Reasons to Cut Back Drinking While Quitting Smoking By Raymond Edwards At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

As two things that tend to always go together, drinking is one of the things that you should avoid while quitting smoking. That doesn't mean that you can't have a few drinks, just that it's one of the more difficult aspects of stopping.

First off, as anybody who has had more than one beer in their life knows, drinking lowers your inhibitions. Kicking your smoking habit? Have a few drinks and you'll start with "heck, I can have just one" and move all the way to "heck, I can quit next week." Not good at all.

I'd like to sidebar for a moment here to point out that you won't be giving up your drinking buddies or alcohol to quit smoking, just that you'll need to put some conscious thought into how much and when you drink.

The bigger problem with alcohol and cigarettes is that they're subconsciously connected in your mind. Think about the times you've been out drinking and you'll realize that after a few drinks, you've always lit up a cigarette. They just go together so well, and while you will soon grow to despise smoking (more on that later) your mental ties between liquor and tobacco are so strong that it becomes difficult to stay away from them while you're getting your drink on.

To draw a counterpoint to the previous for a second, you will have to deal with that connection, or else you'll have to give up alcohol for fear of relapsing into smoking. You don't want to do that, because that adds an extra thing to the list of "things you're quitting" and makes it really darn hard to go through with it.

Quitting smoking is almost entirely a mental journey, not some sort of physical withdrawal like the nicotine replacement therapy hawkers would have you believe. Over time, you'll become aware of what triggers you to smoke and how to deal with it.

There are a couple of universal triggers that make most smokers want to light up. Namely, something really good happening and the opposite, something really bad happening. Annoyingly enough, these are also the triggers that tend to make people have a few drinks (or in the case of the latter, quite a few drinks)

For the time being, however, you'll need to curb the alcohol to push on with the new, non-smoking you. A few drinks isn't going to kill you, but remember that when you drink you're more inclined to want to smoke. Especially during the first few weeks of quitting, when you'll be far more likely to say to yourself, "heck, I've only been away from cigarettes for three days, that's not too much, I'll start again tomorrow."

That's not how quitting works. When you actually stop smoking, you won't want cigarettes any more. At all. It will take a while for your subconscious to figure out that's the case, but when it does, you'll know that you're completely free from cigarettes. When that happens, drink up, and you won't have to worry about smoking at all.

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