Contents
Understand Your Smoking Habit
Reasons to Quit Smoking
How to Get Emotional Support Before Quitting Smoking
How to Get Medical Support Before Quitting Smoking
Alternative Methods for Quitting Smoking
How to Choose a Quit Date
How to Stay Quit
How to Deal with Regression
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- Understand your physical and psychological addiction to nicotine
- Get the emotional support and nicotine replacement therapy you need
- Address triggers, live smoke-free, and avoid relapses
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Understand Your Smoking Habit
Statistics show that quitting cigarette smoking on a whim, without much forethought, seldom works. So before you attempt to stop smoking, it’s important to lay the groundwork for quitting successfully. Understanding why and when you smoke will go a long way toward helping you quit.
Why Cigarettes Are Addictive
Your addiction to cigarette smoking has two components: physical addiction and mental addiction.
Physical Addiction
Nicotine, the addictive drug in cigarettes, has two contradictory effects on the body:
- Small doses (such as a short drag of cigarette) stimulate you, making you feel alert and awake.
- Large doses (a few deep drags) relax you.
Once you’ve been smoking for a while, your body wants a certain level of nicotine in its bloodstream, and you crave a cigarette whenever that level dips down too far. As months or years go by, your body builds up a tolerance to nicotine, and you need to smoke more to get the desired effect.
Cigarettes are particularly addictive because inhalation is the quickest method of getting nicotine to your brain—quicker even than injection. To speed the process even further, tobacco companies add ammonia to their products. Once you inhale and a few seconds pass, the nicotine reaches your brain. There, it causes the release of a chemical called dopamine, which makes you feel good.
Mental Addiction
Nicotine’s ability to stimulate and relax the body simultaneously makes it a psychologically addictive drug. Rather than control your moods naturally, you use cigarettes to combat crankiness, loneliness, boredom, and so on. If you feel sleepy at a bar or anxious during an argument, for example, it’s easy to wake up or calm down by lighting a cigarette.
Smoking Triggers
Certain everyday situations may trigger your desire for a cigarette. Smoking triggers are partly psychological: lighting up becomes a regular part of your routine, such as when you hop in your car or leave class. The triggers are also physical: the first cigarette you smoke with your coffee kicks your metabolism into high gear, while that last cigarette you smoke before bed calms you down.
Breaking Trigger Patterns
As you get ready to quit smoking for good, start changing your response to smoking triggers. The goal should be to avoid giving in to smoking a cigarette during a trigger situation, thus breaking—or at least interrupting—the link between cigarettes and certain activities. For instance:
- Wait a few extra minutes before lighting that after-lunch cigarette.
- Smoke when your favorite TV show is halfway over, rather than as soon as it starts.
- Try smoking with your other hand to make it feel odd.
Analyzing Your Smoking
To quit smoking successfully, you have to analyze your habit objectively. The more realistic you are about your addiction, the more effective you can be at designing a quitting plan and coping with the difficulties of cessation.
Keeping a Smoking Journal
It’s one thing to say that you’re going to be objective about an addictive habit and another to actually be objective. The best way to force yourself to look at your habit in an objective way is to collect data. To do this, carry a small notebook with you for a week wherever you go and jot down the following information for every cigarette you smoke:
- Amount: How many cigarettes you smoked during the week
- Time: When you smoked
- Place: Where you smoked
- Activity: What you were doing when you smoked
- Company: Who you were with when you smoked
- Mood: What mood you were in when you smoked
- Craving level: How intensely you craved each cigarette before you smoked it
Analyzing Your Journal
Once you’ve gathered a week’s worth of data, do some analysis. For instance, use your data to determine:
- How many cigarettes you smoke a day
- What time of day you smoke most
- Where you smoke most
- How much you smoke when alone
- How much you smoke when among other people
- What kind of mood you’re usually in when you smoke
- How often you smoke purely out of habit, and not in response to a craving
Knowing your own habits will help you quit. If your journal reveals that you desperately crave cigarettes whenever you’re on the phone, you’ll be able to anticipate that craving and steel yourself against it once you’re ready to quit. If your journal shows that your best friend is also your best smoking buddy, you’ll have to let your friend know you’re planning to quit and ask him or her to not offer you cigarettes—or even not to smoke at all in your presence.
Knowing Your Addiction
Take a look at your journal to figure out how many of the following apply to you:
- You smoke more than 20 cigarettes a day.
- You smoke within half an hour of waking up.
- You smoke more frequently (i.e., more cigarettes an hour) in the morning than during the rest of the day.
- You get antsy in places where smoking is banned.
- You smoke even when you’re sick.
If three or more of the above apply to you, you might be extremely addicted to nicotine. This isn’t cause for despair, though. Quitting is hard no matter how addicted you are, and even those who smoke multiple packs a day can quit. But it’s important to be realistic about the severity of your habit so you can create an appropriate plan. If you’re very addicted, you’ll almost certainly want to quit with the aid of support groups and one or more nicotine replacement methods (see How to Get Emotional Support Before Quitting Smoking and How to Get Medical Support Before Quitting Smoking).
Analyzing Your Previous Attempts to Quit
It takes many people 5–6 attempts before they quit
successfully. If you’ve tried and failed to quit before, don’t just decide that quitting is impossible for you. Instead, think back on your failed efforts and analyze what worked and what didn’t. Common reasons for relapses include:
- Quitting on the spur of the moment, without creating a plan beforehand
- Failing to use a nicotine replacement product
- Quitting in order to please someone other than yourself, or to stop someone’s incessant nagging about your habit
- Quitting without asking for support from your friends and family
- Quitting as part of an overly ambitious makeover plan
- Facing a stressful personal situation
- Deciding you can handle the occasional cigarette
- Giving in to a craving, feeling disgusted about the slipup, and deciding that you’ve failed and might as well return to your habit
Addictions to Other Forms of Tobacco
Forms of smokeless tobacco, such as snuff and chewing tobacco, are as highly addictive and unhealthy as cigarettes. In fact, they each contain more nicotine than cigarettes do. Though they don’t cause lung cancer or emphysema, they do lead to a slew of other health problems including:
- Oral cancers
- Cancers of the larynx and esophagus
- Gum disease
- Cavities
If you’re addicted to smokeless tobacco, all of the information in this guide applies to you, as quitting snuff or chew is similar to quitting cigarettes.
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