Developing A Plan To Quit Smoking
How do I devise a plan to quit smoking?
If you want help to quit smoking, and you're serious about it, I would do three things. One, find a friend who wouldn't mind you calling them frequently, who has already been successful and has quit smoking. Tell them what you're planning to do, learn what worked for them, find out what resources in your community you can access, either a stop smoking program, an addiction counselor, a stop smoking counselor. Where in your community are there groups of people that you could use to get support from? The second thing I would do is, I would check out all the information I need to convince myself, deep inside myself, I've got my support community going, but why do I like to smoke and what do I want to change. So that would be the second step, dig deeply into yourself and say why do I want to do this. Write it on a piece of paper and look at it everyday. The third step is set a quit day. I want to quit by my birthday, make it something significant. I want to quit by Mother's Day, it'll be a gift to my son, I want to quit on his birthday. I'll quit by Christmas. So pick a date and then work toward all the steps it will take to be successful at that time. The fourth step would be talk to your health care provider. Find out if you need medications to quit smoking. If you are going to use medications, time the start of your medications and understand how to use them so that it can really support your quit date. And then stay faithfully on the program once you've started that.
What resources can help me develop a plan to quit smoking?
There's plenty of counselling information you can get by either calling the 800 number or even online. Several quit smoking support programs would be very helpful to you because you need something everyday, especially in the first couple of weeks. So hang tough at the beginning. It gets easier once you get past that two week and four week mark to stay with the program, and then remind yourself by giving yourself rewards, built in rewards, "If I make it to 24 hours, if I make it to one week, if I make it to one month, how much money have I saved, how much better am I feeling? This is the benefits I'm getting from staying committed to this plan."
What is the self-help method to quitting smoking?
A self-help means; "I'm not going to involve anyone else, even a health professional, to try and do this. I'm just going to read a brochure or make up my mind, throw the cigarettes in the trash, but not really go through a program".
How successful are self-help methods to quit smoking?
Most people who have tried to quit smoking have tried on their own, two, three, five, eight times before they actually try to get help. Self-help quits have the lowest success rate - about two to five percent, a year later, are still not smoking.
How can a group cessation program help me to quit smoking?
After someone has tried on their own to quit, it's really a good idea to get support and be with other people who are doing it right along side you. You get insights from them, you can watch things that don't go right in someone else's life and go "Oh, I want to avoid that". So I encourage people and I actually treat smokers in small groups, because I think they are very effective in how they hold each other accountable. There's usually an instructor whose worked with lots of people or has specific training in smoking cessation, and who can help you figure out what it is that your triggers that you haven't recognized and how to get over barriers.
Where can I find a smoking cessation group?
Look in the yellow pages and see if you can find a smoking cessation group. Look on the internet, call your local hospital, or ask your doctor if they know of any well-designed and effective treatment programs that use that accountability in a group to help you achieve your goal.
How can counseling or therapy help me stop smoking?
When you meet with someone who then takes an inventory of questions on you and your smoking behavior, they can tailor their recommendations to your needs, as opposed to eight or twelve people in a group who all come together where it needs to be more generic, and more general. If you have tried other methods, you might want to say, "I'd like to just work with someone who can help me figure out what my triggers are for smoking, where my roadblocks are, where are the barriers that keep tripping me up?" Make sure it's someone who has a significant length of experience in this field and has adequate training.
How can I determine which cessation program is right for me?
If you have never tried to quit before, I would encourage you to get things to read, talk to friends who've quit, get some recommendations on what's good in your local area, perhaps call your local hospital or ask your doctor or other health care professionals like a pharmacist, find out where they would recommend that you would go. You might find some resources on the internet, through the telephone, or a small group. Perhaps a group counselling program in your area would give you access to someone who can help you sort through your issues, a trained stop smoking counsellor.
What are the benefits of quitting smoking cold turkey?
When someone is successful just stopping cigarettes, their body goes through a very rapid detoxification because you are smoking one day, you're not smoking the next. After the first two to four days, the nicotine levels have dropped to levels where their are nearly undetectable and your body goes quickly through that nicotine withdrawal symptom phase.
What are the dangers of quitting smoking cold turkey?
When someone makes a decision to quit smoking, put the cigarettes down, and don't smoke again. Their brain within 24 or 72 hours starts having significant nicotine withdrawal symptoms. One of the major reasons why people relapse back to smoking is they start feeling miserable. So, without medication, which means, quitting on your own cold turkey, means that you aren't really getting any help to handle all the changes going on in your brain chemistry trying to learn to live life without nicotine. One of the other problems with going cold turkey is that you have a tendency to focus on that event as supposed to having a whole program of taking your medications, following up with your doctor. You don't have a process usually that's going to carry you through, especially that first week. The problem is that quitting cold turkey has the lowest quitting rate of all the methods to quit smoking. So I would encourage you to talk to someone who can give you individual council about what's really best for you.
