Chapter Two: The Anatomy of a Craving

Before you can let something go, you need to see what you are holding. Most people who vape have never looked at a craving. They have felt it arrive, felt the alarm it brings, and reached for the device in one unbroken movement. The craving has never been examined because it has never been allowed to last long enough to be examined.

A craving depends on speed. It arrives and is answered in the time it takes a hand to reach a pocket, and in that speed it never has to show itself. When the hand is slowed the craving stands in the open, and you can see it.

This chapter asks you to look, and it tells you what you are likely to see. You can go on vaping while you read it, if that is where you are. You can look at a craving after stopping, or remember the last time your hand went to the pocket. The nicotine replacement you use can stay as it is. You are not trying to win anything. For a moment the hand rests, and you are curious about what your own body is doing.

What a craving is made of

A craving has two parts, and they are usually fused so tightly that they seem like one thing. It helps to picture two people who have arrived at the door together wearing one coat between them, so that you take them for a single large stranger. Take the coat off and there are two, and neither is as big as the stranger was.

The first is a physical sensation. If you slow down and attend to it you will find it is surprisingly modest. There may be a tightness in the chest, a faint hollow in the stomach, a restlessness in the hands, a slight tension in the jaw or the throat. It is uncomfortable the way mild hunger is uncomfortable, or a room that is a little too warm. There is no danger in it. It is a sensation, in a body, and it will change.

Look closer still, if you like. Many people find the sensation has a place. It sits high in the chest for some, under the collarbones, like a breath that was taken and not finished. For others it lives in the throat, a small dryness there, an itch at the back of the mouth where the vapour used to go. Some find it in the hands, which want something to hold and which drift towards the pocket on their own. A few find it in the belly, a flutter, or find nothing anywhere and only a vague sense that something is missing from the room. Whatever you find, it is small. It is smaller than a stubbed toe. It is smaller than the ache of a full bladder through the last stop of a bus ride. You have carried far worse than this in your body a thousand times and thought nothing of it.

The second is a story. The story arrives at once, wrapped around the sensation, and it is the story that turns a mild sensation into an emergency. The story says, I need this. I cannot concentrate until I have it. This will get worse and worse until I give in, so I might as well give in now. Just one, and then I will stop. I have had a hard day. What is the point.

The story has more than one voice, and it is worth knowing them, because you will meet them again. There is the reasonable voice, which speaks in a calm and adult tone and says that now is not a good time and that a sensible person would wait for a better week. There is the tired voice, which says you have been through enough today and deserve something. There is the bargaining voice, which offers deals. One more and then never. Only at the weekend. Only after meals. There is the frightened voice, which says the feeling is dangerous and that if it is not answered something bad will happen. And there is a flat, low voice that says nothing matters much anyway, so why not. Each of these sounds like you. None of them is the whole of you. They are the sound an addiction makes when it is asked to wait.

The sensation is honest. The story is not. The sensation tells you, accurately, that your body has noticed a change in its chemistry. The story is the addiction's reading of that change, and the addiction has only one interest, which is to go on.

Consider how strange this is. Nicotine has left your blood a little, and a set of nerves has reported the fact, the way they would report that the room has gone cool. That is the whole of the physical event. Then, in the space of a heartbeat, the mind has built a case for the prosecution and a case for the defence and reached a verdict and passed sentence, and the sentence is always the same, and it is always carried out at once. You have lived under this court for years and never once seen it sit.

When you learn to separate the sensation from the story, the craving loses most of its power at once. What remains is a slight discomfort that you are well able to sit with. You have sat with worse in a dentist's chair, in a waiting room, on a long drive with a cold coming on.

The gap

There is a small practice that goes before the looking, and it is the easiest thing in this guide. When the hand moves to the vape, wait one minute, and then vape if you are going to.

Nothing is refused. You open a gap of sixty seconds between the craving and the having, and you stand in the gap to see what it contains. For years there has been no gap at all. The craving and its answer have been one movement, and a thing that is answered in the same instant it appears cannot be seen. Sixty seconds is enough to see it.

Picture an office corridor in the middle of the afternoon. You have pushed back from the desk and you are walking towards the door at the far end, past the printer and the noticeboard, because that is what your body does at this hour. You know the door. You know the patch of pavement outside it, and the cold, and the wall you lean on. Now, this once, stop in the corridor. Stand by the noticeboard for one minute with your hands at your sides. Read a notice about the fire drill if you like. Notice what the minute has in it. There will be the pull, and there will be the sentence, and there may be a sudden feeling that this is absurd and that people will wonder why you are standing there. Let them wonder. When the minute is over, go through the door and vape, if you are going to. You have seen a craving in the open, and it did not harm you, and neither did the wait.

A minute of nothing is a strange country when you first go there. Most people find that their mind rushes to fill it. Plans, grievances, the shopping, a sudden need to check the phone. Underneath the rush, if you stay, there is often a feeling that was there before the craving and that the craving was covering. Sometimes it is boredom. Sometimes it is a small dread about a conversation you are putting off. Sometimes it is nothing at all, only the plain unease of a body that has been told for years that it is not allowed to want nothing. All of it is fine to look at. None of it needs anything done about it today.

If you kept the count that Chapter One asked for, you know how many times a day the hand goes. The minute shows you what one of those reaches has in it. If there is someone you trust, tell them in a sentence what the minute had in it, because a thing said aloud is harder to forget by evening.

Try it now

If you can, the next time a craving comes, do not act on it and do not fight it. Be curious instead.

Curious is how you look at an insect on the windowsill, or a bruise you do not remember getting. There is interest in it and no alarm. The craving has had you as an opponent and as a servant for years, and now, for the first time, it has a witness.

Ask: where in my body is this? Suppose it is a tightness in the chest. You sit with your hands on your thighs and give it a moment to show you where it ends. Near the ribs the feeling is fainter. A little higher it has a harder edge. You can feel that difference without taking a deeper breath or trying to spread it out.

You are making a map, and a map changes nothing about the country. The breath goes in and comes out, and you can feel whether the tightness moves with it or stays in the same place. A dry place in the throat changes when you swallow, or is still there afterwards. Your fingers move against the cloth on your knees. They want to close round something. You can let them rest there and feel the craving without putting anything in them. Nothing here asks you to make the sensation different, or bigger so that you can get a better look. It is exactly as big as it is, and that is the right size for looking at.

Then ask: what is the story? While your hands rest on your thighs, the mind can still be talking. I need this. I deserve this. I cannot cope without it. The last sentence can come again with more force, and your fingers can stay where they are while you hear it. Nobody has to obey it.

It can help to hear the story in the voice of someone else. Imagine it read out by a bored announcer on a train platform, in the flat tone of a platform change. The next craving to arrive will get worse and worse until you give in. Said like that it loses some of its authority. The sentence was a forecast, and a forecast can be checked.

Then simply stay. Stay with the sensation. Let the story run if it wants to run, but do not follow it. Keep your attention on the raw feeling in the body. Watch what it does.

A minute is plenty for this. Two if you like. If at any point it gets worse rather than better, or you feel a rising panic, stop, and lift your eyes, and look at the room. Name three things you can see. The chair, the light switch, the bag by the door. Vape then, if you were going to.

What you will find, if you stay long enough, is that the sensation peaks and then subsides. It does not climb without end, as the story said it would. For most people it rises for a minute or two, holds at its height, and then, with nothing done, begins to soften. It may return later. But it passes, and it always passes, and each time you allow it to pass without acting, the pathway that made it grows a little weaker.

You can watch a wave from the beach. It comes in tall and loud and it looks as though it will go on climbing, and then it breaks and runs up the sand and slides back, and the beach is still there. A craving is like that, and you are the beach, and the beach is not harmed by the wave.

Notice what has happened when the craving has softened and you did nothing. The story said it would get worse and worse until you gave in. It did not get worse and worse. You did not give in, or you did, at the end, with the device in your hand and the feeling already going down. Either way the story was wrong, and you watched it be wrong, and you cannot fully unwatch that. The story will make the same forecast tomorrow with the same confidence. It has no memory and no shame. But you will remember.

What the watching teaches

The first thing most people learn from watching is that cravings are shorter than they thought. The addiction lives in the space between the first flicker and the hand's arrival at the pocket, and that space has usually been a second or two long, so the craving has never had to show its whole length. Watched, a craving is usually a few minutes long. A craving that seems to go on for an hour is nearly always a string of separate cravings with gaps between them, and the gaps are where you were thinking about the next one. This is worth knowing, because a few minutes is a size a person can manage, and an hour is a size a person dreads.

The second thing is that cravings arrive on a timetable, and the timetable is yours. They come when you have always vaped. After the meal, at the car door, on the walk to the train, at the top of the stairs at home, in the first quiet moment after the children are down. They come as reliably as hunger comes at the hours you have always eaten. This is the body doing what bodies do, keeping to habit, and there is nothing in it about weakness of character. Once you know the timetable you can meet a craving at the door instead of being ambushed by it, and a craving that is expected is smaller than one that is not.

The third thing is that there is a difference between fighting a craving and allowing it. When a craving comes, notice which you are doing.

People who watch cravings for a week or so often report that the watching itself becomes interesting. The craving that was a dread becomes a small event that they observe with something close to affection. Here it comes again. There is the tightness, there is the sentence, there is the craving in the hands. And there, a minute later, is the softening. Some people find themselves smiling at it. There is no triumph in the smile. It is the smile of someone who has seen a trick done many times and knows how it works and enjoys it anyway. The fear has gone out of the thing, and fear was most of what it was made of.

Let the day answer

The thought can travel ahead of you to a friend's house and decide what the visit will be like before you have rung the bell. Without the vape I will have nothing to say. Suppose you are going round for a cup of tea at four. You know the kitchen and the chair with a tea towel hanging over its back. You know the back step too, where you have stood talking between pulls. Now you picture sitting at the table with nothing in your hand and nothing in your head. Hear what you expect: I will sit there in silence. You can be nervous on the step and ring the bell. Your friend opens the door with a sock in one hand. There is washing to fold before anyone can sit down.

They move a pile of towels from the chair and put the kettle on. You sit with your coat still on your knees. For a while you say very little. The craving is there in your chest, and you are listening for a pause in which you will have to speak. Then your friend tells you about a new shift at work. They finish after the last bus now. How do you get home? You ask because you know how far it is, and while they answer you remember the road from the bus stop and ask whether the lights have been mended. The cup arrives with the tea too hot to drink. You hold it by the handle. The pull in your chest is still there while your friend describes walking that stretch in the dark.

Do not make the test whether the craving went away. You have something to say while it stays. You are concerned about the person across the table, and for part of the visit you are talking about their walk home. There can also be a visit when you hardly speak at all, when the tea cools and the pull stays sharp and you keep looking towards the back door. Leave that in the account. You can tell your friend that it is hard to sit there, and leave when your cup is empty. A walk together as far as the corner is another way to meet. You do not owe the kitchen a long evening.

Take your medicines as usual. If you need medical care, pick up the phone and ask for it. There is no need to bring on a craving, or make your body feel worse, before you put your hand to your friend's bell.

When you are home, put what you expected beside what happened, on the back of an envelope if you want to keep it. I thought I would sit in silence. I wanted a vape. We talked about the walk home. Use what happened in your own visit. If you sat with your coat on your knees until it was time to go, write that. The words need not come out as an argument for trying again. They are what happened at four, in that kitchen. Once they are on the paper, you can put the pen down. You do not have to read them over until the next visit feels certain. You leave the envelope on the table.

The relief that is not relief

You have vaped thousands of times, and each time you felt something you called relief. It is worth understanding what that relief is, because the misunderstanding of it is the foundation of the whole prison.

When you vape, nicotine enters the blood and the small hollow feeling of withdrawal is filled for a while. For a few moments you feel normal, no more than that, the way a person who has never vaped feels all the time. Then the nicotine begins to leave, and the hollow feeling begins to come back, and before long you are where you started, waiting for the next pull.

The addiction presents this cycle as pleasure. But look at it truthfully. The only thing the vape gives you is the absence, for a while, of the discomfort the vape itself made. It is as if you wore shoes that were too tight all day so that you could enjoy taking them off at night. The relief is real. You would feel far better if you never put the shoes on.

Stand on a train platform for a moment and watch. The train is late and it is cold and people are waiting. Some of them vape, or would be vaping if they were allowed, and their hands are in their pockets and their jaws are working and they look at the departures board every few seconds. And some of them have never vaped, and they are cold and bored the same as everyone else, and that is all they are. They are not enduring anything. They are people waiting for a train. When it comes they will get on it and their day will go on, and at no point will they feel a small hole open in the chest and close again. This is what the vape has taken from you, and the strange part is that it has convinced you that it is what the vape gives you. The ease of the person who does not vape is the thing you have been vaping to get back to, a few minutes at a time, for years. They have it all day. It costs them nothing.

This is the great deception, and once you see it clearly you cannot fully unsee it. There is nothing to give up. The choice in front of you is between a cycle of manufactured discomfort and manufactured relief, and the level peace of a body that needs nothing. Pleasure and deprivation never came into it.

There is nothing to give up

Most people who try to stop treat it as a sacrifice. They brace for a loss. They speak of giving up, as though something of value were being handed over and they were to be poorer for it, and they expect to feel deprived, and so they do. The whole approach is built on a mistake, and the mistake is in the first word.

The vape does a few small jobs on an ordinary day, and Chapter One looked at them. What it adds to each of those moments is a chemical hollow and the filling of it, and that is all it adds, and you do not need it to have the moments themselves.

Then there is the other objection, the one people say with a little defiance. But I enjoy it. Look at that honestly too. Look at the first pull of the morning, and notice that the pleasure in it is the relief of a hollow that the night opened, and that a person who slept without the hollow woke without needing anything. Look at the pull you take when you are already full of nicotine, ten minutes after the last one, and ask what pleasure was in it. Most people find there was none. There was the hand moving and the vapour and a flat nothing. The enjoyment, examined, is nearly always the enjoyment of an itch being scratched, and the itch was made by the last scratch. The pleasure was in a debt being paid for an hour, and the debt was made by the last payment.

None of this is a lecture. You are allowed to have liked it, and you are allowed to be sad about it for a while, the way a person can be sad about anything that was part of their days. But go into this knowing what you are leaving behind, which is a small chemical hollow and a set of stories about it, and what you are walking towards, which is the ordinary ease of a body that wants nothing at the top of the stairs.

The craving as a messenger

There is another way to see the craving, and it matters more the further you go.

The craving is not only a chemical event. It is a signal from within, and if you learn to read it, it will tell you a great deal about what you have been avoiding. Notice when the cravings are strongest. It is rarely random. It is when you are bored, or anxious, or lonely, or angry, or ashamed, or overwhelmed, or feeling something you would rather not feel. The vape has become the way you handle feeling. It is the button you press when an emotion arrives that you would rather not have.

So every craving is pointing at something. Beneath the desire for nicotine there is a feeling that wants to be felt. The addiction has trained you to reach past that feeling for the device. This guide will teach you to stop reaching, and to turn towards the feeling instead.

This is so for many people. It is not so for everyone. Some people have a pleasant habit and nothing buried beneath it. They picked it up because it tasted of something and a friend had one, and it stayed because nicotine stays, and when they turn round there is no feeling waiting there. If that is you, there is nothing to find, and looking for a hidden wound would be inventing one. Chapter Four says more about the difference. The rest of this section is for the people who turn round and find something.

Learn to read the message. When a craving arrives, once you have found the sensation and heard the story, ask one more question. What was here a moment before this? The trigger is easy to name, the car door or the coffee. Look for the feeling instead. Often there was one. A flatness that came on in the middle of the afternoon. A small anxiety about tomorrow that started when you looked at the calendar. A loneliness at the end of a call. Something someone said that you did not answer. The craving came a second later, and it came as a rescue, and you took it, and the feeling underneath was never looked at. It is still there. It is smaller than you fear. It has been waiting, patiently, for years, for you to turn round.

Nothing here is a punishment. The feelings you have been avoiding are less dangerous than you fear. They are feelings, and like the craving they rise and crest and pass when they are allowed to.

Think of a garden gate at the end of the day. You have come home and you are standing at the gate with your hand on the latch and you have not gone in yet. This is a place where many people vape. The gate is where the day outside ends and the life inside begins, and there is a moment in between, and for years the moment has been filled with vapour. Stand there this once with nothing. Feel what the moment has in it. There may be dread of what is inside. There may be relief that the day is done, and a grief that it was another day like the last. There may be a tenderness for the people behind the door and a fear of not being enough for them. There may be nothing but a tiredness so deep that it feels like a feeling. Whatever is there, it is yours, and it is the truth about your evening, and the vape has been standing between you and it. When you have felt it for a moment, go in. You will find you are more there, when you walk through the door, than you have been for a long time.

A month on, and a year on

It is fair to ask where all this looking goes. A month after you stop, for most people, cravings still come. They are fewer and shorter and they no longer bring the alarm, and you meet each one at the noticeboard or the gate, with the sensation found and the sentence heard. A year on, for many people, there is a flicker now and then, and it is gone in the time it takes to notice it. Chapter Eleven describes those months and Chapter Twelve the years.

For now there is the craving that comes while you are doing something else. You are looking for a clean shirt, with the wardrobe open and a sleeve caught beneath the other clothes. The thought says you need a vape. Your fingers loosen the sleeve and lift the shirt from its hanger.