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There are many benefits to giving up smoking. The human body is incredibly resilient and it can heal from many years of damages caused by such activities as smoking cigarettes. There are many information sources out there on and offline about the health benefits on giving up smoking. These sources include government run websites, personal blogs, and corporations that sell quit smoking aids. Unfortunately, while most of them are fine source of learning the health benefits to giving up smoking, they fail to describe the benefits that an average Joe can truly relate to. So without the complicated graphs and medical mumbo jumbo, let’s discuss about the practical benefits to giving up smoking.
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.
Some studies show that only 3 percent of the first time cigarette quitters give up smoking for good. This is a grim outlook for any smoker hoping give up smoking, but it should also be noted that different studies have shown a more favorable success rate. In any case, one common trend among these studies is that they show very low success rate among first time quitters. As someone who quit smoking for good for many years now, it is my personal opinion that giving up smoking is all about the motivation. So here are some powerful methods to motivate yourself to quit smoking for good on your first try.
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.
Smokers behave like pack animals, they huddle together and they like to be part of a group. Perhaps it’s the modern day image of smokers that influence them to this act. Anti-smoking was not a popular word back in the days. Smoking was considered trendy and it was perceived as the pastime for the sophisticated men. For women, since women’s rights was in its infancy, in a weird way smoking meant equality among sexes. Much has changed since then, public image of smoking has moved on from cool to disgusting.
We are seeing smoking ban everywhere and there’s no sign that the trend will slow down anytime soon. In developed nations across the globe, the activity of smoking is viewed negatively even in places allowed. People have tendency to become bolder or at times careless when a negative act is done within a large group. The cigarette smoker’s tendency to smoke in groups may borrow its popularity from such behavior.
Since the smoking-ban in bars has been enacted, it has become a common sight to see a group of people smoking outside the pubs. You will often find yourself go out for a single cigarette and end up smoking more. Out of the boredom of waiting to finish your cigarette you decide to strike a conversation with the smoker next to you. The conversation continues long after your first cigarette is burnt off and you simply light another one. This is perhaps why smokers should stay away from one another. Not only would a smoker smoke, but even when he or she does not, they’ll still be subjected to second hand smoking.
Ironically cigarettes bring people together. Correction, cigarettes bring smokers together. When smokers are in a large group, they tend to smoke a lot more than usual and that is exactly why smokers should stay away from other smokers.
If you want to quit smoking, then you should avoid places where large group of smoker congregate and you should stick to that plan for at least the first month of quitting. Giving up smoking is hard enough, be wise and don’t make it any harder than it should be. Making small changes such as avoiding other smokers will go a long way in giving you the best shot at giving up smoking.
If you decided to quit smoking, I assure you it was the single most important decision in your life. The next step would be to choose how you will quit and you just might be interested in Chantix. Here’s a short description of Chantix for those of you who are not familiar with this drug. Chantix is basically a non-nicotine pill which is designed to target nicotine receptors in the brain and attach to them. The end result is preventing nicotine reaching the receptors.
In theory and by their own marketing pitch it sounds wonderful, but a mounting number of Chantix lawsuit tell a different story. Some of the side effects disclosed by Pfizer (the maker of Chantix) include, reported changes in behavior, agitation, depressed mood, suicidal thoughts or actions, let me stop there. No matter how rare, a stop smoking aid product’s side effect should not include suicidal thoughts or actions. The act of quitting smoking should improve the quality of life and not worsen it.
Chantix was approved by the FDA in May 2006 and by May 2009 FDA indicated it received reports of 39 Chantix suicides. The sales number of Chantix has been sliding ever since the concerns have been made public.
If you believe you need help quitting smoking, there are many other quit smoking aids on the market and I would seriously advice you to go with the alternatives. If you don’t want to add anything into your system, you can also try hypnotherapy or acupuncture.
I like to compare the act of smoking as committing a slow suicide, as you can see I am that much against smoking cigarettes. But If I had to choose between chancing with a cigarette vs. a drug that could possibly give me suicidal thoughts, I’d always go with the cigarette. Be wise, choose another path, and always choose to improve your health.
Giving Up Smoking
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
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