of people feel that way), and that might have happened a little bit but it’s not as serious as it seems.
The first time I noticed a change was after I stopped smoking, in the beginning of a college semester… When I was smoking, I had to repeatedly check the correct classrooms and times in the beginning of every semester, I would keep checking my balance, etc. When I stopped smoking, after a month I noticed that I didn’t need to do all of that and I could just remember things fine. I didn’t have to worry about drug tests when applying for jobs, I didn’t have to worry about getting caught, or smelling like pot, or people knowing I was high…life generally got easier. After that I didn’t have the urge to smoke pot anymore.
I also sold my bubblers, pipes, etc. I’ve seen a couple other people try to quit by doing this and they did the official pothead move: spend that money on more weed… so if I were you I’d get rid of whatever you have, so you don’t have any traces anymore. It looks like you’ve realized that weed is fun when you’re young but becomes a burden once you’re older…
Is this the first time you’ve tried to quit?
To the poster above me: I have bipolar disorder too, and while the combinations and changes of medications can suck, I don’t understand how pot can help with bipolar disorder. It can help in the short term, but not in the long term. One of the side effects of pot is mild mood swings. When I smoked pot it made my mood swings much worse, in fact I haven’t met anyone with this disorder who has actually done well with pot. I’m not trying to knock on your beliefs but I don’t completely agree with you.
For more information visit: http://www.smokedeter.com
I’m serious.
When I was in high school our principal, Mr. Watkins was an avid coffee drinker. And when I say “avid”, I mean nobody stood in between Mr. Watkins and his pot of coffee. Mr. Watkins day wouldn’t start unless he had at least a pot and a half of coffee in his belly. He was a bit high-strung, which the teachers that worked directly ender him blamed his constant “one cup right after the other” coffee drinking mentality. One day the teachers decided to secretly change his regular coffee to decaf in an effort to calm him down. It didn’t work. They didn’t take into consideration that he had just quit smoking weeks earlier. It wasn’t the coffee that made him that way, it was his nervous withdrawals from quitting smoking.
The truth is coffee has very little effects on heavy coffee drinkers like Mr. Watkins. For Individuals who regularly consume coffee/caffeine has no effect on blood pressure. For people who have not consumed caffeine for a certain period of time, drinking coffee can lead to a small, short-lived increase in blood pressure. In fact, if your a coffee drinker with high blood pressure, it wasn’t the coffee that made you that way. My research shows that stopping coffee consumption is of no benefit to people with mild hypertension. There is no evidence to suggest that continued consumption of coffee father compounds hypertension in any diagnosed patients. Actually, regular coffee drinkers don’t even have comparatively higher blood pressure than non coffee drinkers. As the body quickly becomes tolerant to caffeine’s effects on blood pressure.
You may ask, well, there’s no effect on blood pressure, but what about other conditions like cholesterol or palpitations, what about increased risk for certain types of cancers like ovarian cancer or bladder cancer? No, no, no. In general, people who drink coffee do not have higher cholesterol levels than people who obtain from coffee drinking. Heart palpitations? No. Research shows that individuals may experience palpitations(irregular heartbeats). Irrespective of whether they are consuming coffee or not. Ovarian cancer? No conclusive evidence that coffee/caffeine consumption increases the risk of ovarian cancer. Bladder cancer? In 1990, The International Agency For Research On Cancer evaluated coffee, caffeine, tea, and latte’, after assessing the research, gave coffee the classification 2B which is possibly carcinogenic to the human urinary bladder. Coffee was cleared in all other areas.
Honestly folks, I’ve done an awful lot of research on the effects of coffee and caffeine and I haven’t found anything to raise any suspicion or worry. My conclusion is Mr. Watkins had the right idea all along. So, drink up folks, it isn’t bad for you. And like the title says,” That’s a good excuse to drink more coffee”
As always, I hope this article was both informative and entertaining. Thank you for reading and may GOD bless you always, and in always.
Larry Ford
http://www.articlesbase.com/health-articles/a-good-excuse-to-drink-more-coffee–14766.html
