How to get started on quitting smoking

If you’re a smoker, there will come a point in your life, and it may even be now, that you will seriously be thinking of quitting. There are any number of reasons why this may be. Perhaps you don’t cherish your lovely smoker’s cough. Perhaps you are becoming more concerned about your health. It doesn’t really matter. The fact is that we know what smoking does to us, how it is affecting our lives and that eventually, we need to stop. But actually moving forward with that plan is sometimes the hardest part.

Perhaps, due to the ever-increasing methods of quitting available nowadays, choosing one has become a more difficult task. The best recommendation I can make here is to analyze each for its pluses and minuses and try to choose one that goes with your current lifestyle. Just by doing a little homework first, finding the method that will be the most successful for you, becomes far easier.

This was very difficult for me to choose at the time of my quitting as I had no idea as to which method was right for me. So the obvious first stop was to my local health practitioner to see which method had the fewest side effects and yet had a high success rate.

After discussing the many methods and their side effects, the conversation turned to the psychological battle that quitting smoking entails. For most people, myself included, this would be the most trying part of quitting.

One of the things that we discussed was preparing myself mentally to begin my life as a non-smoker and I had not even thought about that. I just assumed that I would stop smoking: a murderous rampage for about four days and be done with this little demon known as a cigarette. I had not even begun to contemplate that this would require making lifelong changes to my lifestyle.

With the conversation with the doctor behind me and with my method of quitting chosen, I picked a day two weeks out and used those two weeks to prepare myself and my home for the new lifestyle. I went so far as to steam clean my carpet and drapes; dispose of all my ashtrays; wash all my clothes; and lastly, began to smoke outdoors.

Quitting smoking is very hard thing to do, anybody who has quit is quick to tell you that it has been one of the most difficult things that they have done within their life. It is also one of the most rewarding accomplishments that one will achieve by overcoming your addiction to nicotine, I will be the first one to tell you how hard it is but being able to walk past the store and not have to worry about if you have enough cigarettes for the night, is absolutely priceless.

Trying to find a way to stop smoking? Better be quick to check out Darren Warmuth’s article on how to get going quitting smoking