How To Quit Smoking Tips

The best tips to quit smoking starts with understanding your habits and why you are addicted to smoking. When you smoke a cigarette, it’s not so much the amount of nicotine in your blood that you want or think you need: you can hardly tell it’s there. What you really want are the sensations you get, for just a few seconds, when a dose of nicotine is entering your body.

You know the feeling. For a moment your heart races and you feel a dizzy kind of intoxication. Extra adrenalin runs through your body. It’s a feeling of excitement, a very brief ‘lift’ or ‘high’. It’s a nicotine buzz.

There has been (and continues to be) a lot of research into how to stop smoking. In the many experiments that have been performed to test how much smokers need the nicotine, as against how much they desire the effects (as listed above), the nicotine was delivered gradually, over one hour. If it had been administered quickly the subjects would have been aware of it and it would have felt to them like smoking, delivering a buzz and thus satisfying their desire to smoke.

If you have ever tried using nicotine replacement products, such as gum, patches or lozenges, you will know what I’m talking about. It delivers the nicotine too slowly to be truly satisfying. Some people can get a very mild buzz from it, and can even get hooked on it, just as some get hooked on other slow-delivery methods, like non-inhaling pipe and cigar smokers.

Nicotine in your blood, even if delivered very gradually, will make your heart beat a little bit faster, among other things, but the effect it has is much more subtle. For the vast majority of cigarette smokers, the buzz is the most important thing, and you only get that from a sudden, rapidly absorbed dose of nicotine. This buzz is something we need to be aware of when we try any of the stop smoking methods, as willpower alone is not always enough.

Unfortunately this increased heart rate isn’t real energy - otherwise athletes would smoke during marathons. It’s a false stimulation, and like all artificial highs it’s immediately followed by a depressed state. To make matters worse, cigarette smoke includes many poisons too, so although the heart is beating faster there is less energy-producing oxygen in the blood. This is why most smokers find they have more energy when they’ve stopped.

Getting It Right

As you are no doubt aware, the buzz is stronger when you haven’t smoked for a while. It’s at its best when a dose of nicotine rapidly enters a brain and body that contain relatively low levels of nicotine. Like the first cigarette of the day, for example.

But the balance has to be right, because for most smokers, if you smoke too infrequently the sensations are too strong and can even make you nauseous. So you need to keep smoking a certain amount in order to maintain some tolerance.

On the other hand, if you smoke too frequently you don’t get enough buzz. This is the bad news: the buzz is subject to "rapid acute tolerance". This means that after the first puff of the first cigarette you’ve had in a while, you get a much weaker sensation. Quite probably, most of the cigarettes you smoke in a day don’t manage to deliver a good buzz, but you keep trying anyway. I know I did.

This is the reason why smokers can still have a desire to smoke even though they’ve got plenty of nicotine in their body. For some smokers there are times when smoking a cigarette doesn’t satisfy the desire, so that they still feel a craving while actually smoking.

That’s because they are still wanting the buzz but just not getting it. For some this can develop into chain-smoking, which is a continuous and largely unsuccessful attempt to satisfy their desire to smoke. So when you’re giving up smoking you need to find a replacement for this buzz that your body is striving for.

It’s a never-ending tease, delivering the prize just often enough to keep you interested. You try to get that buzz feeling as often as you can, waiting in between cigarettes for as long as possible for the nicotine level to drop a bit, so that it feels strong enough when the nicotine goes in. This is why cigarettes are particularly enjoyable after physical exercise and after a meal: the nicotine level has been brought down, giving you a better buzz when you smoke.

So one of my tips to quit smoking is to be aware of this buzz, and look for something to replace it. Exercise is a great (and healthy) way to get a similar sort of buzz – honestly. Try it – you’ll see.

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