Contents
Understand Your Smoking Habit
Reasons to Quit Smoking
How to Get Emotional Support Before Quitting Smoking
How to Get Medical Support Before Quitting Smoking
Alternative Methods for Quitting Smoking
How to Choose a Quit Date
How to Stay Quit
How to Deal with Regression
|
 |
 |
 |
|
How to Choose a Quit Date
Once you’ve identified your reasons for quitting, enlisted the support of family and friends, and consulted a physician to determine your quitting method, it’s time to pick a quit date—the day on which you stop smoking.
How to Pick a Quit Date
Rather than planning to quit “soon,” choose a specific date on which you will quit and circle it on your calendar. The
following guidelines can help you to pick a quit date:
- Make it soon: Pick a date no later than two weeks after you finish all of your pre-quitting preparations.
- Make it symbolic: If possible, consider choosing a day that’s meaningful or symbolic in some way.
- Make it stress-free: Choose a day that will make quitting as easy as possible for you. You might want to quit on a weekend, when you’ll have family or friends around to support you, or on a weekday, when work will distract you.
Getting Ready for Your Quit Date
To prepare for your quit day, tell people about your quitting plans, think about how you want to approach your final cigarettes, and be realistic.
Telling People about Your Quitting Plans
Once you’ve picked a quit date, tell friends, family, and coworkers about your plans. Announcing your quit date will make the prospect of quitting more definitive and official. It will also help to ensure that you have plenty of people supporting you and checking up on your progress. The prospect of failing publicly can actually serve as an effective incentive to not smoke.
The Final Cigarettes
Between now and your quit date, you can keep smoking. How you approach your final cigarettes is up to you. You have three basic options:
- Proceed as usual: Some people smoke their usual amount until their quit date arrives.
- Smoke a lot: Many people want to smoke as much as possible before the arrival of their quit date. You won’t get more physically addicted if you go this route, though some exerts argue that it is psychologically counterproductive to smoke excessively just before you try to quit.
- Cut down: Some people eliminate the cigarettes they crave most (after dinner, for example, or first thing in the morning) before their quit date. Others eliminate the ones they smoke thoughtlessly and don’t really crave. The psychological benefits of cutting down on cigarettes are significant, though cutting down over a short period of time won’t make you less physically addicted to cigarettes.
Be Realistic
All of your preparation will help you quit, but for most smokers quitting is still very tough, even with the aid of therapy and medication. To keep your perspective as realistic as possible during this physically and emotionally challenging time, there are a few points to bear in mind:
- You’re going to feel grumpy, tired, anxious, and weak.
- Sometimes you’ll crave a cigarette badly.
- Everyone who quits has these feelings at times.
- The feelings will diminish and eventually disappear.
Expecting quitting to be difficult will help you manage the inevitable physical and emotional challenges more effectively, which can thus help prevent a relapse.
Start Your Plan
If your doctor has prescribed medication or you’ve joined a group program, your quitting plan will begin a week or so before your actual quit date.
On Your Quit Date
This is the first day of your new smoke-free life. That means that you shouldn’t smoke at all—not even one puff of a cigarette. Many attempts to quit fail because people mistakenly believe that they can smoke just one cigarette without doing themselves any harm. Unfortunately, that one cigarette almost always leads them back to smoking regularly.
Get Rid of All Cigarettes and Smoking Paraphernalia
Go through your living space, car, office, and everywhere else you spend time and collect the following items:
- Packs of cigarettes
- Loose cigarettes
- Lighters and matches
- Ashtrays
- Clothing and other items from tobacco companies
Don’t hold back even one cigarette in case of an emergency. Throw everything away. For extra symbolic emphasis, you might want to drive your cigarettes and smoking paraphernalia to the dump or perform some other goodbye ceremony of your own choosing.
Activate Your Plan
If an NRT product is part of your quitting strategy, start using it. Follow any advice or guidelines provided by your doctor or quitting support group.
Stay Busy
Plan lots of activities for your quit date. Take a jog, go to the movies, call up old friends, visit a spa—do whatever it takes to distract yourself and keep busy.
Avoid Smoke-Inducing Situations
Eventually, you’ll learn to avoid smoking in even the most tempting situations. Your quit day is not the time to start that learning process. Instead, avoid people and places likely to trigger the desire to smoke. This might mean skipping the bar after work or avoiding friends who smoke. Eventually, you’ll have to face these tempting situations without smoking, but exposing yourself to them early in the quitting process is just inviting a relapse.
Stay Hydrated
Drink lots of water. This will make you feel full and satisfy your desire to bring your hand to your mouth.
Don’t Drink Alcohol
For many smokers, alcohol is one of the strongest smoking triggers. Alcohol’s taste and smell can make you want to smoke, and the clouding effect that alcohol has on your head can impair your judgment and weaken your resolve.
| Acknowledgments & Disclaimer |
