GIVING UP SMOKING » quit smoking

Two Things You Should Avoid if You Want to Successfully Quit Smoking

StopSmokingCoach — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 16:01:40 +0000

Unless you are one of those rare people that claim they can quit cigarettes whenever they want, you have to understand that you need many things to go right if you want to quit smoking successfully. There are couple things that you’ll need to avoid in order to achieve success and it’s crucial you get these things settled before you attempt to quit.

Your first priority is to either stay away or to make understand the people around you that try to pressure you into quitting, that you need them to stop pressuring you because you are readying yourself to quit smoking for good. A smoker can never quit smoking due to outside pressure. No matter how much a parent, spouse, or a partner might push a smoker to quit, it will never happen until the smoker himself or herself develops the will to quit.

Let your family and friends know that you are getting yourself ready to quit smoking and that during this time you do not need additional pressure from anyone. Although they may be well meant, getting nagged on to quit smoking while that’s exactly what you are trying to achieve can become a big source of stress for any smoker trying to quit. Make them understand that nicotine addiction can be as serious as cocaine addiction for many smokers and that your will alone may not be enough to help you quit smoking successfully. Having the mental state that will give you the best shot to quit smoking is of utmost importance and you’ll need the support of those around you to make that happen.

The second thing you must do is to stay away from the people that are of the complete opposite of the example above. These are the people that constantly remind you that you will never be able to quit smoking. They can also be your friends or family members who also happen to smoke that always discourage you from quitting. Misery loves company and believe me smokers hate it when someone else has the will to kick the nasty habit they themselves can’t seem to get rid of. Stay away from these people that want you to fail. Some of these people you might care a whole lot for, but you need to stay away from them during the first month of quitting session.

Some of these negative minded people who also happen to be smokers might be able to picture themselves as non-smokers thanks to you. If you successfully quit smoking, you might be able to inspire those smokers around you to quit as well. I’ve seen many times how one smoker quitting led to bunch of other friends to quit smoking as well. You quitting cigarettes can actually have a much bigger impact than you think and you could be changing lives while you improve your own.

Make sure you follow the two tips above and you will give yourself a much better chance at quitting smoking successfully. Good luck and go nicotine free today.

Quit Smoking for Free – Follow These Simple Steps

StopSmokingCoach — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:59:33 +0000

You will save hundreds to thousands of dollars a year if you quit smoking, but being a former smoker myself, I know you do not want to spend a dime in quitting it. This of course does not make any sense at all, but it’s just the way smokers tend to think. Although nicotine replacement therapies and many other quit smoking aids can dramatically increase your chance of quitting, one can quit without them if done properly. Let me explain how it can be done.

This may sound rather obvious and maybe even dumb to some, but you need to have a clear reason as to why you must quit smoking. Quitting smoking isn’t easy and in fact, it’s terribly difficult. It will be both a mental and a physical challenge that you’ll have to endure for 2 to 4 weeks after quitting and more for some people. It really helps to remind yourself of the reasons that gave you the courage to quit smoking every time you feel like giving up.

There’s also the actual quitting part and I can tell you from my experience the first 24 hours are gruesome. But at the end of the day, it’s only 24 hours. You have to ask yourself, do you really want to live the rest of your life controlled by a substance may as well kill you off in a slow and painful death eventually? If you can stay cigarette free for 24 hours, then the next 24 hours are so much more bearable than the first 24 hours. As the hours and days go by, it will be increasingly easy to spend a day without smoking.

Pick a day to quit and don’t be afraid to fail. What’s important is that you are trying and that your desire to quit smoking is strong. You can even experiment with a short-term quitting, basically try not smoking for few hours and see how long you can go without a smoke. I’ve heard of stories of people quitting smoking on their very first try, but I just know those people are rare. I don’t mean to discourage you, but it is more than likely that you will fail your first attempt to quit smoking. It actually helps to experience the initial stage of a nicotine withdrawal symptom before your first attempt. The first time you get a real strong nicotine withdrawal symptom it can hit you real hard and throw you into a panic. Just remember that the first 24 hours are the most difficult to bear and try to stay strong to ride it out to the best that you can.

During the first 24 hours you want to stay well hydrated and get plenty of sleep. So drink lots of water and go to bed early. Drink coffee during the day and don’t drink it for at least few hours prior to sleeping. Trust me when I say this, you do not want to wake up in the middle of the night to urinate. When all is quiet and everyone is asleep, the craving for a cigarette will drive you insane. For most smokers drinking goes hand in hand with smoking, so it will be only wise to stay away from alcoholic beverages for at least couple of weeks to preferably a month.

Keep yourself busy and keep your mouth busy by chewing on healthy snacks. Carrots and cucumber have become my favorite snacks because I depended on them so much during the quitting. Carrot sticks will allow you to chew for a long time and cucumber will help you to stay well hydrated as well as keep your mouth busy. Be sure to stay active as well, regular exercise will help tremendously in negating the nicotine withdrawal symptom. If you are not much of an exercise person, just try to keep yourself busy with your favorite hobbies. Last but not least, do not hang out with friends who smoke at least for a month, but if you do, ask them to smoke where you can’t see them.

There are hundreds of other advices that I would give out to anyone who wishes to quit smoking, but what you see here are the ones that have helped me the most during the time I quit smoking. You can definitely quit smoking for free, just follow the tips above and give it a shot. Good luck and go cigarette free.

5 Effective Giving Up Smoking Tips

StopSmokingCoach — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:19:23 +0000

Giving up smoking will surely test you as an individual and it’s important that you don’t jump in unprepared. Knowing what to do and avoiding the pitfalls many cigarette quitting hopefuls fall in, can mean the difference between success and failure. Here are some helpful tips that could help you give up smoking for good this time.

1. Consider seeing a doctor – Your doctor can help you determine whether you’ll need prescription drug to help you cope with the withdrawal symptoms. It really depends on your smoking habit, but generally withdrawal symptoms are intense and the use of quit smoking product or prescription drug may give you the best chance to stop smoking for good.

2. Throw away all the cigarette related products – If you have a box of cigarette available for “just in case”, then trust me you are just setting yourself up to fail. Get rid of the ashtrays, lighters, matches, and anything else that may remind you of cigarettes. If you want to finish that last box that you have saved up, then just finish it and leave no cigarettes that you can fall back to.

3. Set a date to quit and stick to it – If you don’t set a quit day and push yourself to quit smoking, you will continually keep pushing it for the next day and the next week until you no longer even try. This is a fight between your will to stop smoking and your addiction pushing you to take another puff. Push yourself for that ultimate goal to give up smoking for good.

4. Announce it to the world – Tell all your friends and your family that you are quitting cigarettes. Make it difficult for you to fail by letting it be known to everyone you know that you will successfully quit. This will surely give you an extra incentive to kick the habit in one shot. Don’t become that guy that talks the talk, but never walks the walk.

5. Something to chew on – Keep your mouth busy with anything but cigarettes. You will get urges to smoke or to just stick something in your mouth, help relieve these urges by chewing on carrots, chewing gums, straws, or even toothpicks will do. Avoid chewing anything for an extended period of time though, it could cause gum disease or damage your teeth.

Follow the tips above to help you in giving up smoking and don’t give up even if you fail on your first try. What’s important is your willingness to quit and that will ultimately lead to a successful quit smoking experience.

Giving Up Smoking – Finding The Motivation

Derek Kim — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:42:12 +0000

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.

Why Smokers Should Avoid Other Smokers – Pack Animal Behavior

Derek Kim — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:20:48 +0000

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.

Chantix – What Are The Dangers

StopSmokingCoach — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:55:38 +0000

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 – An Impossible Task for Me

StopSmokingCoach — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:52:09 +0000

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

Free Stop Smoking Aids Now

StopSmokingCoach — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:03:42 +0000

Do you want to stop smoking? Many smokers fear the cost to stop smoking and they fail to recognize even higher cost of continuing to smoke. More important to understand is that stopping smoking does not have to cost you a dime, there are methods that can help you quit for free. Here’s a quick look at few simple and free stop smoking aids that can help you end the addiction.

Nicotine Anonymous
Find and visit a local nicotine anonymous meeting, it is a highly effective program to help smokers stop smoking. Nicotine anonymous is about receiving the support from other smokers who are trying to stop smoking just like you and you’ll also receive guidance from advisers who’ve quit smoking themselves. You can learn from other people’s mistakes as well as gain the much needed encouragement to successfully stop smoking.

Start Something New
Distraction and keeping yourself busy is the key to stop smoking. Start something new today, you should pick up a hobby for example. Maybe you always wanted to drive a nitrous RC Car but you never did or maybe gardening is more of your taste. It doesn’t matter what you do, what’s important is to do something you like and therefore will occupy your mind to reduce the urge to smoke. It’s about taking a break from constant craving for nicotine and you should take full advantage of it.

Substitute the Smoking
Find a physical substitute for cigarettes to help you break the habit gradually. Chewing a gum for example will help you dealing with the absence of cigarettes in your mouth, but limit the chewing of gums for few hours a day as excessive gum chewing can have adverse effect to your oral health. You can drink a lot of water or juice as many smokers had been helped by such. Start eating baby carrots, they are healthy snacks that will keep your mouth busy as well as keep you filled. Finally, exercise to shorten the withdrawal symptom to as little as two weeks.

Information is the key to any success and when you are trying to achieve something on a budget, it is imperative that you scrounge for every information available freely. To learn more, browse this site throughout on many other free stop smoking aids

E-Cigarettes – Are E-Cigarettes safer than smoking?

StopSmokingCoach — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:35:50 +0000

E-Cigarette or “Electronic Cigarette” is an alternative nicotine delivery system to smoked tobacco products such as, cigars, pipes, and of course cigarettes. It looks and feels just like a cigarette but it’s actually a battery-powered device. E-Cigarettes utilize atomizers to vaporize nicotine and propylene glycol (a substance commonly found in fog machines) which deliver nicotine and flavoring to the user without the deadly carcinogens found in cigarette smoke.

Lately, there have been floods of news on E-Cigarettes and the trend doesn’t seem like slowing down anytime soon. Many E-Cigarette users have either cut down on their daily smoking or have completely made the shift to E-Cigarettes. So are E-Cigarettes safer than smoking? The attached video will help determine that on your own, but the general consensus among E-Cigarette users is that “it’s a no-brainer”. Simply put, nicotine on its own is not a harmful substance. What make cigarettes deadly are the additives and the byproduct of the smoke. You remove the smoke and the deadly additives out of cigarettes, and you quite literally get E-Cigarettes.

Lastly, the best alternative to cigarette is to quit smoking for good. But if you are one the people unable to quit but not for lack of trying, then perhaps is time to try something different. As always, good luck.

FDA Wants to Stuff E-Cigarettes

StopSmokingCoach — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:34:07 +0000

The public are outraged at anti E-Cigarette special interest groups and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) for trying to stop E-Cigarettes on the basis (or so FDA claims) that it’s a drug and claiming it needs regulatory approval.

Many supporters of E-Cigarettes are concerned about the new legislation that gives FDA jurisdiction of tobacco products specifically prohibits cigarettes from being outlawed and countless other harmful products which escape the “sin tax”. This leads to the assumption that our government cares more about tobacco tax revenue than the public health.

E-Cigarette users swear by that they have benefited from using E-Cigarettes and the benefits range from stopping coughing, breathing better, ridding of cigarette smoke stench, and countless other benefits.

Sales and use of electronic cigarettes are illegal in Australia and in Hong Kong, but that hasn’t stopped people from purchasing them online. At this point, it’s hard to say how this battle will end, but for the sake for people who’ve benefited from the use of E-Cigarettes, I sincerely hope the people will be heard this time. Learn about E-Cigarettes Here.

E-Cigarettes – Are E-Cigarettes safer than smoking?