When smokers stop smoking, they must be able to deal with the cravings that occur. Experts say the cravings last a few minutes, but some smokers who’ve tried to quit would perhaps dispute this. Sometimes it’s because they, we, don’t fully understand what the difference is. I’ll do my best in this article to explain exactly what I mean from my perspective.

A physical craving is a strong desire to light up. It comes out of the blue without provocation. You may be just sitting there, and suddenly you need a cigarette. It may pop up during a dream too, or wake us when we are sleeping, long after we’ve successfully quit. (That’s why some of us still call ourselves smokers. Some of us need to be reminded that just one slip would get us back into it.)

One lady that I had a discussion with made a comment that after 20 years of not smoking she occasionally still dreams of smoking. Others say the same thing, though they recognize it and roll over and go back to sleep. They consider them to be weak cravings. While one side of the brain is asking them for a smoke, the other side is saying “naw, we don’t need one.” These are annoying, but they are rarely strong. (Even though you remove software from your computer, there’s still a trace of it somewhere in your system.)

Strong cravings occur mostly during initial withdrawal, when the body is ridding itself of its 4000 toxins that we’ve accumulated over time and delivered to our body on a regular basis, until we choose to stop smoking. A smoker quits and brain chemistry is now at work here. The brain will often signal the smoker during an idle moment even, that it’s time to light up. Just as when we learned to smoke each and every day for years, our brain became accustomed to it, and now is programmed to know when our next one is due. After a period of not having any, the brain sends out a strong alert. “Light up! You’re causing me problems up here!” That strong signal is what lasts for 3 to 5 minutes. When I wrote that a craving comes without provocation, I was excluding the mechanism of triggering.

Read Part 2 : Sorting Cravings And Emotional Triggers – Triggering