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We need not guess as to what happens inside a human brain that’s subjected to nicotine during recovery. The evidence seen on brain PET scans is undeniable. Just one puff of nicotine and within ten seconds up to 50% of the brain’s nicotinic-type acetylcholine receptors will become occupied by nicotine. While the smoker’s conscious mind may find itself struggling with tobacco toxin tissue burning sensations and carbon monoxide induced dizziness, well-engineered dopamine payattention pathways will find the resulting dopamine “aaah” sensation nearly impossible to forget.

We may actually walk away from the relapse experience thinking we have gotten away with using. But it won’t be long before our brain is begging for more. Recovery isn’t about battling an entire pack, pouch, tin or box of our particular nicotine delivery vehicle. It’s about that first bolus of nicotine striking the brain, a hit that will end our journey, cost us liberty, and land us behind bars.

Unfortunately, conventional “quitting” wisdom invites relapse with statements such as “Don’t let a little slip put you back to smoking.” As Joel says, it’s like telling the alcoholic, “Don’t let a sip put you back to drinking” or the heroin addict, “Don’t let shooting-up put you back to using.” Experts are fond of stating that “on average, it takes between 3-5 serious quit attempts before breaking free of tobacco dependence,” and that “every time you make an effort you’re smarter and you can use that information to increase the likelihood that your subsequent quit attempt is successful.” What these so called experts fail to reveal is the precise lesson eventually learned.

Why? Why can’t it be taught and mastered prior to a user’s first attempt ever? They don’t teach it because most don’t understand it themselves. Instead they excuse failure before it even occurs, as if trying to protect the particular quitting product they are pushing from being blamed for defeat.

The lesson eventually gleaned from the school of hard-recovery-knocks is that “if I take so much as one puff, dip or chew I will relapse.” Just one, just once and defeat is all but assured. “The idea that you can’t quit the first time is absolutely wrong,” says Joel.120 “The only reason it takes most people multiple attempts to quit is that they don’t understand their addiction to nicotine. How could they, no one really teaches it. People have to learn by screwing up one attempt after another until it finally dawns on them that each time they lost it, it happened by taking a puff. If you understand this concept from the get-go, you don’t have to go through chronic quitting and smoking.”

Try to remember. What was it like being you? What was it like to function every morning without nicotine, to finish a meal, travel, talk on the phone, have a disagreement, start a project or take a break without putting nicotine into your body? What was it like before nicotine took control? What was it like residing inside a mind that did not want for nicotine?
One of the most fascinating aspects of drug addiction is just how quickly nearly all remaining memory of life without the external chemical are buried by high definition dopamine “aaah” memories generated by using it. It’s a common thread among all drug addicts. We’ll discuss this in more detail later but I pose this to you now. How can we claim to like or love something when we have almost no remaining memory of what life without it was like? What basis exists for honest comparison? Why be afraid of returning to a calm and quiet place where you no longer crave a chemical that today, every day, you cannot seem to get off your mind, a chemical that is a mandatory part of every day’s plan?
Why fear arriving here on Easy Street with nearly a billion comfortably recovered nicotine addicts? Is freedom of thought and action a good thing or bad? If good, then why fear life without it? How wonderful would it be to again reside inside an undisturbed mind where addiction chatter gradually becomes infrequent, then rare? Again, I ask you, “What was it like being you?” Why fear coming home? Slave to the world of “nicotine normal,” we were each provided a new identity.
brain dopamine pathways did their designed job and did it well. They left us convinced that our next nicotine fix was central to survival, as important as drinking water or eating food. I recently read disturbing comments posted by more than a hundred long-term nicotine gum addicts. One, a 36 year-old woman, wrote, “I have to say, I traded one problem for another. I chew 4 mg 24/7 and can go through 170 pieces in less than 6 days. I have been chewing Nicorette now for 12 years. If I run out for a short time my mood becomes irrational. It is costing me more money than I have.
 I have chosen Nicorette over food many times.” Although the word “quitting” is part of the fabric of nicotine cessation, such thinking can unconsciously tease and play upon old nicotine use memories, making us feel as though we’ve left something of tremendous value behind. If allowed, it can tease and inflame false fears, fears born of nicotine urge and replenishment memories, durable memories whose purpose was to convince us that nicotine is vital to survival, memories that should never have been present in the first place, memories only made possible because a foreign substance entered the brain and was able to disrupt priorities.
When you think about “quitting” I hope you’ll ponder when the real “quitting” took place. The journey home is about recognizing and embracing truth. But be prepared; learning that for years we were fooled and lived a lie can invoke a host of emotions including anger. Baby steps, patience, honesty and you too will soon be entirely comfortable again engaging all aspects of life without nicotine. Contrary to deeply held beliefs that were pounded into your brain by an endless cycle of urges and rewards, you are leaving absolutely nothing of value behind. To quote a line from one of my favorite movies, “even the love in our heart, we get to bring it with us!”

Tolerance ever so gradually pulls us deeper and deeper into dependency’s forest. We find ourselves sucking a wee bit harder, holding the smoke longer, or smoking more nicotine in order to achieve the desired effect. Two a day, three, four, four smoked hard, our brains gradually grow additional nicotinic-type acetylcholine receptors.
 Over time, most of us require more nicotine in order to match last month’s or last year’s “aaah” reward sensation. My “aaah”s were no more powerful smoking five cigarettes a day at age fifteen than when smoking 60 per day at age forty. I needed that much more in order to achieve the same remembered effect. I know, you’re probably thinking, you’ve been at the same nicotine intake level for some time now and it’s likely vastly less than the three packs-a-day I was smoking. While we don’t yet fully understand wide variations in levels of nicotine use, we know that genetics probably explains most differences.
 There is also the fact that some of our mothers, like mine, smoked during pregnancy. I was born with my brain wired for nicotine. I came into this world as nicotine’s slave and likely spent the first few days in withdrawal. As Duke University’s Professor Slotkin puts it, “nicotine alters the developmental trajectory of acetylcholine systems in the immature brain, with vulnerability extending from fetal stages through adolescence.”