It has been a crazy month since my last update, but I'm happy to say that I've continued on my trend of quitting smoking, and am now a month into my quit. It's been rough, but I'm finally past all of the withdrawal symptoms, and most of the psychological symptoms have finally subsided as well. Unfortunately, this has also meant that I've had to come face-to-face with my other addiction, sweet sweet caffeine.
Let me put this into perspective. In college, my academic adviser drank coffee until about 4:30 in the afternoon, and this is a guy I spent a lot of time with my senior year. To say I picked up the habit is an understatement. My last semester as a history major had me writing somewhere around 90-100 pages between all my classes, and I was drinking coffee from 7am to 7pm and switching to Wild Turkey at 7:01pm, while smoking a pack a day.
Even nowadays, my morning usually started with three cups of coffee that I finish before 8am, and then I drink at least 3 more. And then on my way home from work, I'll grab a Monster from the gas station. On weekends, I'll easily drink 6 cups from the start. You can get a pretty good idea of how this can mess with my sleep cycle, and thus create a vicious cycle of dependency.
This is all well and good when you're smoking, because nicotine messes with how alcohol and caffeine effect the body, mostly in that they reduce the effects. Take away that nicotine, and you have a super-powered drunk/hyperman running around. So in honor of my one month of smoking cessation, I've decided to confront my caffeine addiction. I started out trying not to drink anything containing caffeine, but that turned out to be what scientists define as fucking retarded. After about an hour of feeling like my brain was being pried open, I caved and had a small coffee, and for the rest of the day I felt okay. And that night, I slept like a baby. No waking up in the middle of the night, it took me all of about 10 minutes to go to sleep, and I didn't wake up two hours before my alarm went off. The next day, I decided on drinking my 3 cups of coffee in the morning to get me going, and under no circumstances would I drink a Monster after work.
Now on day four, I've also had the bonus effect of not ingesting between 200-250 calories of God knows what, nor any of the gas station snacks I'd buy and eat as well. Baby steps to a healthier me, woo.
In any case, this post has focused mainly on my resolution of quitting smoking, which I feel confident enough to say I can cross off my list of resolutions. So now, between having a positive net worth and this, I've finished 2 of the 5 things I've set out to do this year. I'll do the full first third of the year update next week, but so far, I'm pretty pumped! And I'll keep posting my QuitNow achievements as I get them, because life deserves to be played like a video game.
Let me put this into perspective. In college, my academic adviser drank coffee until about 4:30 in the afternoon, and this is a guy I spent a lot of time with my senior year. To say I picked up the habit is an understatement. My last semester as a history major had me writing somewhere around 90-100 pages between all my classes, and I was drinking coffee from 7am to 7pm and switching to Wild Turkey at 7:01pm, while smoking a pack a day.
Even nowadays, my morning usually started with three cups of coffee that I finish before 8am, and then I drink at least 3 more. And then on my way home from work, I'll grab a Monster from the gas station. On weekends, I'll easily drink 6 cups from the start. You can get a pretty good idea of how this can mess with my sleep cycle, and thus create a vicious cycle of dependency.
This is all well and good when you're smoking, because nicotine messes with how alcohol and caffeine effect the body, mostly in that they reduce the effects. Take away that nicotine, and you have a super-powered drunk/hyperman running around. So in honor of my one month of smoking cessation, I've decided to confront my caffeine addiction. I started out trying not to drink anything containing caffeine, but that turned out to be what scientists define as fucking retarded. After about an hour of feeling like my brain was being pried open, I caved and had a small coffee, and for the rest of the day I felt okay. And that night, I slept like a baby. No waking up in the middle of the night, it took me all of about 10 minutes to go to sleep, and I didn't wake up two hours before my alarm went off. The next day, I decided on drinking my 3 cups of coffee in the morning to get me going, and under no circumstances would I drink a Monster after work.
Now on day four, I've also had the bonus effect of not ingesting between 200-250 calories of God knows what, nor any of the gas station snacks I'd buy and eat as well. Baby steps to a healthier me, woo.
In any case, this post has focused mainly on my resolution of quitting smoking, which I feel confident enough to say I can cross off my list of resolutions. So now, between having a positive net worth and this, I've finished 2 of the 5 things I've set out to do this year. I'll do the full first third of the year update next week, but so far, I'm pretty pumped! And I'll keep posting my QuitNow achievements as I get them, because life deserves to be played like a video game.
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