To Stop Smoking
The thought of quitting scares you?

• The thought of quitting scares you?
• No willpower to stop smoking
• It’s my choice to continue smoking
• I’ve got it under control
• I can’t stop
• They’ll find a vaccine against smoking
• Everyone I know smokes
• Smoking is social
• It didn’t kill my grandfather
• It’s not as bad as they say
• There are worse things than smoking
• If it was so bad, the government would make it illegal
• I smoke all-natural cigarettes
• Everyone smokes
• You have to die somehow...
• Tips to stop smoking
• Smoking and nicotine
• Quit without gaining weight
• Quit and manage your stress
• Quitting and physical activity
• Quitting and health benefits
• Quitting and withdrawal symptoms
• Failures and relapses
• The steps of the stop-smoking method

So the thought of quitting scares you? Or you’ve already stopped smoking, but you go through anxious moments when the need for a cigarette is too strong?

Congratulations!

Clicking to get here shows that you want to free yourself from tobacco for good!

Instead of lighting up, give yourself a moment to think about this:

• The urge to smoke only lasts a few minutes.
• You’re not weak or short of willpower: it’s normal to feel the urge to smoke when you try to free yourself from your addiction.
• Accept this PASSING crisis as a fact of life. Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself! If you do, your mind will use it against you to create dubious pretexts such as “Just one puff”, “I earned it”, or “It’ll be the last one”.
• Distract yourself by immediately DOING something you enjoy that’s good for you and for your health. Do this every time the urge to smoke comes back.

Remember this:

• If you get through this moment of need without smoking, your self-confidence and your pride will increase. As a result, future cravings (whether minor or major) will become less frequent.
• On the other hand, if you do light up a cigarette, the urge will come back much more quickly.
• So look for positive ways of getting rid of or getting through stress, anger, depression or other emotions.

Two Simple Tips to Help You Stop Smoking

When the urge to light up gets too strong, do this instead:

1. Yawn! It’s the body’s natural reflex to get more oxygen.
2. Take a moment to stretch.
   
   Standing up, or lying on the ground, lift your arms above your head, pointing your hands and fingers. Visualize yourself as an arrow. Breathe in deeply and stretch out as far as you can while clenching all your muscles. Keep this pose for three to five seconds, then quickly release it. Repeat three to five times.

To benefit even more from these simple tips, combine them with simple mental imaging or visualisation techniques. To find a technique that suits you, search the Internet for “visualization techniques”.

Expect Unpleasant Symptoms When You Stop Smoking

There are too many physical and psychological symptoms when someone stops smoking to list them all here. Nevertheless, here are a few: rage, depression, sadness, anxiety, doubts, guilt, insomnia, difficulty breathing, palpitations, skin rash, etc.

Don’t worry: these are normal symptoms and they are usually a good sign. They mean that your body and your mind are adapting to change.

The strength and duration of these symptoms vary between individuals, based on the number of years smoking, the number of cigarettes smoked, and the body’s ability to heal itself.

In addition to nicotine replacement therapies (NRT), which double your chances of freeing yourself from tobacco, you can also make it easier for yourself to stop smoking if you eat well and exercise. If you also cultivate a positive attitude when you face difficult moments and maintain your relationships with friends, then you’re really putting the odds on your side!

Worried? Feel free to post questions in the iQuitNow Stop-smoking discussion group on the site's interactive section. There, you can benefit from the experience of others who have been there before or who, like you, are trying to quit.

On the site's interactive section, you can also turn to the iQuitNow Stop smoking help line. Specially-trained experts are ready to listen to you and to answer your questions.

Quitting Can Give You the Blues

Do you have negative thoughts bouncing around in your head?

« Will the urge to smoke ever end? »

« I don’t have enough willpower. »

« I must be weak. »

« I’m always on edge. »

« I keep getting weepy. »

« I get angry for no good reason... »

These thoughts make it harder for you to quit smoking. You may start thinking “If it’s going to be this bad, I might as well light one up!” Just a sec!

To get rid of cigarettes, you must :

To reach these two goals, you need more information.

Understanding the Power of Cigarettes

The Age at Which People Start to Smoke

The teenage brain

Almost 80% of current adult smokers fell into tobacco’s trap as teenagers. At that age, the brain is not yet fully developed.

Introducing a substance like tobacco, which acts directly on important parts of the brain, is sure to have an effect. For example, it can create permanent changes, like an increased susceptibility to mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, etc.

Recent studies show that many teenagers are genetically predisposed to fall quickly into nicotine’s grip: symptoms of addiction appear with the very first cigarette!

The wrong tool

What’s more, adolescence is a key stage in the development of personality. Turning to a substance that quickly becomes linked to all of life’s events – by the power of the physical dependency it establishes – also creates a strong psychological dependency.

Cigarettes become crutches used to face difficult moments and to accompany other life events. The teenage smoker fails to develop, or to develop fully, the ability and strategies to cope with those situations and with the emotions that come with them.

So it’s not surprising that quitting as an adult is such a challenge!

Duration and Quantity of Exposure to Tobacco

More is bad

• The younger you are when you start to smoke, the greater the risk of smoking more and for longer.
• The longer you smoke, the more cigarettes you consume.
• The more cigarettes you smoke:
  • the greater the danger associated with the effects of toxic products on the body’s functions (physical addiction and diseases);
  • the stronger the link between cigarettes and all the events in your life: this is what creates psychological dependency. In other words, it’s as if each cigarette adds another brick to the walls of your prison; it increases the weight of your dependency

Lots is worse

The psychological and physical addiction to tobacco is so strong that some people relapse even after many years of not smoking. How can this be?

• A “puff” carries nicotine to the brain in less than 10 seconds. The effect is satisfying: the brain releases endorphins and other neurotransmitters, which induce a sense of well-being.
• Each cigarette provides 10 to 12 puffs. Each of those puffs injects a drug (nicotine) which gives the smoker an almost immediate sense of well-being, primarily because of the feeling of relief that nicotine brings to a brain that is suffering withdrawal symptoms.
• How many times each day and each year has your well-being depended on this drug? Figure it out: if you smoke 10 cigarettes a day, that 100 puffs a day, 36,500 a year. If you smoke 20 a day, that’s 200 puffs/day, 73,000/year. Now, multiply that by the number of years you’ve been smoking...

The consequences

Each of those hundreds of thousands of puffs has registered in your brain (linked with the accompanying situations and emotions) and in your body (repetition of the same gesture). What’s wrong with this? Each of those puffs has been linked in a positive way to whatever you were experiencing at that time.

Whether the situation was pleasant, unpleasant, or boring, a cigarette was always there to make you feel good.

As a result, you may say things like: “A cigarette goes so well with a cup of coffee, with a nice cold beer”, “I enjoy smoking!”, “When I stopped smoking, it was like I lost my best friend”, and so on.

In fact, there is no real link between smoking and those situations and feelings. It’s just a form of conditioning or programming. But this programming can trip you up and lead to a relapse, projecting you back into the grip of cigarettes after months or years of freedom. A relapse often occurs during a joyful social event, but more often during stressful or unpleasant times. Your former “best friend” will pop up automatically because you’ve used it to face so many similar situations in the past.

The good news is that programming, however powerful it may be, can be changed!

Ending It Once and For All

Based on the information above, it doesn’t really make sense to talk about lack of willpower, about being stupid, or about other “character flaws”. Stop banging your head against the wall!

If you bear in mind the explanations we’ve given, it will allow you to avoid many traps. Awareness and knowledge are very effective tools to help you deprogram yourself.

You may agree, and yet still say “I’ll never be able to do this! My genetic baggage and the weight of my memories and familiar gestures await me at every turn. What can I do?”

You’ve just given the answer: “do”!

Even if it sounds too good to be true, it’s real.

But what can you do when you’re experiencing a storm of emotions, feelings, contradictory thoughts, and unpleasant physical symptoms

The Answer:

1. The Answer:, eusing :
   • the information and online help on this site;
   • the fantastic mutual aid you can find on this site, given freely and without judgment by the virtual community that brings the discussion group and the chat room to life;
   • the information available on other good sites such www.stop-tabac.ch/fr/en or in books. Here are some suggested reading materials which will help you get through this time more calmly and understand that you can live without the crutch provided by cigarettes:
     • The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, by Allen Carr.
     • The Instinct to Heal or Healing without Freud or Prozac, books by David Servan-Schreiber.
       See his site for a description.
     • Albert Ellis works on the Rational Emotive Behaviour approach.
     • In a different vein, but potentially equally useful in regaining control of your life: Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.

2. Choose actions and steps that are within your reach.
3. Perform those actions!!!
   Never let the obsessive nature of mental noise take over. And if this doesn’t work?
4. Repeat the process!
   

Each year, thousands of people just like you free themselves from tobacco’s hold. You can do it too. Really, you can!