Simple Tips to Stop Smoking

Smoking is a vice and not only injurious just to the smoker but to people all around him. A smoker has higher chances of having a heart attack or lung cancer compare to non-smokers. Kicking this bad habit out is not just beneficial physically but you can also save lots of money that you could have blown off in buying cigarettes. And don't forget the health hazard that you impose to your near and dear ones by exposing them to passive smoke.
So, it's the time to kick the butt and you can do it by following the few simple tips given below.

Smoking and Teens: Time to Quit

SAY GOODBYE TO AN UGLY HABIT – QUIT SMOKING!

It’s probably not news to you that smoking is bad for your body. It causes wrinkles and turns your teeth yellow, and puts you at risk for diseases. Here’s a newsflash for you ladies, though. Smoke hates you more than it hates guys!

• It is harder for females to quit than it is for males.
• Smoke can be more harmful to female lungs than male lungs.
• The younger you start, the harder it is to quit!
• This means that starting to smoke as a female teen is asking for trouble. So, quit smoking or don’t start for YOU…for your health and beauty, today and in the future.
• Smoking ads may try to make smoking look cool, but you’re smarter than that. The tobacco companies are not looking out for you, so you have to look out for yourself. Don’t smoke. If you smoke, quit – either way you win by not giving them your money!

What smoking does to your body

Soon after you start, smoking causes yellow teeth and bad breath (gross!), as well as health problems such as shortness of breath, coughing, upset stomach, and dizziness. When you are older, you can get major health problems from smoking, like cancer and heart disease. Smoking will also make your skin wrinkle.

What quitting can do for your health

• 12 hours after quitting, the dangerous carbon monoxide level in your blood drops to normal.
• 2 weeks to 3 months after quitting, your heart and lungs begin to work better.
• 1 to 9 months after quitting, coughing, fatigue, and shortness of breath start to go away.
• 1 year after quitting, your risk of heart disease goes down.

Why do people smoke?

Stress. Smoking leads to more stress. Learn how to manage stress with tips from www.GirlsHealth.gov.

Habit. If you feel like you can’t stop smoking, ask a doctor or nurse for help

Boredom. Smoking to fill time? Find other things that you like to do instead, like jog, read, or shop.

Others smoke. Stay strong and tell your friends and family they should quit, too.

Can’t quit. Don’t think you’ll be able to quit? Start thinking positive – yes, you can!

Weight control. Quitting doesn’t add pounds, eating more does. Exercise and eat healthy to keep from gaining.

How to quit

Sick of spending money on cigarettes, smelling like an ashtray, and your friends hassling you about smoking? Then you are ready to quit!

1) Set a quit date and tell everybody when you are going to stop
2) Throw away all your cigarettes, lighters, and ashtrays.
3) When you get the urge to smoke, do something else…take deep breaths or drink a glass of water.
4) Carry things with you to put in your mouth, such as gum or hard candy.
5) Stay busy by going to the movies, riding your bike, walking the dog, or hanging out with a friend.
6) Spend time in places where you are not allowed to smoke, such as the movies or the mall.
7) The first few days after quitting, don’t hang with smokers or in places you used to smoke.
8) Drink lots of water and fruit juice…stay away from drinks with caffeine, like soda, coffee or tea.

Be prepared! You may be crabby and feel on edge for a couple of weeks or longer, but then your body will
forget nicotine and you will feel better. Once you feel better, you may still want to smoke at times, but stay
strong…it’s easy to get hooked again and you don’t want to throw away all that hard work.

WebMD Public Information from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Need Help? Try These Quit Smoking Tips

According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), more people than those who quit heroin combined than those that quit smoking. Megastar Ozzy Osbourne, who has been addicted to just about every drug in the world, stated once that of all his addictions, smoking was the most difficult to quit. Nicotine is an incredibly difficult drug to stop using, and ASAM cites it as having a very high relapse rate. Does this mean that you shouldn’t even try to stop smoking? Absolutely not! Many people have successfully stopped smoking and have never relapsed. With knowledge, willpower, and some good quit smoking tips, you can soon call yourself an ex-smoker.

Because of nicotine’s intense level of addiction, it’s hard to “go it alone.” See your physician for medical help to stop smoking. By reading and trying quit smoking tips, your chances for success will be very good. You won’t know if any quit smoking tips work unless you try them. The road will seem endless until you start walking.

Quit Smoking Tips That Work

First, change your routine. Smokers generally have a subconscious routine that is built around smoking. For example, when you drive to work and smoke two cigarettes on the way, take another route to work. If you enjoy an after dinner smoke, try getting up from the table immediately and wash the dishes. These quit smoking tips are a form of behavior modification. Smoking was a learned behavior for you; what is learned can be un-learned and replaced by other behavior.

Second, if you have a “slip” and smoke, don’t believe that you just can’t do it. An important quit smoking tip is to let yourself be less than perfect. All is not lost. It’s not important how many times you fall down; what is important is how many times you get up. Keep getting up, no matter what.

Third, smoking is linked to times of stress and anger. An import quit smoking tip is to take a stress or anger management class. You can find mental health centers that excel in these classes at little or no cost. Learning how to cope with stress and anger without smoking is an essential skill.

Finally, if you like to smoke at social occasions, an excellent quit smoking tip is to explain to your friends that you no longer smoke, and ask them not to offer you cigarettes no matter how much you tell them about why you need to smoke right now. Your real friends will stay true to your request for help.

For more quit smoking tips, there are many on-line sources of help. Yes, you can stop!

7 Days Stop Smoking Program

The first thing to do is set a date when you are going to stop smoking. Let’s start one week from today. That will give you plenty of time to practice with the weapons in your arsenal. Eight days from today, it will be the beginning of the end of your smoking habit.

Days 1 and 2

Examine your smoking behavior for the first two days. Every time you light up, ask yourself:

1. Why am I smoking this cigarette?
2. Would this be an easy one or a difficult one to do without?
3. If I did not smoke this cigarette, what would I do instead?

Day 3

Let’s get out and test your weapons today.

At least once today, use your weapons to shoot down the urge to smoke.

During the five minutes that it will take for the urge to pass, try out some of your arsenal. Try one, or all, or find a combination that works for you.

Day 4

Today is the big testing day. If you haven’t already tried it, skip those one or two cigarettes that you feel may be the toughest to give up in your daily routine. Pick the ones that you rated “difficult” during your monitoring period.

Remember, this is a practice period, and you must not get upset if you are unable to give up a difficult cigarette. You must practice and experiment with your different weapons to realize how you can be more effective.

If you found skipping that cigarette very hard or even failed in the end, review any factor that got in the way of your success. The most common causes of difficulty or failure that a potential quitter faces are:

Chemical properties of addiction

When you do not have that cigarette, you feel lousy. If you are a heavy smoker, a nicotine patch may help to relieve your bad feelings.

Social pressures

You may find yourself in a situation like, card game, party, coffee break during which you would normally smoke. It may help to let others know of your desire to stop smoking, and also your reasons to stop smoking.

Enlisting the aid of a non smoker to confide in may also help. Make sure that he or she is aware of your goals so that they do not say or do anything to instill a negative impact on your desire to stop smoking.

If you feel that you may not resist the social pressures of smoking, consider the option of giving up these social encounters for two or three weeks until the urge passes and you can be comfortable again.

Tension and negative emotion

A crisis occurs during your work or personal day, and one of the main reasons for you to smoke has been tension reduction. Try to deal with your negative emotions and use the tension reducing methods that we talked about earlier.

Get away from the area that the tension is associated with. Take a walk, or go to another room. You may also find that nicotine gum will give you enough tension relief to get through.

Days 5, 6, and 7

You are now heading down the home stretch. In the next three days, your goal is to come out of this week smoking half the cigarettes that you would normally smoke. If you started as a one pack a day smoker, cut back to ten cigarettes per day, or less.

The fewer the better

During days 5 and 6, set your goals toward achieving positive results on day 7. Maintain your smoking record during these three days, and continue to decrease your dependency on nicotine.

What do you do if you still have doubts? This is probably due to your chemical dependency on nicotine. It is a highly powerful drug, and many factors have been working together to make you dependent.

Discuss with your doctor about the feasibility of a patch or nicotine gum. Nicotine is the hook that has gotten you to smoke which carries the harmful effects to your body. With the help from the patch or the gum, you will have all he tools you need to successfully quit.

The nicotine patch or gum will give you a steady influx of nicotine into your system, which will be reduced slowly over a period of several weeks. Do not smoke while on the nicotine patch. You could experience a dangerous overdose of nicotine.