You know you need to stop smoking. You’ve read that smoking causes lung, bladder, throat and mouth cancer. Your health and life insurance rates will go down when you quit. Maybe you’ve lost a friend or loved one from the effects of smoking. Perhaps your concerned about developing other lung diseases, such as emphysema or chronic obstructive lung disease from smoking. If you didn’t already have enough reasons, consider that smoking decreases the average smoker’s life by over 22 years. Over 2 million Americans die each year from the effect of smoking tobacco products.
Now you’re ready to quit. You’re considering whether to just quit, going cold turkey, or to use a product designed to help to quit. Consider these options in details.
Cold Turkey:
Quitting cold turkey is cheap; you just have to refrain from smoking. Is it easy? No. In fact, quitting cold turkey is the harder way to quit. For one thing, it’s psychologically difficult. Nearly 100 percent, over 95 percent to be exact, of those who quit cold turkey resume smoking in less than one year.
Additionally, most of those who quit cold turkey go it alone, relying solely on will power without any support mechanism. This is bound to fail for physical reasons that will be discussed in the next section. Some people do succeed, perhaps three to 10 percent do eventually succeed. The odds are not in favor of your being able to quit cold turkey and remain off cigarettes forever.
Thomas Glynn of the American Cancer Society remarks, “It’s like tightrope-walking without a net. It’s natural to want to try to quit independently. Most people think they can handle quitting on their own, but they typically underestimate how powerful nicotine dependence really is.”
Quitting cold turkey is also physically difficult. This is because nicotine, the component of tobacco that makes smoking feel good, is physically addictive. That means that nicotine binds to special receptors in your brain called dopamine receptors. When nicotine binds to dopamine receptors, it enhances feeling of pleasure. It’s no wonder that dopamine, the body’s natural molecule that binds to dopamine receptors, is also called the pleasure molecule. When you give up smoking without replacing something real to bind to dopamine receptors, you feel the withdrawal symptoms of irritability, insomnia and depression. These unpleasant symptoms can last up to three months.
Stop Smoking Products:
A better and more effective to quit smoking is to use a product that helps you stop smoking. Using an actual product helps in two ways. First, it replaces the habit of smoking with a new habit, one that doesn’t involve tobacco. Think about smoking in detail for a moment.
There’s a ritual involved. You draw out a cigarette, or perhaps roll you own. You light it. You move your hands in a coordinated way as you inhale. This ritual becomes associated with feeling good as you smoke. You need to do something to replace the ritual. Now you need to replace smoking tobacco as the source of nicotine.
A product designed to help you stop smoking will do just that. It’ll substitute for the nicotine in the tobacco you used to smoke, and give you the same pleasurable feeling you received when you smoked.
Different kinds of products to help you stop smoking are available. Some include prescribed drugs. Other include patches, gums or a type of cigarette that doesn’t use tobacco but delivers a measured dose of an agent to help you stop smoking. Joining a group of people who are quitting helps you stay motivated as you quit.
When you think about everything you’ve just read, you can see that using a product to help you stop smoking is the better way to stop smoking successfully.
