Smoking cut anxiety, but now cooking is a better vice

Many of my favorite childhood memories are smoke-filled. Whether it was a special Sunday dinner at a steakhouse chain or eavesdropping on grown folks’ conversation at cookouts, cigarettes and pipes were there.

These were the days when you could light up inside restaurants instead of being banished outside. The years when smoking in an airplane got you a designated section on it not a police escort off of it.

Children wedged candy cigarettes between their fingers and tried to blow smoke with the powdered sugar. Different times.

I picked up the habit. When I was 21, smoking was an assertion of manhood. Then it became a friend for conversation after big meals and on long solo drives.

Finally, as the social stigma deepened, it was a vice, my secret — sneaking around to find a place to enjoy a cigarette while facing downwind and scrubbing the evidence with breath mints and hand soap.

At every stage, though, it helped me find quiet. That’s what made the quitting hard: Not the nicotine but how the ritual of grabbing a smoke relaxed my worrying mind.

Growing up, anxiety was framed as unavoidable, a reminder that life is hard and unfair.

A medical diagnosis of anxiety was taken to mean “her nerves are bad” or “he’s just ornery.” Culturally, anxiety was read as a sign of insecurity, unpreparedness or disloyalty.

Grown folk prescribed hard work and prayer — spiritual salves, perhaps, but no better than a nicotine patch.

Even they knew, though, that bad nerves and the sugar — anxiety and diabetes — could make life difficult and even cut it short.

Our age has the benefit of more medical research and more accessible information to help us manage. I’ve come to appreciate that for me, smoking was less a chemical addiction than a coping mechanism.

Such personal rituals often arise in response to life’s worries. The research shows that any set of actions and gestures is good at reducing anxiety when it is a ritual — when it holds meaning connected to a system of belief or values, such as religion or healthy living.

When athletes listen to the same song before every game or a parent walks a child through a bedtime routine, it helps shed anxiety.

I started smoking during my senior year of college, shortly before heading to military training. It was an anxious period many times over. When I was on deployment, homesick and weary of the daily routine, a smoke in the middle of the ocean was a godsend. It gave me the quiet to focus, solve problems, endure.

Before long, I was a parent. The wandering feet and widening eyes of my kids made me quit smoking cold turkey. But the loss of the ritual almost scared me to death. A panic attack arrived. Months later, another.

The instruction at my annual physical was clear: You need a new vice — this time, a healthy one.

It took some time to find. First up was CrossFit. That was over before it began — wasn’t my cup of tea. But fitness was increasingly important, as much for the health benefits as for the discipline. I became a regular at the gym, lifting weights, rowing and obsessing over protein. After a few months, I could see changes. I was in great shape. And miserable.

Smoking had pushed me outside several times a day. I missed the fresh air. Running became the new thing. After many early mornings and late evenings battling with the pavement, I found the quiet again. I also found plantar fasciitis, which is your foot’s way of saying, “You’re doing too much.” I needed something else to ritualize.

This quest is a common one. Nearly one-third of teenagers have an anxiety disorder, as do nearly 1 in 5 Americans 18 or older. Young adults tend to be the most anxious; after 50 the worry begins to ebb. For some the sleepless nights or short tempers or melancholy moods require treatment. Some can find relief in one of life’s little rhythms.

All of us look for ways to find space, sometimes going to quiet places, such as a pond with a line out, or to louder places where the drums need only ask you once to dance. Some gotta go for a smoke, some gotta go for a run. It’s the going that’s most important.

Today, I go to my kitchen. My newest vice is the ritual of cooking from suburban scratch, which means I buy fresh veggies and make my own sauces but I’m not mixing dough. It didn’t happen overnight. Like smoking, cooking was routine before it was habit. Then meaning arrived.

Cooking — the feeling and process of it all — puts the world within grasp and transforms worry into care and detail. Each part of the ritual is purposeful; on a good day, the result is a crab bisque or my mother’s corn or, a few Thursdays ago, ratatouille. Yes, like in the movie. It was really good and didn’t burn.

Not to worry: The grill out back means my kids’ memories will be smoke-filled, too.