I have often read that smoking is bad for someone with borderline, just like any addictive drugs, as they apparently increase emotional instability. But at the same time smoking was such a reliable way of calming down. I even started asking myself if it's perhaps worth to exchange physical health for less psychological stress, as in the end long term stress can be very harmful for the body too.
Despite of that I have decided to try giving up smoking and started to experiment with using nicotine replacements instead of cigarettes. And then I noticed a few interesting things:
Nicotine craving feels to me very same as the anxiety that causes me to freak out1.
It does not feel like I imagined that nicotine craving would feel like, which is actually craving a cigarette. It's much more sneaky and tricky, probably because of my irregularity of smoking. Let me get more specific, when I write about "feeling" I am referring to one of the "body sensations" that according to Vipassana are the direct cause of emotions. It was difficult to dig to this. Initially I would only notice that since I have started smoking I would freak out more often. I was even suspecting myself of subconsciously freaking out just in order to have an excuse for smoking. But recently I noticed that in some situations my freakout that has just been building up would immediately stop after taking a nicotine replacement (even though I did not crave the replacement). And I understood that:
My body has been mistaking the nicotine craving anxiety with my usual life anxiety.
Boom. It makes me think of the "Mindsight" book, where the author explained that the emotions caused by projecting the past onto the present are caused by exactly same neural path that would be activated if there was a real threat in the present. So this is actually a reverse of that - I thought I am freaking out because of my borderline wounds, but I was actually freaking out because of something as trivial as craving nicotine. It's even hard to tell now how many freakouts were not a "real" freakouts but just something caused by my stupid addiction (that I was not even aware of).
So now I know why exactly why smoking is bad for me 😃
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1) may be also because I used to smoke only when I was freaking out