Are You Trying to Quit Smoking? Don't START, Be SMART

If you're thinking about quitting smoking and you've spent any time looking on the internet for information to help you quit, you may have run across the START acronym. It's a handy little tool for remembering five things you can do that might help you quit.

If you haven't seen it before, here's a quick summary of it:

    Set a quit date
    Tell friends, family and coworkers
    Anticipate and plan for the challenges
    Remove cigarettes from your home, car and work
    Talk with your doctor

How To Quit Smoking - Even If It's An Important Part Of Your Life

So you have been smoking for decades, it's a part of your life, you never go anywhere without your precious smokes and you certainly make sure that you never run out of cigarettes.

So how can you quit smoking when it's such an important part of your life. In fact it's more than a habit. It's a friend who comforts you when you are lonely or upset. It's a comfort to you in the middle of a cold dark night.

When you are bored it's there to give you something to do to make your life better. Cigarettes certainly make food taste better, and you wouldn't consider a fine wine or a boutique beer without a smoke to richly enhance the flavour.

10 Tips to Quit Smoking

Tip #1: Choose a strong, personal reason to quit

"Because it's bad for you" isn't good enough. To have the will power to quit and stay quit you need a powerful and personal reason to quit. Maybe you have small children and don't want to expose them to second hand smoke. Perhaps you have a family history of cancer and are deathly afraid. Come to a conclusion of what is the best reason for you to quit. Something that is mightier than the urge to light up.

Tip #2: Don't Just Go Cold Turkey

We've all heard of people going "cold turkey". It sound tempting to just throw out your cigarettes but going cold turkey is very difficult to do and I don't recommend it. 

Do You Know What Will Happen After You Stop Smoking?

What happens after you stop smoking? Aside from positive comments from friends and family, stopping smoking has immediate effects. You will be able to breathe easier and have an improved sense of smell and taste immediately after 20 minutes you stop; there are a lot more positive effects of stopping smoking and here are some of the most amazing:

    Lungs - what happens after you stop smoking? Will you be able to regain lung health that you had before you started smoking? Yes, you will be able to regain your usual breathing capacity after several weeks of quitting smoking; you will also be able to breathe easier during times of stress and exercise. Smoking is the cause of 1 out of 5 deaths in the United States according to the American Lung Association which is why it is recommended that a smoker quits as soon as possible.

Preparing Yourself With The Psychology For Quitting Cigarettes

The first thing you should know is that most smokers quit unsuccessfully several times before they quit for good. You will most likely not be successful your first time around - but you must keep trying! Each time you attempt to quit you come closer to finally quitting for good.

During or before you have your last cigarette, start to visualise yourself as a non-smoker. Visualisation is a very effective psychological technique not only for quitting cigarettes but for many other things as well.

There have been many scientific research studies to show how powerful visualisation can be. One that I recall, was a study done where athletes were wired to a machine used to measure muscle activity and asked to visualise themselves in the act of doing their event, say a 100 meter sprint. 

How To Quit Smoking - With Plain Cigarette Packaging

At the time of writing, the Australian government is about to introduce a law requiring cigarette companies to market their products in plain green packaging. I imagine they are thinking that, when a person asks how they can quit smoking, they think about the packaging.

Tobacco giant Phillip Morris is threatening to sue the Australian government.

Past efforts such as grisly images on packaging, no smoking signs and scary television ads have had little impact on smoking numbers. Smokers freely admit that quite often seeing an advertisement with a smoker dying in a hospital bed actually makes them want to smoke.

One client while watching television with his son, reported that as his young lad was becoming upset and pleading with him to quit, all he could think about was going outside to light up a smoke.

Stop Smoking Now - A Motivational Approach

Having taught motivational psychotherapy for many years at university I believe this is probably one of the best ways to give up smoking. It doesn't rely on teaching you stuff you already know or assuming that you don't know how to give up, but aims to kick start your intrinsic motivation so that you really, really want to stop smoking.

Let me ask you a very important question; what do you like about smoking? Think about it hard, and don't say "nothing." If that were true you would have given up by now. The reason that you haven't is because you still get something from it, be it the nicotine rush or relaxation or a hundred and one of the other things that cigarettes provide. Write out, or think about, a list of what smoking gives you and be honest with yourself. Include all the things that you feel you shouldn't own up to; be as honest as you can.

Health Effects Of Smoking - For People Wanting To Quit Smoking

Awful health effects of smoking are for the most part are always addressed whenever an article is written concerning facts about smoking. They emphasize that the smoke in cigarette contains poisonous nicotine drug and many other unsafe substances which are damaging to the lungs. The dreadful and scary statistics about death as a result of cigarette smoking is never missed to be included in these articles and reports to sway people away from smoking.

Yet smokers continue on inhaling this drug making it difficult for people who don't smoke to comprehend why. Well, besides being addicted to nicotine, people smoke tobacco to help calm themselves in dealing with difficult situations in their lives, such as peer pressure both for kids and adults, as their need to belong to group, and be perceived as cool and tough guy or gal; to name a few.

How To Prepare For Your 'Quit Cigarettes Day'

One popular way to quit cigarettes is to choose a "stop smoking day". As the name suggests, the point of choosing a day is to make the commitment to yourself that on a particular day, you'll stop smoking. Your goal is to fully load up on anything you may need on your journey towards becoming a non-smoker. So, how do you prepare for this day?

The first step is to write your intention and desire for quitting on a piece of paper, or an index card. Write down what you want to do and why. Then every morning after you wake up, read this note and reinforce your desire to quit smoking. You should also refer to this card any time you are tempted to smoke after your "stop smoking day". What you want to do is really start to generate some strong emotional traction around quitting and remaining a non-smoker. The more emotions you can develop around quitting and remaining a non-smoker, the more likely you'll be successful.

How Do Related Pulmonary or Lung Diseases Affect Quality of Life?

COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) is not just one disease, but a group of lung diseases mainly consisting of:

♦ Emphysema;

♦ Chronic bronchitis.

These are the two symptoms of COPD.

Since COPD is a progressive disease, it gets worse over time and makes it harder and harder to breathe. Coughing is a result of this disease and produces not only large amounts of mucus but shortness of breath, tightness of the chest, and wheezing.

How To Quit Smoking When You Suffer From Depression

It can be hard enough to quit smoking at the best of times, but if you want to know how to quit smoking when you also suffer from depression you are going to need to get support on several fronts.

Depression has both organic and emotional components. The emotional can be assisted by professional therapy, such as cognitive behavioural therapy. The organic aspect is usually well managed with specific selective Serotonin reuptake inhibitor medications such as Zoloft, Prozac and Paxil.

A person with depression will need the support of their medical specialist to assist and monitor their medications and their emotional state when they quit cigarettes.

'Help Me Stop Smoking' - How Hypnosis Can Help You

Knowing how powerful hypnosis can be to help someone quit cigarettes once and for all, it's a real shame that many people out there will never consider it simply because of the misconceptions they have about hypnosis, what it is and how it works.

My goal here is to share some information with you. It's the exact thing I tell people when I meet a smoker, I tell them what I do and then immediately they say to me "help me stop smoking!"

So how does hypnosis help people quit this horrible habit? It's quite simple really. It just takes away that huge overwhelming URGE TO SMOKE. At the end of the day, once you have decided to quit, you wouldn't smoke if you didn't feel like a cigarette would you?