The physical addiction and withdrawal last only a few days after quitting cold turkey and can be easily countered with Nicotine Replacement Products (NRP). It only takes a few days, a week at most, for the nicotine to leave the body. There will be no more physical withdrawal or physical urge to smoke. It will be a mental battle from here on. It is the trauma of sudden loss of, often times the only anchor in the wild stormy ocean that is life, that motivates us to come to back to the familiar comfort of smoking. The monkey is just unable to cope with the trauma of being deprived on the only relief it knows and will go back to smoking.

It matters not how good a cigarette tastes, it will not taste as good as the romantic memory of the first cigarette to the virgin lung, and even that cigarette will only be trumped by the taste of the relapse cigarette. No other cigarette tastes quite as good as the relapse cigarette, because there has not been an internal shift accompanied with the smoking cessation, rather amplified agony and stress of nicotine withdrawal and mental cravings. Once a smoker has relapsed, the smoking habit will start to re-establish itself in the brain in such a way that the brain will now derive more pleasure from smoking than it did before and will establish an insurance policy against future quitting attempts. The agony of deprivation and withdrawal is so well ingrained in the emotional memory banks of the brain that no amount of cough, pain or disease will motivate a new quit attempt. The brain has learned to associate non-smoking with terrible withdrawal and intense abstinence, with pain. The brain learns that non-smoking is a terribly negative and painful experience compared to smoking. The monkey now associates non-smoking with pain. The choice is simple for the monkey. It is just too painful to quit.