Nicotine Addiction: Richard Green's Story

Video Transcript

RICHARD GREEN: Hi. My name is Richard Green, and I am a nicotine addict. I'm most addicted to the smoke and the smell and the taste and the image of cigarettes. I wanted to become a better singer. And in order to increase my range, both the top range and the bottom range but also to have the sustainability of air, I knew within a month of starting to study singing that I had to quit if I really wanted to accomplish what I wanted to do. You know, it's really, for me, my experience every time that I've done it is it's three days of absolute hell. It's three weeks of no sleep and three months of regret. And then you start to, like, wake up and not the first thing you think about is a cigarette. But it is a daily addiction. In Los Angeles, you get odd looks when you go and grab a cigarette where people would look askance at you like when they smell it on your clothes. But in Europe where I spent a lot of time, I mean, it's still heavy duty. People expect you to smoke; it'd odd if you don't smoke. Everybody offers people cigarettes in Europe. The only way I've ever succeeded in quitting smoking is cold turkey. There are things that can help you achieve cold turkey. There's hypnosis. There are herbal remedies and various things that will keep you calm. But if you don't get off the cigarettes and let it get out of your system, you're addicted. You're strung out. I know people who have been chewing gum or taking nicotine tabs for years. Cold turkey is the only way that I found that's successful. When I initially quit, I got--just everybody wanted me to and were willing to accommodate my need to get out of the house for a few days to get off the cigarettes so that I wasn't screaming at people. And they were very supportive and understanding that I was going to have to deal with this on a regular basis. It wasn't just I quit, it's over, now treat me like everybody else. I quit, it's over and now I have to deal with this addiction. And sometimes I'm not going to deal with it as well as I could, and that's going to cost me to be a little bit more erratic or impatient or a little angry and they would give me a little bit of room and a little support, a little understanding and a little encouragement to calm down in those circumstances. Stopping doing something in your life is pretty difficult to do unless you have a reason to do it, a motivation. Just to stop doing something so that I don't get sent down the line, hard to motivate. But if you were going to quit smoking because you want to look better or because you want to smell better or because there's something else in your life that you want to live a long time for other than the general idea of: Oh, this is bad for me. Let me not do it. That's really hard with an addiction. For me, I quit smoking so I can sing. And I sing whenever I have an urge for a cigarette. You'll see me singing. And when I'm singing, it just--I'll go through an evening of wonderful stuff that I could never do before, and that just gives me so much motivation not to pick up that cigarette. Find the thing that makes you want to live longer and use that as a motivation to quit smoking so that you have a way of living longer but you got something to live for, the bottom line.