Posts Tagged ‘breaking habits’
Before you actually try to quit smoking you will have to totally rethink your life. You probably relax after work with with a cigarette, vent about
your problems while smoking, and drive while smoke. You probably even need a cigarette to help you think and focus on major issues. It’s not easy to remove what has become a staple in your life, but literally rethinking your daily schedule will.
If you have habits that you associate with smoking cigarettes, avoid them. Well, you can’t exactly avoid driving but if you frequent a particular bar with your smoking buddies, don’t go until you’ve kicked your habit. Smoking has been widely considered as addictive as street drugs, so you will have to take similar actions in order to successfully quit. This may sound extreme, but if you’ve tried unsuccessfully to quit smoking before you might want to think about why you failed.
Withdrawal is how your body copes with losing it’s favorite drug, nicotine. Pretty much everyone who quits smoking can expect some sort of withdrawal as they quit.
Everyone is different. Quitters may experience physical and/or mental symptoms. All are natural as our body fights to expel the drugs from our system. Stay strong as withdrawals symptoms don’t last forever. They usually become less noticeable after the first 4-5 days.
Physical Symptoms.
During the process of quitting, people should treat the physical symptoms as they would any other illness and treat them accordingly:
* Tingling in the hands and feet
* Sweating
* Intestinal disorders (cramps, nausea)
* Headache
* Cold symptoms as the lungs begin to clear (sore throats, coughing, and other signs of colds and respiratory problem)
Anxiety, headaches, and cravings are common with most people quitting and will subside over time. The worst of these will be in the first 3 or 4 days but you probably wont feel completely safe for a month or so. I quit in 2004 and haven’t had a craving in years even though I am in a high stress job and can even go shopping and smell smoke from someone smoking and all it does is disgust me now!
Mental Symptoms.
Cravings build up during periods of withdrawal, sometimes to a nearly intolerable point. Nearly every moderate to heavy smoker experiences more than one of the following strong emotional and mental responses to withdrawal.
*Insomnia
*Irritability
*Anxiety
*Depression is common in the short term. It may mimic the feelings of grief felt when a loved one is lost. As foolish as it sounds, a smoker should plan on a period of actual mourning in order to get through the early withdrawal depression.
“Quit smoking!” Ah, the phrase you’ve been hearing from your friends and family for a long time now and you’ve tried and tried and tried and just can’t seem to quit. You might have tried meditation, patches or just cutting it out dead. But, you just can’t manage to completely quit. You find yourself needing a smoke whilst you’re out with friends or find yourself in a stressful situation at work. What else can you try? Well, have you tried the electronic cigarette?
Some research suggests that the sheer action of moving a cigarette up to your mouth and ‘drawing’ from the cigarette is the addictive part, You’ve done it so often, it becomes part of your day-to-day movements. Other forms that try to get you to quit smoking ignore this movement, for example patches, and focus on the chemical imbalance that is created when you stop smoking.
Say, “hello” to the eCigarette. It’s an extremely simple piece of kit that is an aid for you to quit smoking for good. Shaped just like a cigarette, it acts as the substitute for the smelly and chemical-filled “death-stick”. The electronic cigarette is simply made up of two compartments, being the battery and the cartridge. The cartridge is the important part, since this is where the ‘smoke’ is stored. When puffed on, it ejects the smoke which stimulates the ‘drawing’ behavior of smoking.
If you’re used to smoking 20 cigarettes a day, don’t forget, by being at the quit smoking stage, you’ll be saving yourself so much money. The battery with this eCigarette can last up to 300 puffs, thanks to it containing lithium ion. This battery actually heats up the liquid that is contained in the stick, which in turn creates the smoke. Having the option of choosing a regular or menthol flavor will help you if you’re not used to smoking one particular type of cigarette prior to when you quit smoking.
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There are many people who have managed to stop smoking successfully and then gained some weight after doing so. When asked why they think they put on the weight there are two answers that always surface. One is that they can actually taste the food now and cannot get enough and the other is an uncontrollable urge to eat which results in weight gain and possibly obesity. Many people are under the misconception that they have put on weight because they gave up smoking.
Smoking is a Habit
There are 3 reasons why it is so difficult to give up smoking; these are addiction, association and habit. It is impossible to give up smoking without understanding what these mean. We will look at habit. What does it mean? A habit is defined as something that you do so often that it just becomes an automatic thing to do whether this is consciously or subconsciously. Of course a habit is incredibly hard to break and it has been found that the easiest way is to replace the habit.
The issue here is that a person who has quit smoking is still brainwashed into a habit, therefore when they replace it with something else, whether it be gum, candy or food they form a habit with that thing, which is why so many people then gain weight. In saying this of course, a habit in regards to food and gaining weight is so much easier to correct than a smoking habit.
Find a Good Replacement
There are so many things that you can replace smoking with that are a much healthier choice. When a craving hits, you could try water. Every time you feel like a cigarette, pick up a glass of water instead. There are many alternatives, I have heard of people having books to read when a craving hits or they do breathing exercises or even some gym exercise. Whatever works for you to distract yourself from that craving but in a healthy way.
What to Do When You’re Overweight
Obviously, food tastes much better once you give up smoking but you cannot blame everything on giving up smoking. It does not matter whether you have never smoked in your life or if you have just given up you need to live a healthy life. At the end of the day, if you have found that you have put on weight, this can be fixed a lot easier than the habit of smoking. There are so many programs out there these days that will help you lose some of that weight you gained.
So when you finally make the decision to be smoke free permanently you need to choose a healthy habit to replace it with. Now there are many people out there who just can’t do it without gum or candy or other unhealthy choices, my personal opinion is that giving up smoking is the goal, so you just have to do whatever you need to do to get over the smoking habit, and then work with the new habit of eating unhealthy food.
