How to Stop Cigarette Smoking: 3 Things You Need to Know

Each year, millions of people try to stop smoking and don't succeed. For a successful quit attempt, it's important to consider three things: your behaviour, your thoughts and feelings, and the chemical aspects of the cigarette smoking habit.

Behaviour

Your behaviour, especially the things you do automatically and without thinking, is part of what keeps you in the habit of smoking. To break the habit, you need to break the pattern of behaviour that has become associated with smoking in your mind.

If you always smoke in a particular chair, sit somewhere else. Put things on the seat of the chair so you can't sit there, or remove it altogether.

If you smoke when you drink coffee or alcohol, give yourself a break from those while you are dealing with your smoking habit.

If you always smoke in the car, take the bus if you can, or find some other way to break your pattern.

Thoughts and Feelings

Whether you're aware of it or not, there are certain thoughts and feelings that are associated with smoking in your mind. Smoking reinforces memory, and it changes the state of your brain. To be free from the cigarette smoking habit you need to shift your habitual thoughts and feelings.

Write down the thoughts and feelings you have just before you light a cigarette. Then create some different thoughts that will help you counteract those automatic thoughts, and spend some time sitting and saying first the old thought, and then the new thought. For example, you might have a thought that says "Having a cigarette will relax me." Your new thought might be, "Having a cigarette will raise my blood pressure and heart rate and stress my body. A few deep breaths will calm me down much better."

Chemicals

Smoking cigarettes puts a number of chemicals into your body. The addictive one among them is nicotine, which imitates a natural brain chemical that stimulates your brain. Although nicotine is poisonous in large amounts, in the doses that you get from cigarettes it's not the most dangerous part of the cigarette by any means.

This is why nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) can help you to stop smoking if you have a chemical addiction to nicotine. It gives even smaller doses, which help your mind and body adjust more slowly to being without nicotine and helps some of the more difficult symptoms you may otherwise experience, like irritability, stomach troubles or sleeping problems.

Talk to your doctor or other health provider about NRT. They should be able to assess whether it would help you and advise you how to use it, and in some countries they may be able to get it for you more cheaply.

By addressing what you do, how you think and feel, and the chemical side of your cigarette smoking, you can stop more easily and have a greater chance of remaining smokefree.