Tips on Stopping Smoking
Perhaps one of the most obvious, yet so often missed, tips on stopping smoking is in understanding your habits and nicotine addiction. Only when “you know the enemy” can you make plans to defeat it. Quitting smoking is about changing your habits and breaking your nicotine addiction.
Although the word addiction may sound strong – that is exactly what the problem is. But the cigarette companies have always had the odds stacked heavily in their favor, because nicotine is the fastest addictive drug currently known to man.
In other articles on this site we have referred to the smoking habit, but we will now address two very different aspects of smoking dependency: physical addiction and smoking habits.
1. Physical addiction. According to the USA Public Health Service Clinical Practice Guideline Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence, nicotine is a very addictive drug. Some cigarette companies have themselves confirmed the highly addictive properties of nicotine.
2. The habits - invariably more than one - associated with smoking behavior that tend to continue to operate automatically even when a person consciously desires to act otherwise. Although all addiction, and indeed behavior, concerns the mind, we can call this second factor psychological addiction.
With a better understanding of these aspects of smoking and cigarettes, quitting smoking for good becomes far less of a hurdle..
Understanding Nicotine Addiction
Nicotine is the fastest addictive drug we know of, and it can take just a few cigarettes to become hooked (on average perhaps four) and just one to become re-hooked after a period of abstinence - in fact a single puff is usually enough to undo days of abstinence.
Its function in the tobacco plant is to act as a natural insecticide. It acts more quickly than a dose of heroin, although it does not have the powerful characteristics of heroin addiction which can result in criminality and more visible antisocial consequences. As we shall see though, the speed of the addictive stimulus is an important factor when it comes to withdrawal, so we need to take account of it.
Within seconds of puffing on a cigarette, nicotine is supplied to the brain and the craving ends. That results in the sense of relaxation that the smoker sometimes associates with the cigarette. It also accounts for any pleasurable or beneficial association between the immediate effect of the cigarette and the behavior related to it - such as lighting up after a pleasant meal, or when receiving a stressful telephone call to regain some feeling of control. Those positive associations, rather than the physical addiction, account for the psychological power of the ‘habit’.
The other side of the coin is that the effect wears off quickly - maybe within a quarter of an hour, and then you need another fix. That explains why most smokers average about 20 a day. Physical addiction is the minor part of the smoker’s problem, however, and one that has long been the subject of myths. So we need to set the record straight.
In 1527 Archbishop de las Casas of Spain wrote about tobacco addiction among Indians, and their reporting their inability to stop smoking.
In 1604 James I, King of England, wrote a denunciation of smoking due to tobacco’s addictive effect of which his doctors had told him.
In 1669 the French Academy of Science (comparable to the USA Surgeon General Committee of today) held a national medical conference on tobacco’s mental effects. The king’s physician, Dr Guy Fagon advised that experience had shown that tobacco use shortened human life.
On 26 March 1699 Dr Fagon reported that tobacco is “a poison that is more dangerous than hemlock, deadlier than opium… Assuredly, when people try it for the first time, they feel an uneasiness that tells us that we have taken poison.” But continuing, soon “all reasoning, all warning is in vain. He cannot shake off his enemy.. .tobacco alone becomes a fatal, insatiable necessity (addiction), - smoking is a permanent epilepsy.”
In 1798 the Surgeon General (Benjamin Rush, MD) under General George Washington during the Revolution, reported smoking’s adverse mental effect.
So, if you’re looking for tips on stopping smoking, start to analyze your habits and make notes of the circumstances of when and how you light up a cigarette. Then you will be much better equipped to change those habits and quit smoking for good.
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Tags: nicotine addiction, Quitting Smoking, smoking habits, tips on stopping smoking, Tips To Quit Smoking