Day 5/6 - Itchy Fingers

Friday the 27th and Saturday the 28th were day 5 and day 6 respectively.I am suffering the dreaded itchy fingers!

I have up until this point been fairly upbeat about the whole stop smoking thing. People are behind me, I have never heard my parents say that they were proud of me so many times in such a short space of time and generally I felt pretty good about the whole deal. But the last couple of days I have been....

agitated... is probably the nicest way to say it..

Pissed off... is probably closer to the truth
Its really difficult to explain how it feels to come off of cigarettes and even if your an ex smoker you know every smoker is different. The people who say "I just stopped, cold turkey, didn't even think about it and it never bothered me", I don't feel happy for them or think that it's great, I want to chop of their heads and stick them on a spike with a sign hanging off their necks which reads; "shouldn't have rubbed it in, should ya?"

I am using patches, as you all know, and this means that I am on a controlled dosage of nicotine which is administered into my system through a patch on the skin. I am actually on the step 2 of the three step plan because I wasn't considered a heavy enough smoker to need step 1. I didn't get up in the middle of the night to smoke and it wasn't the first thing I would do in the morning, so my level of actual addiction was fairly low. What my problem came down to was habit. Pure and simple habit. I may not smoke first thing in the morning but the one after my dinner at night and the one I had before I went to bed were equally important to me. Giving this information you would think that the doctor would have not given me the nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) designed for people with strong addictions but maybe the NRT patch company had donated 200 extra pens that week and he had a moral obligation to "scratch their back".

So my agitation isn't, or shouldn't, be me craving for nicotine, because I am getting it, the same amount I was getting day 1,2,3 and 4. I don't know if its starting to study for my research methods chapter of my dissertation, a task that is slowly going to cause a mental breakdown. I don't know if it's being back at work on my usual shifts or cabin fever or boredom... but something is making me agitated.

Difficult to say wither or not I would have been agitated whilst still smoking or not... obviously I am not going to test that theory. Don't get me wrong I didn't have an urge to go and buy a packet but I can feel myself getting worked up over stupid things and I know the signs.

So I washed the car and tidied my room and signed an extra shift at work and ordered some make up on line (I actually had money in the bank even though its been over a week since payday!) and tried to keep my mind off of my annoyance. It worked, I still haven't smoked and soon I'll be blogging about the milestone that I very often never get to: DAY 7!