I’ll be straight with it. I’m a smoker, I smoke inside, I have a PC that is also inside. I want to clean my PC thoroughly to buy it a few more years. I know about the q tip method, and the compressed air, and general methods of cleaning out gunk and junk from PC parts. But this boy is way too gunked up for a regular cleaning. So, I reckon, the easiest way to clean it is to dunk the dirtiest parts in a bath of isopropyl alcohol. I was considering acetone at first, but it’s way too strong of a solvent, and alcohol should be better at dissolving organic residues. Is this a good idea?
I hereby submit this query to the council, and await judgement.
I’d like to hear it. Does it work for other addictions?
Actually sure, if we’re going to be earnest I do recommend some tactics for beating addictive behavior.
The most important thing you will ever learn about yourself and reality itself is the sheer amount of delusion your brain puts you in, no matter who you are or how smart you think you are.
We think of our brains as logical, calculating machines inside our heads where all our will and thoughts and ideas come from, but this is an illusion, you are not your brain, you’re not even your language center. Your brain’s primary and only job is to assemble your feelings into a narrative story. That story doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to connect things so your feeling makes sense.
What this means for addictive behavior is that you can find the point where your brain starts reasoning things out that it wants, and cut it off because you know it’s not you, it’s another entity inside your head trying to get a thing it wants. Drugs fire off unnatural pleasure associations which your brain will make up a lot of excuses to keep getting, so learning to identify the stories your brain tells you to engage in behavior you don’t want is key to reducing that behavior.
A huge part of this is preparing ahead of time for when you get worn out trying to argue with yourself and setting specific boundaries for your future-self. Get rid of the stuff you want to quit taking, make sure there’s none in the house. Lock your money and credit card in a timed safe after a certain part of the day, because you will have a harder time resisting the “reasoning attack” as it gets later and later in the day, and resist the urge to think about tomorrow or how miserable you’re going to feel as the night, week and year go on. This is why they say “one day at a time” because your brain will wear you the fuck down with debate and “ideas” and bargaining, and if you anticipate that lasting on and on, you will break easier.
All of this requires being very honest with yourself and examining the habit you want to quit, such as looking up the actual risks, the actual data about dangers and the actual amount of money you’re spending on it, and all that stuff your brain really doesn’t like incorporating into it’s mental story-telling.
Understanding your brain isn’t you and it will actually be your worst enemy and will childishly sabotage your whole life to get what it wants, and that it talks to you in your own internal voice so it’s hard to resist, these ideas will be your best mental strategy for quitting because at least you have your actual enemy identified.
So it’s nothing new. I was hoping for something new.
I could just quit cold turkey. I have that type of mental fortitude. But smoking is literally one of the… I think three joys that I have in my life. So I’m a bit apprehensive about giving up one of the few things that makes me less miserable.
And before you ask, all of my “joys of life” can be classified as addictions.
Maybe that’s the problem… I literally have nothing that makes me happy and is healhy. I’ll look into that. Thanks for making me think about it.
That’s a very good and honest answer and that can also be worked with, you have an outline for effective change right there:
Work on better mental health, starting with non-smoking activities, ideally getting out of the house and trying new things, preferably at first in spaces where you can’t even smoke if you wanted to. Consider talking to a therapist. Change your environment, don’t stop at your computer, clean your whole living space and change things around. Change your career (I know, I know, I gotta throw it out there.) If you are in a rut, change what you can and change how you feel about the things you can’t change. Find something of value you can start tackling in your life like raising a pet, a plant, a new routine like forcing walks.
Understand that the addiction is also diminishing your happiness. I like to use porn addiction as the best example of this part, because people often misinterpret why pleasurable addictions are harmful even if they had no health effects - which is, as you engage with activities that boost your pleasure responsonses, your brain will reinforce those pleasure paths and all the other pathways in your brain diminish and wither so that it’s harder to feel happiness from other things. Think of the things you do and think about like roads and highways, the more you pave them and use them, the easier it is for your thought-stream to get on an onramp to flavortown and indulge in the vice, whereas the offramps to other things that used to make you happy start to erode and fade.
So whichever you tackle first, understand that this takes time.
(I never was a smoker, but I did beat a level of alcoholism that took the lives of most of my family, it took a long time and many attempts.)