Surfing the net, you may notice a lot of users, worried about how to give up smoking. This question is asked 100000 times a month. Even more people enquire for another questions, connected with smoking (harm of smoking, smoke influence on organism, lung cancer from smoking, smoking and pregnancy, child’s smoking, methods of treatment of tobacco dependence, how to stop smoking quickly etc).
However the whole tobacco industry works so that the smoker would never give up his habit. ADVERTISERS KNOW HOW TO WORK WITH PEOPLE’S SUBCONSCIOUSNESS. If it wasn’t effective, they would never invest megabucks in advertisement in glossy magazines. They know how to design the page of magazine or the advertising panel and how to pick the right words to make you try these cigarettes and join something beautiful, shown on the magazine’s pages.
They prove that cigarettes relax and make us confident. And do remember the movie, when a lethally wounded hero asks for a last cigarette. From now and then our subconsciousness starts taking cigarettes as something, we must long for even under the threat of death. Or remember that naked pair, smoking one cigarette at halves after having a good sex - the context is evident.
Don’t let nice packs of cigarettes and golden lighters make a fool of you. Try to see in them only awful garbage, and ask yourself a question: Do I really need it? SURE YOU DON’T! Give up smoking!
Any person can easily leave off smoking, but many people are afraid of missing something important.
Let us analyze one of the methods how to quit smoking, recommended by competent society, but first we need to remember the following moments:
1. It is not so difficult, as you think. As soon as you try to be honest with yourself and take a look at facts, connected with your smoking, you will find a pleasure in quitting this dependence.
2. Think carefully of your habit of smoking. Examine it and find out its degree. Ask yourself, what it does for you and what it doesn’t. You may start from the tips of your hair and go up to the tips of your nails. Smoking is medically proved to affect each organ of the human body, injuring it.
3. Take quitting smoking as a present for yourself – a very valuable gift. You make your life better and possibly longer. You give yourself a healthier body. You present yourself higher self-concept. Pack up all these things and take the package as a gift, which it really is, and then – go ahead!
4. Fix a date. Undertake a commitment. Make an effort. Remember, it is normal, if you don’t succeed from the first time. Just continue making attempts. The only way to become free is to go on trying.
5. Don’t take it, as if you are leaving something. Otherwise it would seem a great loss for you. In truth, you throw out of your life only the bad and useless things. You throw garbage away. You don’t let your lungs serve as a garbage can for nicotine and tar.
6. Be positive. It is eventually one of the most positive things ever done by you.
7. Stop smoking for your own sake. Even if your family and close ones will gain great advantages over your quitting smoking, the greatest advantages will be yours.
8. Treat your decision to stop smoking with respect; it is really worthy of respect. You have to strike this habit out of your life at any price. If your desire to quit smoking is not so strong, pray it to be stronger. Usually it helps.
9. Look for the meaning of the word “nicotine” in the dictionary and write it down in large letters: POISONOUS ALKALOID, USED AS AN AGRICULTURAL INSECTICIDE. Hang these words on the plain view, where you could often see them.
10. Don’t say “I must use my chance”, if you continue smoking. This chance doesn’t belong to you. We didn’t give birth to ourselves, and we have no right to “use our chance” and ruin our lives. The God is the only, who decides.
11. Don’t make a fool of yourself, saying you have now too many difficulties in your life to give up smoking. Your smoking is a difficulty number one, pressing on you a lot. Every day is a play, and your life is a stake in this play. When you remove nicotine out of your life, you will cope with other difficulties much easier. You will treat yourself kindly and have more power. You will make something more significant, than all the money and material values you would ever possess. You will give yourself something, that nobody is able to give you. You will never be pressed by the thought, that you are a smoker.
12. Don’t try to find an excuse for your smoking in the possibility of putting on weight. Even if you gain weight a bit, you will become more active and be able to do more exercises to prevent yourself from further gaining. Remember, it is not quitting smoking but overeating, that leads to getting fat.
13. Plan your time carefully to keep your mind from the thoughts of nicotine. Sometimes our mind becomes our worst enemy. It can tell you - you need a cigarette and prove this fact by any means. For example, if you go to the cinema and sit in the section for non-smokers, you can chew popcorn or drink lemonade and thus make your mind free from any wrong thoughts. Visit museums and other places, where smoking is forbidden. Swimming is also a good idea.
14. Give up smoking only for today and think only about the current part of a day. “I won’t smoke till the midday”, “I won’t smoke before three hours”. Sometimes stop smoking for an hour. It is much easier, than trying to quit this bad habit forever.
15. Don’t be the subject of smoking situations. If you meet someone, who smokes, tell yourself: “He is smoking a cigarette, which I could be smoking”, and then feel the gratitude to yourself for not doing it.
16. As long as you are not smoking, take it as a contribution. Not smoking an hour means you become a healthier person for this time. Now add one more hour. Go on making a contribution hour after hour. Your investments will grow, getting more valuable with every hour. You will feel and see the compensation you receive from these investments. Protect and defend them, as if they were treasures.
17. Be kind to yourself. It is your new way of life, and you are the number one here. Respect yourself, love yourself and remember – you are not going to poison your body every several minutes anymore. Breathe fresh air, inhale it deep. Smell different beautiful scents. Spend your free time outdoors. A lot of new feelings and impressions are waiting for you.
18. Don’t be angry too much. When we get angry, our minds tell us, that we need a cigarette to stop it. Try to avoid situations disappointing you, until your mind understands that you don’t need a cigarette to calm down. Keep off the people annoying you. If you have a lot of stress on your work, get several days off. If you can’t get overtime leaves, then stop smoking on holidays. Try to avoid such situations as holdups on the roads as far as possible. Take precautions against situations like that. The anger can be very destructive.
19. Satisfy your hunger in time. It is amazing, how our way of thinking depends on our stomach. Sometimes we think that things are in a bad way, but that means we just need to have a bite to make them much better.
20. Don’t overstrain yourself. Getting tired, we become easily irritated, and being irritated, our mind will think of a cigarette. It breaks our resistance so, that we could easily say: “Ok, I’ll probably have a smoke”.
21. Don’t be alone. It would be great, if you make the acquaintance of several people, having the same goals and interests. Attending the meetings of the Smokers Anonymous Society, you may get the phones of these people and share your thoughts and methods with them.
22. You may remember these four important things with the help of the word «HALT» (abbreviation, made of first letters of the words “hunger”, “anger”, “loneliness” and “tiredness” in English). If you feel you need a cigarette – check yourself. Make sure you don’t have one of these four feelings.
23. Avoid boredom and idleness. It is very difficult to do nothing and not smoking. Be busy with something. Find the occupation of your liking. It can be cycling, hiking, swimming, visiting new places, attending new restaurants. It’s time to forgive yourself.
24. Busy your hands with something. We used to take a cigarette. Quitting smoking may be a loss for your hands. Hold a small rubber ball, mould out of plasticine or play with dough.
25. Always have something to put into your mouth. Candies and any long-playing sweets will be fine. Dried meat and lemonade could help as well. Avoid fattening foods and cookies. The cookies are very nourishing, and they overfill you too fast. Make the experiments with food even if you still smoke, to find out, what helps to decrease the addiction. If candies help you, provide yourself with them. Warning! Don’t follow this method of replacement for a long period of time.
26. If you always smoke with coffee, stop drinking it until you quit smoking.
27. Don’t drink alcohol while you are leaving off smoking. As soon as alcohol gets into your body, your ability to resist smoking comes considerably down.
28. Be sure, the discomfort you feel up to two weeks, will be ended soon, and you won’t feel it again.
29. Often clap yourself on the shoulder with approval. The thing you do is not an easy one. You need a lot of courage to stop smoking.
30. If you feel pain because of abstinence – let it stay in your memory for a long time. It will remind you, that nicotine is a very strong drug, and it captured you quite a lot.
31. Remember, every single minute, when you were taking a puff at your cigarette – it was taking a puff of you. Cigarettes were sucking the lifeblood out of your body. Don’t let them do it anymore.
32. Don’t feel pity of yourself. As soon as we start feeling this way, our mind says, we need a cigarette to feel better.
33. Remember, if you continue making attempts, you shall overcome. This is a fight of good against evil, and you have all chances to win.
34. Before you stop smoking, plan your things to do for the first several days after you stop it. This helps to avoid the necessity of making decisions in the period, when you are not smoking. First you may find it difficult without a cigarette.
35. If you can’t stop smoking at once, begin to reduce the number of smoking cigarettes. If you smoke two packs a day, reducing the number by one daily during the month, you will be smoking only 10 cigarettes a day. Some people though find this method as difficult, as quitting smoking at once.
36. Drink more liquid to discharge toxins more actively out of your body. You may drink orange juice to fill your organism with vitamin C, as nicotine decreases its amount.
37. Remember, the first cigarette means you start smoking again. One is enough. The one you don’t have. You may forget about it, smoking this first cigarette, but don’t deceive yourself, that you can start and stop smoking whenever you like. You can’t. Many people tried to do the same, and joined the ranks of smokers again and again.
38. Don’t forget to remind yourself about the changes you’ve noticed. For example: your breath is not like a dirty ashtray anymore; your teeth are no more yellow, but white and clean; your fingers don’t have stains of tobacco; this terrible cough of a smoker is almost over; you can smell and taste again; your constitution is improving; you treat yourself much better, as you really care of yourself.
39. Share your experience. Tell another people about your method of quitting smoking. Whenever you have the opportunity to share your experience, power and hopes with another smoker, do it. It will increase your chances to live without nicotine and give power to your program. It is a big honor to set someone free from this dangerous habit.
40. Make an effective program. Don’t think that all hardships are behind, because you haven’t been smoking for several weeks. Nicotine is very insidious. Continue attending the meetings of Smokers Anonymous. If there are no groups, where you live, help to create them. It’s not difficult. All you need is a place to meet each other and several people interested in quitting smoking.
If you want to smoke, read this list once again.
Many smokers think they have stopped smoking, as they haven’t been smoking for a long period of time already. But then they suddenly smoke a cigarette on the party or something, and everything gets back to the drawing board. You have to remember it once and for all – smoking causes nicotine addiction; it is nicotine, that doesn’t let the smokers quit smoking. Therefore if you started the process of giving it up and haven’t been smoking for quite a long time, you should avoid the temptation of smoking this one cigarette. Imagine drug abuser, who stopped taking narcotic drugs. Once he goes to the party, where he is offered to try a drug. If he takes this drug, he will become drug addict again with probability of 99 percent. It is because drugs produce dependence, and nicotine produces nicotine dependence. You must care of your health.
We believe you can leave off smoking by yourself. Free yourself from dependence. The more is your addiction, the less freedom you have, doesn’t you? Wishing you good luck and patience!
