Health Tips

It’s often been said that the hardest part of accomplishing any task is taking the first step.  Like anything else in life, it is important to have a goal, as well as a plan to get there.  When you begin setting goals and plans to get started for quitting smoking, you will find a lot of resources that are available to you if you desire to stop the nicotine habit.

* The first thing you must do is decide why you want to quit.  The reasons may be health related, such as decreasing your risk of a heart attack, stroke, or other debilitating disease, or it may be psychological, such as wanting to be free of the addictive behavior, to feel in control of yourself again, or to set a good example for your children.  Another reasonable, and perfectly acceptable reason might be purely financial.  You can envision how much more money you will have, simply by not buying those cigarettes, or having to replace burned clothes and furniture.

Take a few minutes and write your reasons down on a piece of notebook paper, index card, in  your pda, wherever you will have quick access to them in moments of weakness.

* Second, evaluate where and when you light up the most.  Perhaps you light up, as most people do, with your morning cup of coffee.  Find something else to do with that cup of coffee, such as calling a friend, or perhaps walking outside, taking a deep breath of fresh air, and focusing on why you wanted to quit in the first place.

A successful tool to use in discovering more about why you smoke is to start a quitting diary.  It can be as simple as a notebook or as complicated as a word processing document.  What it needs to be however, is easily accessed by you each and every day.  If you choose to type it, be certain that you print it out and place it with your cigarettes so that you will remember to complete it.   Make an entry, before smoking, showing the time, place and reason for each cigarette, and give it a rating of 1 to 3.  A rating of 1 means that you really needed it, and number 3 means that it was a habitual cigarette, that you smoked almost without noticing it.

Take the first step in stopping smoking by eliminating your number 3 cigarettes first.  These are the cigarettes that will be the least painful to stop smoking.

* Third, examine why you smoke.  Does it bring you pleasure, give you energy or relax you when you are feeling stressful?  Understanding why you continue smoking, even after realizing that it is no good for you, can help you to quit.
* The final step in stopping smoking is to just do it.  Pick a date, and a method and go for it.  You can go “cold turkey”, taper off the number of cigarettes, or delay time between cigarettes.  Each way has it’s own pros and cons, but only you can know which way is best for you.