"I've tried, and it was awful"

If you've tried to stop before, you have a memory of what it was like. For many people the memory goes like this. You lasted somewhere between a day and a fortnight. You thought about cigarettes constantly, you were miserable and short with everyone, and at some point it seemed obvious that life was too short to feel like that. You had one, felt better at once, and concluded that you're someone who can't do it.

I'd like to take that memory apart, because I think it contains two mistakes, and neither of them is your fault.

The first mistake is about how long it lasts. John Hughes, who has spent much of his career studying what happens when people stop, reviewed the research on this in 2007. The confirmed symptoms, which are the ones I listed in chapter 3, peak within the first week and last two to four weeks. The NHS gives a similar picture. Withdrawal can start within a few hours of your last cigarette, it's usually strongest in the first week and especially the first three days, and on average it lasts three to four weeks. The NHS adds, fairly, that some people feel it for longer, occasionally for a few months.

Put that beside another of Hughes's findings. When people try to stop with no help at all, most of those who relapse do so within the first eight days. They go back during the worst stretch. So what most people know of stopping is the first week repeated, attempt after attempt. It's the hardest part of the process, and they take it for the whole thing. Very few smokers have ever seen week five, so they've no reason to believe it's different.

The same review found that only about three to five in a hundred unaided attempts lasted six months to a year. I include that number because I think it's freeing. If you tried on your own and it didn't hold, you weren't showing a weakness of character. It's the ordinary outcome of an unaided attempt, for almost everybody. It's also the best argument I know for the next chapter, which is about the kinds of help that raise those odds.

The second mistake is about what the misery was. While you were going through it, you still believed the cigarette was your source of calm, your break and your pleasure. So each pang came with a story attached. The story said that this was what life would be like from now on, with a permanent gap where the good thing used to be. I think that story is what makes the first week unbearable, and what's happening in your body is the smaller part. An itch you know will be gone in three weeks is an irritation. If you believe it's permanent, the same itch is a good reason to give up. This is my interpretation and not a finding. But it's the reason this book spends nine chapters on beliefs before it gets to a plan.

It helps to know that there are two kinds of urge, because they behave differently.

The first is the need itself, the chemical one. It comes on its own timetable, whatever you're doing, and it's what makes the first days rough. It fades over those first weeks as your brain adjusts to working without nicotine, and nicotine products or medicines can take much of the edge off it.

The second is the cue. This is the learned pairing from chapter 6. You finish a meal, or get in the car, or pick up the phone, or pour a glass of wine, and the wish for a cigarette appears, because those moments have been followed by a cigarette thousands of times. Cue urges can be sharp, but they're brief, and they're tied to situations. They wear out by going through the situation without smoking. The first coffee without one is strange. By the tenth you'll probably notice it much less. It's why an urge can ambush you months later in a place you haven't been since you stopped, like a particular holiday bar. You're nowhere near the start when that happens. You've met an old pairing you haven't yet had the chance to wear out.

Both kinds have something in common that's easy to forget in the moment. An urge rises, peaks and falls away whether or not you smoke. Having the cigarette isn't what ends it. It would have ended anyway, and the NHS is right to tell people to remember that cravings pass. If you smoke in answer to an urge, you're back on the hourly timetable, and the next one is already on its way. If you let it pass, I think the next one tends to be a little weaker, because that's how learned pairings usually fade.

I can't promise you an easy few weeks, and I'd distrust anyone who did. Some people have a rough time even with every kind of help. What I can say is that it has an end, and that it's a different thing from the permanent loss you may have been picturing. With help it's also usually milder than you remember.