I'm having serious trouble dealing with the after-effects of quitting. It seems all my muscles have gone permanently tense, as per a normal anxiety issue. The worst part of this is that two months into it now, I've started to get a panic attack from nearly everything. I haven't had a flat out panic attack in years, but now...walking up stairs, going anywhere (including staying in a truck and going through a drive-through lane at the bank), stores, shops, even my therapist...it's all an instant panic attack. It's gotten so bad that all my years of practice have started to give way and I'm sinking into cardiophobia. (i.e. maybe it's not just panic). Has anyone else been through this? Did it end? Ease up? Anything to give me hope...I seriously considering buying a pack this morning.
I have various mental health issues (particularly ADHD, autism, multiple drug addiction) but not axiety disorder. My mother has schizophrenia, so that's maybe something in the background that I have to watch out for.
I quit without substitutes. The first 2 month I was just always tired and everything would be difficult. I did weight lifting, that somewhat kept the blood pressure up, and I was still coping. Then I basically crashed psychologically 2-4 month into it. I would always be afraid and sometimes had panic attacks about minor things. After 3 month I clearly felt that my body was changing, especially blood vessels in the brain. I would get corresponding sensations and anxiety about the changes. I had trouble to concentrate on anything and sleep 12 hours at least per day if not more. This never got better, but only worse, the more I tried to fight it. After 9 month of trying to work, failing all the time, not finishing any projects etc. just doing very simple tasks, I was taking more drastic measures. First I would force myself even more by even less reasonable levels of willpower and persistence. But this effectively implied that I was so overcharged at the problems at hand, that it made me essentially psychotic. And this only created more disorder and exhaustion in my mind and life. Realizing how harmful it was, I then shifted towards using self-prescribed drugs. I started with Modafinil, but it didn't cure the problem at all. Then I tried an array of other nootropics/drugs and finally weighted the disadvantages of this all against using nicotine gum again. When I did this, in combination with other drugs I took at the time, my psyche basically rebooted from zero.
Even month after this experience, I am still essentially recovering from all the psychological changes that I induced prior to falling back to nicotine to force myself to concentrate, in lack of other options at the time. Instead of just using a psychostimulant drug like nicotine, which I deprived myself of, I would for example believe that I was losing my job and couldn't buy food the next month, or even put myself actually into this situation, to pressure myself enough to concentrate on the task. I would create similar doomsday scenarios for much of everything I did to just be able to focus on what I had to do in life. When I was able to concentrate, my blood pressure would go up too high from emotion like worries, anger, survival instinct and whatever I could hold on to that worked and I would get headaches from it. I also had issues with tense, rigid partly cramping muscles, that disappeared after a year or so. I would feel physically sick from pressuring myself and also needed more sleep in direct relation to work I could finish with those methods. I overreacted to everything around me and often of course that was not functional. After the many month of feeling in such extremes as this, it also blunted me quite a lot to respond to serious scenarios at all, since I fooled myself with them just many times too often. I was aware of all of this, but it was just that there weren't any other options available. To concentrate, you need to be able to mobilize cognitive resources. And just natural emotional incentives weren't nearly enough to make much of anything work for me. In fact, they have never been in my entire life. I believed I could somehow make this work. But in the end, everything I learned from all this now only poses an obstacle to function in everyday life. But unrelated to functioning in life, from a perspective of general life wisdom and my own personal worldview, overcoming my smoking withdrawal was the single most comprehensive and difficult problem I tried to solve in the last 10 years. It was so comprehensive, that I couldn't escape to have learned a whole lot about this world and the people in it, from it.
The realilty of things is that I started smoking in my teens and I smoked very very consistently and persistently and never stopped. I chose to be very good at computers and programming, with interests in math and science in general because I could easily follow the content and be productive if I did put the effort into it. Now I realize that I simply wouldn't have been able to do this, if I had not used nicotine from smoking all the time. Hence I would have lived a different life to begin with, because I wouldn't have been able to become the same person.
I even chewed gum in additon to smoking at some points in my life, because it lead to much improvement. The option to quit nicotine and and to keep the life I have grown into at the same time, simply never was there. And I was not willing to accept this. Thus for the major relevant part, I tried the impossible. And as described it also deteriorated my psyche. Because I not only changed a working system, I rewrote the very foundation of it.
Change is good though and so is wisdom and experience. I do not regret this experience at all. But for me it involved quite a lot of agony and quite a lot of failures in life I could have avoided that I am unhappy with. And I am still struggling with the aftermath.
So maybe you are cycling through something similar. Maybe you are not taking enough nicotine. I vape 30-100mg per day, depending on how much I have to concentrate, and also recently started smoking a couple of cigarettes per day again (3-5). Unfortunately I don't know what your particular issue is. You have to discover that for yourself, and draw honest instead of illusory conclusions about it. Maybe it means you want to live without nicotine or without tobacco, maybe it doesn't. Surely living without any drugs is worth a solid attempt.
My particular issue is that I can't ever function in any sane manner without stimulant drugs. From my experiences, I strongly believe that I would actually develop schizophrenic psychosis if I was deprived of functional alternatives for too long. I only have to rely on nicotine in particular, because Ritalin is essentially [names of direclty comparable US schedule I class stimulant drugs not allowed on this forum] in pill form and it is just too addictive and powerful to ever touch again. I tried to abuse nicotine but it is just too displeasant and not powerful enough on the long run.
Anyway, I hope this related in-detail withdrawal story helps you. Withdrawing from drugs you have grown into, over the course of a decade or so, is just not so easy. You believe you know the world around you, but this knowledge is only superficial. Drugs change everything, and so does not taking them. A lot of things need to be reformulated and understood from this new perspective, before you will experience the same level of emotional comfort.
Don't take nicotine lightly, just because other people can apparently just stop smoking when they want to and don't suffer much from it, although addiction may just get back at them. To most people, nicotine is a recreational aspect of their lifes. They primarily derive just additional pleasure from it. To other people, nicotine/smoking is partly or exclusively self-medication for real and serious mental health problems. This connects it to much more than just recreational activities and the impact of withdrawing from it will equally be as comprehensive in your life. Some people are also just more sensitive to drugs. Especially people with autism, anxiety and also OCD seem to fall in this category.
