“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Lao Tzu
Month: August 2007
Quit Quote for 7th August
“Usually, the best place to make a new start is where you are right now”
Resolve to quit smoking
It is important that smokers genuinely ‘resolve to quit smoking’ when they ‘decide’ to quit. Resolving to quit smoking properly makes a significant difference in your chances of success. By making a ‘proper’ decision, you increase your chances of success in overcoming the evil weed several fold.
So what do I mean by ‘making a proper decision’? Well, most smokers when they decide to quit smoking don’t really resolve to quit smoking; they merely decide to hope to be able to quit smoking. There are many reasons for this but the most significant one I think is the emotional attachment to smoking.
Smokers think that they enjoy smoking despite the fact that to smoke, one must inhale hot toxic gas and particulates in order to enjoy it. Because smokers are so attached to smoking as an enjoyable pass time, it is difficult to resolve to quit smoking without seeing quitting smoking as a test of will or abstinence, resulting in anxiety about quitting.
This anxiety manifests itself in the smokers mind by making them nervous at the thought of spending the rest of their lives without their beloved cigarettes. After all, the average smoker hasn’t enjoyed a cup of coffee, meal or alcoholic drink in the last few years without a trusty cigarette within arms reach.
If you decide to quit smoking you must resolve to quit smoking and not merely decide to ‘give it another go’. And it probably will be another go – research suggests that most smokers take 7 attempts over several years to kick the habit!
So how can you go about resolving to quit smoking? Well, firstly you must accept the rest of your life must be without cigarettes. This is an horrific proposition for most smokers because they enjoy smoking so much. But consider these facts;
Fact #1: We were all born as non-smokers. It was only after starting smoking that we became smokers and we didn’t even chose to do that, we only chose to give smoking a try. (That is another story I cover in my book!)
Fact #2: 25% of the population of the United States have never smoked a cigarette and they seem to get on with life okay. These people have resolved never to smoke and they don’t miss it one iota!
Fact #3: 25% of the population have tried smoking and just couldn’t get into it – they don’t smoke and they seem to manage just fine too.
Fact #4: 25% of the population used to smoke at one time or another for varying periods of time but they have now quit. They don’t smoke and seem to get on with life fine too.
Finally, there is the 25% of people who currently smoke and who have not managed to resolve to quit smoking. Researching how to quit smoking is a good start and the first step on a journey to a smoke free life so by reading this article you are already headed in the right direction!
At least 75% of the population can and do live happily without cigarettes. What makes you so special? Go on, don’t just decide to try and quit, resolve to quit smoking.
To finish, here is a quote from Marlene von Savant: “Being defeated is a temporary condition. Giving up makes it permanent.” As ever, never quit trying to quit smoking.
Quit Quote for 6th August
A little quotation to help sustain your quit:
“The road to success in life is lined with many tempting parking spaces”
Quit Quote for 5th August
Here’s a little quote to help you on your way to becoming smoke free:
“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are probably right” Henry Ford
How to quit smoking – some tips
Ready to quit? Protect yourself and your loved ones by giving up smoking for good!
Avoid the traps: If you always smoke when you are in a bar, then when you are actively trying to quit, avoid putting yourself in this setting. You will have much better luck if you avoid situations where you would normally smoke.
Find new habits: When you feel like grabbing a cigarette, take a walk, or do some deep breathing exercises. Many reformed smokers talk about how the only deep breaths they ever took were when they were inhaling. Try it without the cigarette! Your lungs will love you.
Keep busy, stay active: Find ways to keep your hands occupied. Many people find knitting, needlework, or even jigsaw puzzles help. Take your mind off of cigarettes by walking, gardening, biking, or do some yoga stretches. Being active will not only keep your mind busy, it has the added benefit of making you feel better and helping to prevent weight gain.
Discover your healthy appetite: When you are craving a cigarette grab a vegetable stick or apple slice. Even chewing gum can make the craving go away. What you are attempting is amazing, so get plenty of rest, drink lots of water, and eat three healthy meals daily. Give yourself a pat on the back for making a major, positive change in your life.
Know what to expect: In the beginning you may experience temporary withdrawal symptoms, such as headaches, irritability, tiredness, and trouble concentrating. These are signs that your body is recovering from the effects of smoking and will most likely end within a couple weeks.
Don’t quit your goal to quit: Experience a relapse? Get right back on track. It doesn’t mean you can’t quit. Keep thinking of yourself as a non-smoker, and before you know it, you will be! Reach out to others if you need a boost of confidence. The American Lung Association and the American Cancer Society, hospitals, offices, and community groups offer programs for support.
Found at Oprah.com
Give Up Smoking Benefits: 10 more reasons to give up smoking
There are many benefits to giving up smoking. Most of the benefits are reductions in the risk of developing some disease or other. These benefits are the reason why you should give up smoking. They wont in themselves help you give up smoking but they will provide you with motivation to go on and learn how to give up smoking successfully.
Give up smoking benefit #2: Smoking causes damage to your mouth and gums. Smokers are more likely to suffer from ‘acute necrotising and ulcerative gingivitis’ (diseased gums) which increases the risk of tooth loss and gives you bad breath amongst other things. Urgh!
Give up smoking benefit #3: Smokers are 20 times more likely to suffer from angina than non-smokers.
Give up smoking benefit #4: Want to keep your eyesight? Smokers run twice the risk of developing cataracts when compared to non-smokers. Smokers are also more likely to develop type 2 diabetes and therefore diabetic retinopathy – the degeneration of the retina, leading to blindness. They are also twice as likely to suffer from macular degeneration of the eyes and amblyopia (loss of sight).
Give up smoking benefit #5: Hey stud! Men who smoke increase the risk suffering from erectile dysfunction, reduced ejaculate volume, reduced sperm counts and deformed, damaged or dead sperm. Basically, smoking is a good way to increase your chances of being impotent! Reduce your risks by giving up smoking as soon as possible.
Give up smoking benefit #6: Hey good looking! Smokers run twice the risk of suffering from psoriasis and skin wrinkling. Free radicals found in cigarette smoke damage skin tissues and reduce their elasticity more rapidly than non-smokers. This is why long-term smokers tend to look older and have a poorer complexion than non-smokers.
Give up smoking benefit #7: Cancer anyone? Smokers run an elevated risk of developing lung cancer. They also have a disproportionately high risk of developing throat, oesophageal, bladder, kidney, stomach, pancreatic, mouth and tongue and lip cancers!
Give up smoking benefit #8: 45% of all duodenum or stomach ulcers are found in smokers. Nicotine interacts with the parasympathetic nervous system (the automatic bit) and relaxes the stomach sphincters, allowing stomach acid excess into the oesophagus (heartburn) and the duodenum.
Give up smoking benefit #9: An aortic aneurism is the ballooning of the aorta which can result in it rupturing which leads to massive internal bleeding and quick, certain death. Smokers suffer 57% of all aortic aneurisms.
Give up smoking benefit #10: Stick around! Did you know that people who smoke between 1 and 14 cigarettes per day are 8 times more likely to die early when compared to non-smokers.. Smokers on 15 to 25 cigarettes per day are 13 times more likely to die early compared to non-smokers. Smokers who smoke over 25 cigarettes per day are 25 times more likely to die early!
Finally, there is a Japanese proverb that says “fall down seven times, get up eight”. Giving up smoking is just like that too. You have to keep trying to give up. My advice as ever is never give up trying to give up.
Quit Smoking Benefits: 10 reasons to quit smoking
There are many benefits to quitting smoking. These benefits are the reason why you should quit smoking. They wont in themselves help you quit smoking but they will provide you with motivation to go on and learn how to quit smoking successfully.
Quit smoking benefit #2: Cigarette smoke and the cocktail of 3,500 chemicals found in it, have damaged nerves throughout your body. Within 2 days your body will start to re-grow these damaged nerves. Your sense of taste and smell will sharpen. You will not need to salt your food as heavily as you used to.
Quit smoking benefit #3: Smokers are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure. When you quit smoking, your blood pressure will come down without any other intervention just from quitting smoking. High blood pressure is known as the ‘silent killer’ that often goes unnoticed in people of middle age. High blood pressure makes your heart work harder and can result in an enlarged heart and heart disease. It is advisable to ask you doctor for a blood pressure check the next time you see them.
Quit smoking benefit #4: 90% of all lung cancer sufferers are smokers. The vast majority of smokers quit smoking the minute they are diagnosed with lung cancer, proving that quitting is possible. 10 years after quitting smoking, your risk of lung cancer will have halved.
Quit smoking benefit #5: Naturally, inhaling hot toxic gasses into your lungs 20 times a day causes considerable damage. Most significantly, smoking is a major contributor in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease or COPD. COPD includes such illnesses as bronchitis (the inflammation of the lung bronchioles (tubes)) and emphysema. Emphysema is when your lung tissues lose their elasticity and you cannot breath normally. Death from emphysema comes in the form of a slow and utterly debilitating suffocation over the course of a few years. It is irreversible and incurable.
Quit smoking benefit #6: Between 5 and 15 years after quitting smoking, your risk of a stroke will have returned to that of a non-smoker (depending upon other influencing factors such as diet).
Quit smoking benefit #7: On average, smokers die between 8 and 10 years earlier than non-smokers. Quitting smoking even in middle age can reduce the risks of ill health significantly and there are always benefits in quitting smoking, no matter what your age.
Quit smoking benefit #8: After years of smoking, you will have suffered from a chronic cough. Between 3 and 12 months after quitting smoking, this cough should have disappeared.
Quit smoking benefit #9: Within 3 months of quitting smoking, your circulation should have improved significantly. If you used to suffer from ‘pins and needles’, they should be a thing of the past now. Your risk of heart attack will have reduced significantly.
Quit smoking benefit #10: Not only can you smell better you do smell better too! Your general odour will be much more pleasant to those around you.
There is a Japanese proverb that says “fall down seven times, get up eight”. Quitting smoking is just like that too. You have to keep trying to quit. My advice as ever is never quit trying to quit.
How to give up cigarettes
The simplest way to answer the question of how to give up cigarettes is to say, just don’t smoke anymore! That is a bit of a fickle response though because if it were that easy, no one would bother to ask how to give up cigarettes would they?
The reason why cigarettes are so hard to give up is because of nicotine addiction. Many smokers and healthcare professionals believe that smoking is a ‘habit’. I can assure you and them that this is not the case. Biting your fingernails is a habit, smoking tobacco is the manifestation of an addiction to nicotine.
One of the common answers as to how to give up cigarettes is to turn to nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) such as nicotine patches or nicotine gum. This in my opinion is possibly the stupidest course of action to take. The reason I think this is because of what I have already said about addiction and habit. I also think it is stupid because any drug addiction treated with more of the same drug just seems silly.
When you are told how to give up cigarettes using NRT, you are basically told you have to overcome the habit of smoking and then you have to overcome the addiction to nicotine. Stop smoking then stop using the patches.
What I can tell you is that there is no need to use the patches to try and overcome the ‘habit’. There is no habit in smoking. It is all the result of addiction. The only reason you keep smoking is because you are addicted to nicotine. It has nothing to do with you needing to put a cigarette in your mouth. Children need soothers but adults do not!
Another common response smokers are given when they ask how to give up cigarettes is to turn to a ‘wonder’ drug such as zyban or chantix.
Zyban and Chantix have respectively 16% and 22% success rates. (Chantix does not have the 44% Pfizer like to suggest it has by the way.) The problem with both Zyban and Chantix is that they break the physical addiction to smoking. They stop nicotine working somehow (and by the way, the doctors don’t know how!) but they don’t change your emotional attachment to smoking.
Without dealing with both your physical and mental addiction to nicotine, you are highly likely to fall back into smoking once your prescriptions for zyban or chantix run out.
The other problems with these drugs are the side effects. There is the nausea, the chances of seizure and a whole host of others. I cover those in more detail in other articles on my blog.
So what is the answer as to how to give up cigarettes? Well, in my humble opinion, it is achieved through adjusting your mental attitude towards smoking. It is achieved through understanding your enemy. In short, understand nicotine and how it has changed the way your body operates. One way this can be achieved easily and quickly with an open mind and a fresh look at smoking through an approach known as cognitive behavioural therapy.
Cognitive behavioural therapy works by looking at smoking in a different way. The relationship you have with cigarettes is often based on a series of misconceptions. It breaks your relationship with tobacco down into bite-sized chunks and deals with each misconception individually. It may seem hard to believe but just because you think you have a handle on smoking, doesn’t necessarily mean you actually have!
People who use cognitive behavioural therapy to give up smoking often report ‘seeing the light’ or having an ‘epiphany’ about smoking when they complete the course. More often than not, they know they will never start smoking again after they have given up because the whole smoking relationship has been blown to pieces.
Finally, there are many ways to give up smoking and it is important that you find the one that works for you, so as ever, my most important piece of advice to any would-be quitter is, never stop trying to give up.
The best quit smoking tip ever!
When I was a smoker, I was determined to find that one best quit smoking tip. I always thought that there was one that I could rely on and use to make me quit smoking. You see, smoking is incredibly difficult to quit until you have found your own solution, i.e. the best smoking tip ever for you. When you have found that, it becomes easy to quit smoking.
So what is the best quit smoking tip ever then I hear you say. Well, the bad news for you is that I don’t know. It’s not that I don’t know a whole heap of quit smoking tips, it’s just that I don’t know which is the best quit smoking tip for you personally.
Let me clarify. When I quit smoking, one thing that really changed things for me was the realisation that I could actually enjoy life without cigarettes. For me that was the best quit smoking tip ever, but it wasn’t the only one and on its own it wasn’t that powerful. There were a whole raft of things I had to understand before I could happily quit the smokes. Now this is a strange analogy but stick with me. It is a bit like the Whitehouse, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC.
The Whitehouse is a magnificent building, but it is a magnificent building because it appears to be greater than the sum of its parts. Its parts add up to ‘x’ but the whole thing put together is worth ‘x’ plus a whole lot more.
The Whitehouse wouldn’t look very good with just the huge entrance and no building. The building itself wouldn’t look very impressive without that portico. The lamp under the portico wouldn’t look good without the portico and the portico wouldn’t look as good without the lamp. The gardens wouldn’t be set off as well as they are without the house and the house wouldn’t look as magnificent if it didn’t have the gardens.
Do you see what I mean? One thing in itself may not be that impressive but when contrasted or complimented with something else or a number of other things, it becomes greater than it really is. It is always possible for something to be greater than the sum of its parts.
There are lists and lists of quit smoking tips available – heck, look at my previous postings. You can read them all over the internet, but they tend to follow different ideas about smoking and how you can overcome its grip on your life. If you read quit smoking tips all day long you could quite easily get no nearer finding a simple way to quit smoking without the anguish and stress and normal need for willpower.
So if you are really keen to quit smoking, I suppose the best quit smoking tip I can give you is this. You are killing yourself. You know that but it doesn’t make it any easier to quit smoking. You need to find a solution, so keep looking. They do exist but it may be different for you than it was for me. Lots of people succeed with cognitive behavioural therapy, others with hypnotherapy and others with drugs, although I take a pretty dim view on drugs to help you quit!
For me, it was cognitive behavioural therapy. That sounds serious and scary but it’s not. It is a set of instructions to change the way you think about your relationship with cigarettes. Once I understood why I smoked, it was really easy for me to quit. As they say in the military, “know your enemy!”
My final piece of advice that I suppose is the other ‘best quit smoking tip’ that I can think of is always, never quit trying to quit smoking.