Have you ever noticed that you always end up smoking more when you’re drinking? Are you worried that you’ll have to quit drinking when you quit smoking because you won’t be able to stop yourself from reaching for a cigarette whenever you have a few drinks?
This is an issue that many (if not most) smokers go through when they’re about to quit, and there’s good reason for concern: I can’t tell you how many quits I threw away over a few beers, and I know plenty of other smokers who could tell you the same story.
But, like any other trigger, the urge to smoke while you’re drinking is something that you can handle if you’re aware of what’s going on and plan ahead for it. First of all, it may help to understand the reason why you smoke more when you drink:
Why Do You Smoke More When You Drink?
In order to really understand this, let’s break it down and deal with the first part of the question (“Why Do You Smoke?”) first:
Without getting too technical here, you smoke to feed your addiction to nicotine. Basically, what this means is that you’ve conditioned your body to expect a certain amount of nicotine to be present at all times. As soon as you put out a cigarette, the amount of nicotine in your body starts to drop, and it continues to drop until it gets below the level your body has come to expect. When this happens, your brain sends you a signal to smoke another cigarette to bring the nicotine level back up.
When you get the signal, you smoke another cigarette, which raises the level of nicotine in your body, but as soon as you put that cigarette out, your nicotine level starts to drop again. When it gets low enough, your brain sends the signal to smoke again, which raises the level, but then the level immediately starts to drop when you put that cigarette out and so on…
That’s the basic cycle of addiction, and it’s what keeps you “hooked”.
So Why Do You Smoke More When You Drink?
When you drink, the alcohol changes your body’s pH level (making it more acidic), which causes nicotine to be drawn out of your bloodstream much more quickly than normal. Add to that the fact that drinking alcohol also makes you urinate more frequently than normal, and you can see why you smoke more when you drink: the more you drink, the more you pee, and the faster the nicotine gets flushed out of your body, so the more you need to smoke to replenish the nicotine in your body.
What About After I Quit?
Theoretically, as long as you’re not putting any nicotine into your body, its relative rate of depletion won’t actually matter, so drinking after you quit should not have the effect of making you want to smoke.
In reality, of course, there’s the habit component of smoking to consider (i.e., you habitually smoked — a lot — when drinking), combined with the loss of inhibition that pretty much everybody experiences when they consume alcohol, plus the social element: if you’re out at the bar with your friends and several of them step outside to smoke on a fairly regular basis, you may be more than a little tempted to join them.
So How Do I Handle It?
You probably shouldn’t avoid doing things you’d normally do (e.g., going out for drinks with friends) merely because you think they might be a trigger to your habitual smoking response (at least, not permanently); sooner or later, you’ll have to deal with them, and putting off the “confrontation” may make the situation seem larger than life.
Personally, I avoided going to a bar for the first couple of months of my quit, because I was afraid that drinking would make me want to smoke, but when I finally went, the only reaction I had was, “Yuck! How can these people stand to be in this enclosed space with all this disgusting smoke?”
Safety First
On the other hand, it’s best to be cautious in the early stages of your quit: if you do go out to a bar, pace yourself, and don’t drink so much or so quickly that you lose control; as long as you’re capable of rational thought, you’re capable of choosing not to smoke. But if you drink so much or so quickly that rational thought isn’t possible any more, your quit will definitely be at risk.