The Nicodemon
June 16th, 2009 | Published in How I Kicked The Habit
Who or what is the Nicodemon? The Nicodemon is used by some people to describe how addiction makes you think in strange ways. He, she or it actually fool you into defying your own powers of logic and reason and to believe and support your addiction.
Now, personally speaking, I am not religious and nor do I believe in evil spirits or beings that we cannot see. The Nicodemon is just a personification of this strange phenomenon that we cannot explain. If you are a person of faith, then you may believe the Nicodemon to be evil personified or otherwise - this is not a problem at all and may actually help.
In fact, I am personally very open minded. I am open to everything, but what I can say is that addiction is an incredible thing. Could you imagine if an army wanted to create the ultimate weapon that they would create something that would cause it’s victims to harm themselves, to do it with an unrelenting passion and to keep on doing it despite it going against all their logic and reasoning? This weapon would cause it’s victims to believe that their addiction is good for them and to do anything and everything to perpetuate it?
Like I said, I am personally not religious, but even I have to wonder if someone or something once created addiction because it has an incredible design for enslaving people to self harm.
So in this sense, personifying an addiction for what it is, it can be helpful to call it the “Nicodemon”. After all, you can relate to what if feels like to have “just one more cigarette”, to be unhappy about your addiction and yet seemingly unable to break it, to offer cigarettes to people and loved ones that you know have decided to stop smoking and to “enjoy” the camaraderie of your fellow addicts.
So, even if you are a non-God-believing evidence based scientist of no religion, using the “Nicodemon” can be a convenient way to sum up any strange false logic that your addiction causes you.
The good news is that with this method, the Nicodemon dies very quickly after you stop smoking, within a couple of days usually.
