I, like many others before was not able to quit cigarettes on my first try. In fact, it took me many attempts before I was finally able to quit for good. I haven’t smoked a single cigarette for over 3 years now. I can tell you from firsthand experience that just the attempt to quit really helps you give up smoking in the long run. There is a big difference between knowing what to expect and not knowing at all what you the challenges will be. For me, the failures served me well in the end and on my last try I was very relaxed about the whole process of quitting smoking.

The first time you stop smoking, the urge to smoke catches you by surprise, because it is much stronger than you ever expected it to be. I remember on the first day of my first attempt to stop smoking, I was so nervous about not being able to smoke that I could not relax not even for a minute. Needless to say, I failed miserably on my first attempt and I believe I lasted about 5 hours without a smoke. I tried again after couple of months, but I found it very surprising that I wasn’t as nervous as the first time. I thought I’d be even more stressed, but knowing what to expect really kept me composed and relaxed. I had failed again on my second try, but I lasted a little over 24 hours without a single cigarette.

I found myself more and more used to the idea of giving up smoking and at every attempt I lasted a little more than the previous without having to smoke. I can’t even remember after how many attempts, but at some point I just because extremely confident about my ability to go without smokes. I told myself that if I could go without smoking for 3 days, then I probably would have gone past the most difficult part of the whole quitting process. I was right. I was able to last for 36 hours without a cigarette and by then the urge to smoke was not as intense as the first and the second day. I knew I had succeeded to give up smoking and it had happened after multiple tries.

Do not concern yourself over having failed to quit smoking or to fail to quit smoking on your first try. Every attempt you make, you are one step closer to kicking the habit for good and it is not a failure by any measure. So go on and give your second and third try, you will quit smoking in time but you have to continue trying. If you feel that you need some additional help to quit smoking successfully, then click here to quit once and for all.

©2012 GIVING UP SMOKING. All Rights Reserved.

One of the most important aspects of quitting smoking is the fact that everyone does it a little differently. To give you an example, two people can quit smoking using the cold turkey method, but the two can go about it drastically different. Smoker number one will set a quit date and buy himself enough packs of cigarettes to last him until his set date. Smoker number two will smoke his cigarettes as usual and he will quit on the day, hour, and the minute on which he feels the most confident to quit. Both have quit cold turkey, but the way they approached it is very different.

That’s where you come in to the picture. You have to understand that no matter how other former smokers have quit cigarettes and regardless of what the authority in quitting smoking informs you of (CDC for example), in the end, you have to experiment on what’s right for you. Over 90 percent of smokers who try to quit fail on their first try and the statistic for the second time quitter are not that great either. But the ones that are persistent, the ones that continue to try quit smoking and to try to experiment with how they should go about it are eventually successful.

To give up smoking successfully, you have to create your own personal stop smoking plan. You cannot depend only on what others have done to quit smoking, because you are a unique individual under unique circumstances that requires a stop smoking plan that works best for you. The best person to come up with this plan is you and you can do this by experimenting with the process of quitting smoking. If you speak to hundreds of former smokers like I have, you learn that the little difference, the little details can become crucial in quitting successfully.

Some former smokers will swear by their experience that it is easier to quit smoking the first thing in the morning (start the day smoke free), but I have also seen plenty people who say they needed that last drag during the day before they kissed goodbye their addiction for good. Here are some more examples. Some former smokers say they couldn’t stop smoking successfully until they changed their cigarette from regular flavor to light flavor. Some also claimed that it was helpful to smoke more than usual on the day they decided to quit. Reasons varied from “I was pretty sick of smoking”, to “I needed one last big shot of nicotine before I quit”.

No matter how unscientific, the fact remains that these little quirks can mean the difference between successfully giving up smoking, and failing miserably time after time. So don’t worry about the past failures and do your best to try to learn from them. Try to remember what helped you the most with the craving, the time of the day the craving was the worse, and all other details that might help you on your next try. You can also try going smoke free on different hours of the day and for different length of time. This will give you a pretty good idea of what to expect the next time you quit smoking and it could be important because lots of smokers go into a mini panic attacks on their first day of quitting smoking.

Don’t just depend on the generic guides that are written by medical professionals and other qualified sources. Meet your personal need with your knowledge and create your own personal stop smoking plan and you will give yourself the best chance to successfully quit smoking for good.

©2012 GIVING UP SMOKING. All Rights Reserved.

The first thing you notice about most smokers is their inability to enjoy an active life. I can attest to this as a former smoker myself. It is a common knowledge that smoking cigarettes diminish the lung capacity.

First and foremost, you can say goodbye to just about every sports activity you’ve enjoyed over the years once you start smoking. An active lifestyle creates an energetic person and is not the other way around. If you haven’t been smoking for long, you may think this does not apply to you, but you truly feel the effect of smoking after a full year or two of smoking cigarettes.

Your social life, the relationships with your friends, family, and colleagues, they all change overtime due to your smoking habit. At first you smoke because it makes you feel good, then because you need to, and finally, you smoke because you are completely addicted to cigarettes. The places you can be, the things you can do, and the people you meet get limited because of your addiction.

One aspect of your life that gets hit hard when you start smoking is the romance in your life. If you had a girlfriend, boyfriend, or spouse before you started smoking, then you know firsthand smoking is a big issue with them.

If you are hoping to date someone new and you’ve picked up a smoking habit as well, you’d be surprised to learn that some surveys show that over 90 percent of non-smoking singles won’t even entertain the idea of dating a smoker. You’ve just reduced your dating pool to about 20 percent of the population.

There’s also the benefit of possibly saving a large sum of money. There was the largest hike for taxes on cigarettes in 2009 and the last time I checked, there was a plan to increase the tax by another $1.49 which would be a record hike. This means that in areas that cigarettes are the most expensive, such as New York, you would be paying as much as $10 per pack. But even if you live in an area that for a long time retained a low cigarette price, you would still be paying in the upwards of $6 per pack.

The latest figure I’ve seen suggest that an average smoker smokes one pack a day. This means that an average smoker can save nearly $4000 a year. Can you use an extra 4 grand? I know most of us could and just imagine how much interest your money would have accrued in a period of 10 years had you put your money in a C/D account.

Lastly, do you dread the feeling of being left with just enough cigarettes to survive the evening until your bed time? I know the feeling of wanting that insurance, that extra pack that assures you that you will not run out of cigarettes until you sleep, and that you will have a pack waiting for you as you wake up in the morning. So won’t you run out at 1am in the morning to the nearest 24hr convenient shop for your fix? Whether you would like to admit it or not, you’ve become a junkie.

The benefits of giving up smoking are in the dramatic improvements in the quality of life. Your smoking habit touches so many aspects of your life, that once you quit, you’ll notice the positive changes take place in parts of your life that you never imagined would have been affected by your habit. Stop smoking today and I promise you the benefits to kicking the habit will not let you down.

©2012 GIVING UP SMOKING. All Rights Reserved.

The first and the most effective motivating factor are the people that you care about. If you are a father, then what more motivation do you need than giving up smoking for the sake of your children. If you are a husband, then you have a responsibility be there for your wife through the good and bad, smoking will make that difficult for many reasons I shouldn’t have to explain to you. As a son or a daughter of loving parents, the worst thing you can do to your parents is to die before they do, smoking can make that possibility very real. As a friend, maybe your early departure from this life might not have as profound effect as it might have on your family, but you will still be leaving many people who care for you and love you, to grieve for you for the rest of their lives.

For most people, I would assume that family and friends should be the main motivator in giving up smoking. But to be fair, quitting smoking is extremely difficult feat to achieve and you may need additional motivation to stop smoking for good.

Ask yourself this question. When was the last time you felt fresh and energized when you woke up in the morning? You probably can’t remember because smoking will do that to you. No matter how young and or fit you may think you are, if you are a smoker you will not have good mornings. You will wake up with a lump of mucus in your throat and your first action would be to force that lump out of your throat into your mouth and into your garbage with a forceful gag. Not the way to start an ideal morning if you would ask me.

Do you play sports? Try jogging for 5 minutes and I assure you that you’ll feel like dying. Hold the tip of a spoon with your thumb and your index finger. Try to hold the spoon steady and I assure you that you will shake like a 100 year old man. You are not normal and smoking has left you crippled in many more ways than you can imagine.

Think about everything that I’ve noted here so far and use them to motivate yourself. When it comes to giving up smoking, you or anyone else for that matter cannot force it onto you. You have to want it, giving up smoking is very difficult but it becomes so much easier if you truly want it and having the motivating factors to give up smoking will mean the difference between success and failure. Giving up smoking is all about the motivation, find that x-factor that pumps you up and free yourself from cigarettes today.

©2012 GIVING UP SMOKING. All Rights Reserved.

Giving up smoking is extremely difficult for anyone who’s smoked for a prolonged period of time. Dependency to nicotine grows over the period of your addiction and the years that pass by turn you into a junkie. I don’t use the word “junkie” lightly, but that’s essentially what you become as you regularly have panic attacks when cigarettes are not readily available to you. Giving up smoking may seem like an impossible task, but I can give you a few tips that will go a long way in helping you kick the habit.

Do you have extra packs of cigarettes stashed in your house? You may even keep extra packs in your car and you are most likely very mindful of how low you are running on cigarettes. If this is you then it’s seriously a good time to give up smoking. This is basically addiction running your life and the sign that you have completely lost control over your nicotine craving. You should not need scary statistic to convince yourself to at least entertain the thought of giving up smoking.

It’s completely normal to feel uncertain and uneasy about the thought of giving up smoking. In fact, you are better off cutting yourself some slack and expect to fail on your first try. It is my experience that people who’ve smoked less than 2 years tend to quit fairly easy. As for those who’ve smoked over 2 years, some studies suggest more than 70 percent failing on their first try.

The sooner you quit the better of course, but you have to concentrate more on the quitting part than the when. It may as well take you several tries to give up smoking and it may even take you a year or two to quit for good, but if you quit for good, that’s all that matters really.

The truth is the initial shock that you feel the first time you try giving up smoking gets less and less intense as you try to quit again and again. A big part of giving up smoking is psychological, the more you know what to expect, the better you will cope with the stress of nicotine withdrawal. So in an essence, a failure in giving up smoking is only a step forward to ultimately quitting for good rather than a flat out failure.

The key is on giving it a try, just try quitting smoking. You may give up in just one hour or in one day, that’s OK because you’ve tried. That first step is very important, you can talk all you want about how much you’d like to quit but ultimately only actions count. Persistence will eventually pay off and you will be nicotine free as long as you are willing to take actions. Giving up smoking is all about persistence.

Continue with Giving Up Smoking – Finding The Motivation

©2012 GIVING UP SMOKING. All Rights Reserved.

We all have that uncle who likes to poop on everyone’s party and that cousin who criticizes every one of your achievements. Unfortunately some of these people are very dear to us no matter how irritating they may be. Obviously you can’t alienate these people forever, but it’s important to keep them out of your life temporarily or at least don’t let them know that you are in the process of quitting smoking. You walk a very fine line when you first stop smoking. Little things will trigger relapse and there’s nothing worse than hearing discouraging words from people who should be cheering you on.

Ideally we would all love to have family members who can be around every time we need someone to talk to. But we know that’s not possible and we also know it’s not because our families don’t care. So we can’t control the sort of support we get from our family members, but we can control who we spend time with and where we spend time at.

Many things in our lives are out of the realms of our control. So the things that we can control to some degree, we have to make sure we manage them in ways that are beneficial to our lives. So how about skipping the next family barbeque? You can go back to the way things were as soon as you take control of your nicotine addiction. That’s really easier than you think as nicotine withdrawal symptoms generally last only up to two weeks. The rest is all mental and if you had the fortitude to stay cigarette free for two weeks, you have what it takes to stay free from it for life.

Positive reinforcement is the key and you can’t expect to quit smoking if you let the naysayers discourage you. As Robert Collier once said, “All power is from within and therefore under our control”. Take charge and stop smoking away your life. Continue with “50-50 Chance of Survival”.

©2012 GIVING UP SMOKING. All Rights Reserved.

Giving up smoking is an enormous challenge for majority of smokers. You need to find something very important to you and allow yourself to make a connection to your smoking habit. Think for a minute, there’s nothing that you do that is not affected in some way by your smoking habit. You need that connection and there are quite few places you can look for them.

If you are a parent you have an infallible responsibility to your children. For the rest of you, all you need is to remind yourself of the people you love, and that should be simply enough reason to quit.  For those of you who are health conscious, drinking decaffeinated coffee and eating organic vegetables will not prevent the diseases that overcome so many smokers. Recent WHO reports state that over 5 million people die each year from illnesses or diseases attributed to tobacco use. For those of you who are struggling financially, imagine being able to earn an extra $1000 to $3000 doing nothing. Yes! Doing nothing! Does it sound too good to be true? Well there is a catch, all you have to do is from doing the act of smoking to not doing it and that’s it.

Cigarettes are now roughly $6.50 a pack and in many states you are paying $7 to $8 per pack. If you smoke a pack a day, that comes out to be $2372.50 per year. For those of you who smoke 2 packs a day, it is a whopping $4745! What can you do with all that money? How about that trip you always wanted to take? Pay off that credit card debt maybe? The truth is, weather you smoke a pack or two packs per day. The money you are spending on your addiction could be used in many self improving manners.

I can write for a month and come up with hundreds of reasons for you to quit smoking. But ultimately, the reason to quit smoking has to be something that touches you in a personal manner. Speak to your loved ones or give yourself a day of self reflection. When you find it, it will be far more effective in combating your addiction than any other quit smoking aids ever devised. Good luck friends. Continue with “Get The Naysayers Out Of The Way” and “How to quit smoking”.

©2012 GIVING UP SMOKING. All Rights Reserved.