Smoking is the answer.
Sometimes our thoughts can really throw us off course. Here's another way of - huh- thinking about them.
Every few months or years, at a specific point in my search for more creative escapism in my life, I will come upon the recurrent thought:
Maybe if I started smoking again, I will become an expert writer. True, unbridled inspiration will find me every night, as I stay up late with red wine and wild hair and cigarettes inside the house. Yes. Smoking. Smoking is the answer.
Now, I love smoking.
I know we’re not meant to say that. It’s gross and unhelpful or makes me appear a certain type of someone, or whatever. But it’s true.
In fact, the one and only reason why I don’t smoke is that I believe enough of the evidence that says it’s unhealthy; I love absolutely everything else about it. Yes, the smell. Yes, the mess. Yes, the annoyance of having to buy them. Has someone invented healthy cigarettes yet? When they do, I’m all in.
I look back on my years of smoking fondly, and perhaps with rosé-tinted glasses. They were the reckless abandon years of drinking without horrendous hangovers and feeling like you still had decades to figure your life out, so why worry about it now. They were the years of bitching about work while standing right outside of it, and feeling as though you knew secrets others didn’t because office rank fell away in that circled off, renegade area. They were the late night years. The disposable money years. And not all of that was because of smoking, but smoking somehow tied it all together.
I also grew up with the image of a writer being incredibly romantic but extremely unhealthy. I don’t know where I got that picture from, but it was always dark and gloomy and atmospheric. Messy and creative were practically synonyms. Alcohol seemed like it should always be involved. Smoking was a given. The struggling, tired, but unbelievably imaginative artist. I have often wondered, since I started exploring the stories I carry around with me, whether I gravitate towards the tribulations of life because I’m subconsciously trying to recreate that image for myself - or whether art truly is more often dredged from the darkness than it is spun from light. It’s something I’m still figuring out.
So you see, my brain has created this double-layered positive association with smoking that makes it seem far more attractive than it actually is, especially when I’m struggling with something.
I actually started smoking again in late 2021, for about 3 months. Me and my partner (both ex-smokers, it’s worth noting) had endured devastating event after devastating event that year, and were in Italy battling a particularly heavy one. We were broken and filthy, from our fingernails to our bones. Cigarettes are still only a few euros over there (because Italians know how to live the good life, perhaps), so it started as a little lightweight relief; something to externalise how we felt on the inside. But, of course, nothing that enters as a coping mechanism stays that lightweight for long. I was smoking 10 a day relatively quickly again, which was soon costing a ridiculous amount of money once they were £15 a pack again back in the UK.
I felt a lot of shame about it this time around. I felt like a fraud as a coach, because wasn’t I meant to have developed better coping tendencies by now? How could I stand to wax lyrical about a healthy mindset when I was grief-stricken and chuffing on Marlboro lights every 3 hours? How hypocritical was that? How could I dare believe I still had value even when at my worst? God-forbid I was a human being who crumbles sometimes.
So I hid a lot of it. Only shamefully telling friends I saw for longer than I could stand to wait to have another cigarette, explaining that it was only a temporary thing, just to help me deal with what we were going through. That was right for about a month, maybe 8 weeks. The last four though, it was pure habit. I resolved that it wouldn’t enter 2022 with me and I was right, it didn’t, but to bring us right back to the start of this article - sometimes the thought of it is still extremely enticing.
Why do I tell you this story?
Partly because it seems I am airing all of my shameful secrets in this little newsletter. You’re welcome.
But also because I think it’s a useful example of using our thoughts as signposts to assess where we’re at in a pattern, or cycle, and when or why those patterns are activated.
I like to think of our overall state of wellbeing as a scale, with ‘I’m doing excellent’ at the top, neutral in the middle (note: not where you’re at most of the time, but a pure neutrality - neither good nor bad), and ‘I’m doing really badly’ at the bottom.
Note 2: this also isn’t a scale of how well you SHOULD be doing, i.e. how many things are going right in your life - and it’s also not fixed. It changes minute-to-minute because how we are is affected by a multitude of different and constantly changing things.
The key is that WHO we are is also changing with it.
Let’s explore that:
The brain is a map of our experiences. A catalogue of everything we’ve ever learnt.
I like to think of these as fold-out maps. The type you find languishing in a drawer of every holiday home you’ve ever stayed in. I know they’re not really a thing any more since we’re all using Google Maps, but let’s stick with it.
Typically, there will be less detailed maps that cover a large area, like a county (or state, if you prefer to think in US terms), and then each town within that county will also have its own map. You may even find a map dedicated to walking routes in that town, or industrial areas; the idea is that they get more detailed as you need them to. If you’re only going to be driving swiftly through Cambridgeshire or your way to a Norfolk beach, you don’t really need to know how to find your way to King’s College, so you only open up certain maps when you need them.
Applied to the brain: some of our stored patterns, responses and behavioural tendencies are only in the detailed maps.
Our brain can operate without firing up a particular set of neurons (like the set responsible for my thought ‘smoking is the answer’) for a really long time, but all it takes is for us to enter Cambridge, to require a more detailed map of the area, for them to unfold.
This hypothetical Cambridge (am I losing this analogy? I think so. We’re going to blindly carry on) can be anything. It may be that your body only opens up this part of the map when hunger levels reach 43% and tiredness is at 87%. It may be on a certain day of your cycle, or when you’ve received a surprising number of compliments.
Anything at all. But within that map, it will find a certain set of patterns that are only activated under those specific conditions.
The tendency is to follow the pattern. Of course it is! That’s what the brain does. Event occurs: brain swiftly finds appropriate response.
Automacy is the brain’s ideal state because it saves energy. The brain is super power-hungry, and running a pattern is its way of being energy efficient, so the more automated things it runs, the better its EPC rating.
But when you start to notice your patterns, you can then use them as signposts on the map instead of destinations.
Rather than following the thought train and the behavioural patterns that follow ‘Smoking is the answer’, I can start to realise that the emergence of that thought is a sign that I’m feeling worn out creatively. I might not need to head down the rabbit hole of comparing myself to other writers, or berating myself for thinking that way, or continue to exhaust myself and risk actually smoking again. Perhaps I just need to find a new source of inspiration, or give myself the gift of rest. As I said last week, our thoughts can be the way that we feel certain parts of our brain come online.
Noticing not just what our patterns are, but when and why they are activated can help us stay one step removed from them. It’s so easy to trick ourselves into believing that we’re doing fine, but the emergence of a specific pattern can become a signpost to where we’re truly residing on that wellbeing scale, and therefore whether we need to take better care of ourselves in any given moment.
Some self-help advice may say that you are not your thoughts, or encourage ignoring them entirely.
Personally, I believe our thoughts are a product of our bodies, and therefore worthy of attention - as long as we hold them loosely. They aren’t a definitive truth to be believed (I am not, unfortunately, going to be a magnificent writer if I smoke Marlboros at 4 in the morning), but rather a ‘you are here’ sign in an otherwise dense, confusing place.
As with everything I write, I write this at least 50% for myself. All writers do, I think (I hope). This one I write because I am bored shitless by the false idea that I have to be perfect in order to do my job as a coach (which I am, FYI, very good at - no matter what I am moving through personally). I’m bored shitless by the false idea that any of us have to be perfect, or that we can or should ever truly be ‘healed’, as if there is a beautiful, pure, conscious, effortless [& politically correct] version of ourselves floating about the ether, and it is our role as a human being to find and then become them. It’s perfectionism wrapped up in spirituality, wrapped up in self-help individualism, wrapped up in consumerism and it makes me shiver. Yes to understanding ourselves and connecting deeper with ourselves, yes to learning, and yes to normalising what our bodies do, so that we don’t constantly walk around slapping each other in the face with our dysregulation, and so that mental health isn’t called mental health as if it’s not the same body producing anxiety and reforming bones, and so that individuals aren’t isolated or hurting themselves or simply feeling like shit because we hold unreachable, incorrect and outdated standards of living - but no to doing all of that so that we can do life ‘right’. NO. We do all of that to make everything that will continue to be difficult less dangerous. To lighten the fucking load. To see the sun.
So I write about smoking and how much I love it, in part in rebellion - and then also for the thing about patterns.