How To Stop Smoking

Smokers are all aware of the damage they are doing to themselves by smoking. Every day they are bombarded with more information about how much damage they are doing to their health. But this is just a depressing message that achieves nothing for the smoker.

The health warnings only serve to provide smokers with the motive to stop smoking. It does not provide the means nor the opportunity to stop smoking. To put it another way, if you are hungry and I tell you that eating some food will stop you being hungry, that information does not sate your appetite! It is exactly the same for smokers - telling them they're harming themselves does not tell them how to quit.

Smoking tobacco is merely a method for delivering nicotine to the body where it can act on the central nervous system. The smoker craves the reaction they have to having nicotine in their bloodstream, acting on their nervous system.

Nicotine, in the doses that smokers take, is a relatively harmless substance. The real problem with smoking is the other junk in the tobacco smoke that is inhaled by the smoker. There is tar, arsenic, carbon monoxide, benzene, various hydrocarbons, polonium, cadmium, ammonia and a whole host, amounting to over 4,000 other chemicals potentially in cigarette smoke. This is the real problem of nicotine addiction - the delivery system.

As a response to the ill effects brought about by the cigarette smoke, pharmaceutical companies and doctors have conspired to provide nicotine via other delivery systems such as patches, inhalers, sprays and gums. This is commonly known as Nicotine Replacement Therapy or NRT.

This begs the question, why don’t doctors treat heroin or cocaine addicts with pure forms of their respective addictive drugs? Well, in the case of heroine, methadone ‘draw-down’ is the accepted therapy – weaning the addict off their drug. In the case of cocaine, it is just cold turkey! Both methods have poor success rates in reality.

But this also begs the question about nicotine addiction – why is it acceptable or even necessary to maintain ones addiction as part of the therapy?

The truth of the matter is that nicotine replacement therapy or NRT does not work very effectively. In the short term it is an effective means of getting smokers to stop smoking whilst their motives are high, but in the long run, it is ineffective and studies have shown this to be the case with most NRT subject resorting to cigarettes after the 4-week follow up.

Combination therapies have been found to be more successful than single therapy approaches and there is much anecdotal evidence that acupuncture and hypnotherapy are effective. However, around 90% of people who have permanently quit smoking have done so using the simplest method – cold turkey. But how is this?

In truth, there are two kinds of cold 'turkeyer'. There are cold turkeyers who want to quit smoking and there are cold turkeyers who are going to quit smoking. Note the difference between 'want' and 'going to'. The truth is, it is all in the decision making process.

Too many smokers enter into a quit campaign hoping they will be successful in quitting smoking. They fail simply because they enter into the attempt expecting a strong likelihood of failure. And why shouldn't they – from childhood and all through their lives they've been told what a near impossible task quitting smoking is!

However, if the smoker makes the right decisions, understands them and can open their eyes to the truth about smoking and their smoking behaviour, it is possible for them to quit. Knowledge is power and understanding what smoking is really about and how it works on you is the key to quitting for good.

Sure there are smokers who have quit for years without any help, but they virtually all still crave for a cigarette from time to time. It is their will-power that prevents them from smoking a year since their last cigarette. It is their pride. Could you imagine going a whole year without a cigarette and then on a whim, lighting one up!

A positive mental attitude to quitting smoking, coupled with a good understanding of why you really smoke will help any smoker quit the habit. All smokers have the motivation to quit; they just need to know what to do to make it happen aside from just not smoking cigarettes!