Question for smokers....

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I’m wondering if I could get some help for a story I’m in the planning stages to write.

If there are any Smokers out there, can you explain to me how it “feels” to “Need” a smoke.

In a body swap story, a non-smoker ends up in a smokers body, and not being originally a smoker himself, how would the swapped person know the new new body is craving a cigarette ?

Thanks in Advance.

Sapphire

Comments

Not a smoker but

Dad was a heavy smoker and I talked with him about it. First of all it's a nicotine addiction. However if the person is new in the body they won't have a clue what they crave unless they smell cigarette smoke. My dad tried to quit and he said smelling cigarette smoke made him aware of needing one. If he stayed away from smokers he still felt the urge but it wasn't as great. A person who hasn't smoked would need a clue. Otherwise their body is just sending signals they don't know how to interpret. Like an itch with nowhere to scratch.

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thanks!

Thanks! Although personally, the only time I smoked was when I was a teenager, over 50 years ago. While I find women/girls smoking exciting, I don't know personally how that addiction feels, which makes it harder to write about its effects.

Sapphire

I've quit three years ago

I've quit three years ago after more than forty years. The first thing I'd missed - hand's movement to the mouth like eating pistachios. I guess this addiction to a movement is in a head and not in the body. Nicotine abstinence feels like a light intoxication, head is spinning a little and later light dizziness was felt for almost a month. What changes after quitting, eventually what they will notice after getting into smokers body. Fingers and nails (both finger nails and toe nails) are coloured in brown-gold shade. Fingers that usually hold cigarette has a callus because they are holding the burning stump. Smoke's smell is recognized by brain, not body

Ever crave a certain food

Ever crave a certain food that you just can't get out of your head? Feel the need to do something despite knowing you shouldn't be doing it? Splurge on something you can't afford just because you "have to have it"?

Those are all feelings smokers feel. Some are a lot worse and can't go more than a few hours without a butt while others are casual but still need to have a couple of cigarettes a day...

Each person is different. People like my mother and aunt are susceptible to smoking due to family addictions while others like my father use it to calm nerves due to rampant anxiety. It's all in how you try to make your character out to be, if she's a heavy smoker then the compulsion is going to dominate her life; if she's a light smoker then it's going to nag her but it's not something she can't deal with once she gets used to her new body.

I'm told STFU more times in a day than most people get told in a lifetime

I had a character go through that exact situation

laika's picture

In PLAY NICE, a pair of squabbling 20-something siblings were body-swapped by their witch grandmother to literally force them to walk a mile in each other's shoes and hopefully understand each other better in a few weeks when she switched them back. Joy was a smoker. Teddie was an ex-smoker but he was so disoriented by the experience of being in her body that it took him a while to realize what he/she was craving. He doesn't give into the addiction but uses food as a substitute, taking a vindictive satisfaction in the idea of his vain sister being fatter when she got her body back:

Angry and full of self pity, I jabbed buttons on the remote, looking for something watcheable on sucky broadcast television ......... When suddenly the garish green grass of a baseball stadium filled the screen. Top of the second. The Dodgers and the Mets out in L.A. The Playoffs. I had forgotten all about this game. Perfect! Staying immobile, immersing myself in the game was an escape into something that was familiar to me, comforting in its banality, in its utter divorce from any reality outside of its very limited rules and objectives...

27 days and two hours to go until the old witch switches us back. I knew I couldn't do it for a whole month, but for right now I didn't want to think about this new body of mine. I was still dealing with the oddness of taking a piss a while back ....... I had known the approximate proceedure, to sit down, and about where I would have to wipe, but the process had felt alien and ...... untidy.

I thought that the vague anstiness I had been feeling over the past half hour was some side effect of my transformation. Or for all I knew women ALWAYS felt this on edge. Some might say that this explained a lot. But whatever it was, the weird anxiety kept increasing.

It was during one of the commercials---a public service announcement---that I finally figured out what it was. A man in a suit and tie skulks out of his office building to have a cigarette in the designated area. He lights up, takes a deep drag, and proceeds to cough so hard that he expells all the main organs affected by smoking. By means of computer animation his tongue, his larynx, his lungs and finally his heart go flying out of his mouth to land on the concrete with a sickening splat, a collection of gruesome diseased blobs. And I thought: Aaaaaaahhh! THAT'S what I need!

It all made sense now. I had quit smoking five years earlier, on my sixth attempt; so now that I had a mental framework for it, it was a very familiar sensation. The way my mouth watered at the closeup of the butt that lay there next to the caved-in looking dead man, fuming deliciously. Joy's body was addicted to nicotine. So I would sit here suffering her withdrawal symptoms, while she was upstairs in my body, probably sleeping like a baby. It was the sort of situation that had Joy written all over it... Her purse still sat on the kitchen table, and I'm sure she had some of those nasty French ciggies sitting in there. And it wasn't like it would be MY lungs and such I was polluting. But I didn't want to re-familiarize myself with all the rituals of the habit. I would just have to tough this out... SHIT!!!

Suddenly a big bowl of ice cream sounded really, really good! That pint of Haagen Dasz I had seen in the freezer. I got up and checked it out. It was Perfect Peach, my father's favorite. I slid the spoon into the gelid pinkish goo. The sugar hit my system like an opiate. I went back for a second spoonful, and a third...

The game ended---The Mets had beaten the expatriate bums---and I decided that I'd better try to get to sleep before the nicotine jim-jams returned...

Maybe there's something in there you can use for inspiration or I wouldn't care if you stole parts outright. PLAY NICE is yet another of my old, probably-never-be-finishes series'...
~hugs, Ronni

quiting smoking

I am smoking for some 40 years now (45 with stops) and for me the nicotine craving is only for a day or 3 (have stopped 7 times for up to a half year), after that it's just the mental habit of smoking and as a result missing something. With regards to being switched to a smokers body as a non smoker, when you smell a cigarette it will just stink for you as much as it would in your old body. I don't see that triggering any want for lighting one yourself.

Yours, Leontine

my take on smocking (lol heheheh)

bobbie-c's picture

I can't speak for anyone else, but here's what I think:

Addiction to smoking has two components - a psychological one and a physical one.

In terms of psychological, one likes smoking for its ability to make you feel cool. I don't know for others, but it makes me feel sexy and sophisticated - perhaps like when you're wearing a sexy dress or a cool top. Also, it's like any other prop you use when interacting with others - you would use the holding of the cigarette like you would holding a pen in your hand while talking or gesturing, and if you didn't have it, you'd feel like there's something missing when you talk with others, making you less articulate or less assured (not by much, but enough to knock you off your stride a bit).

There are also things that come with the smoking - the rituals of taking it out of the pack, of tapping the pack or the cigarette on the end prior to lighting it, of blowing smoke (always up or away from people's faces), interacting with others while the cigarette dangles off your fingers, or the feeling of being rude or tough or in-charge when you talk to people while smoking (or sexy and sophisticated if you happen to be flirting or just trying to be nice), of tapping the ashes off, or putting out the butt and throwing it away. These rituals make you either feel like you belong (when you're around others who smoke), or feel special since you're unique (when you're around non-smokers), or it gives you a "ritual" of things to do while interacting with others.

There's also the social aspect of it - bumming a cigarette off someone, or asking for a light, or being the one to offer it, or to offer to light up someone. These can be convenient icebreakers or a means of getting closer to someone enough so that you can have a conversation or share a nodding smile or some such.

There's also the ability to show consideration to others, specifically non-smokers, like, "oh, is my cigarette bothering you?" et cetera, and you can be all kind and considerate by stubbing out your cigarette.

As to what it makes you feel - well, inhaling the smoke gives you a kind of taste of something like menthol, and it gives you a cool feeling in your chest, and it sort of addresses a craving - I suppose it would be parallel to answering a craving for chocolate or some favorite snack. Most smokers would light up after a meal or after drinking coffee. Some include the ritual of hanging out in a coffeehouse with a cigarette, (since hanging out in a coffeehouse is the thing, not to have the coffee, and the cigarette part of that). So, I suppose, smoking is parallel to eating - it can answer a craving, or it can be a habit or it can be a social thing.

In general, cigarettes makes you be in a better mood and make you feel better when you're feeling down. It makes you feel less irritable, makes you less hungry (which is good for keeping the weight down) and it actually improves your concentration and your memory.

These are all part and parcel of the rituals of smoking, and hence it can become like an addiction - not an addiction in the clinical sense, but more like you are used to a certain habit or mode of behavior, or a way one handles her day-to-day. Not having it will make one ill-at-ease, and you would therefore feel a bit off.

But these things are built up over a period of time as one becomes a smoker. I would doubt your character would feel any of that.

As to the physical component - that is all about the physiological dependence that one would have developed after a person has become a smoker. When you don't get your fix, you'd feel some tingling in the hands and feet, you'd probably be sweating, you'd be nauseated and have some cramps, constipation and gas, insomnia, inability to concentrate, a sore throat, you'd be irritable, depressed, anxious, and you'd have headaches that wouldn't necessarily increase in intensity, but you'd be desperate to get rid of them especially since they're accompanied by all the other bad stuff. And coughing - lots of coughing. And if you're able to stick to not smoking for a time, you'll find you've gained weight.

Over and above all that, your craving for nicotine will be there, and increasing over time. It would eventually plateau and recede and be mostly gone, but from then on, you'll always have to consciously actively stop yourself from reaching for a cigarette every time you see it being sold or if someone offers you one, or if you're around your smoker friends. That's what it means to be an addict (there is no such thing as an "ex-addict" - at best, you're going to be a "recovering addict").

As for your character, even if she hasn't smoked before, I can assume that her new body will have that addiction and just smelling the smoke and the cigarette "taste" from a smoker passing by will trigger the craving, and she would instinctively know what she's craving for. If the person whose body she jumped into has stopped smoking already, she'll still have that craving, but if the person was a smoker when she inhabited the body, she'll probably feel all the physical symptoms I mentioned, all coming on gradually and increasing until they plateau, and they will recede.

It took me a while to kick the habit, but I managed it (probably because I wasn't a smoker for that long a time). But it was rough.

So, kids, don't smock. (lol heheheh)