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3 Basic Tips to help you Quit Smoking - Cold Turkey, Nicotine Patches, or Hypnotism?
There are probably many ways that smokers have devised to help themselves quit smoking. Many smokers have good intentions to quit smoking, but just cannot seem to succeed. Those non-smokers, who look at smokers as failures when they are unable to quit, do not understand the situation. Nicotine is a highly addictive drug found in cigarettes, cigars and in pipe tobacco which the smoker needs and craves constantly. Quitting an addiction is not even in the same class as, say, quitting biting your nails or popping your gum. It is difficult to quit smoking, and there are really three main ways that most people seem to try:
- Quit Smoking Cold Turkey
Quit smoking cold turkey is a good way to give up cigarettes, provided you have an iron willpower to match, although it is not known what a turkey has to do with it. To quit smoking cold turkey means to abruptly quit smoking cigarettes. Once the smoker quits smoking cold turkey, the goal is to never smoke another cigarette again. No drugs or medical aids are used when a person quits smoking cigarettes using this method. Fierce willpower, and maybe someone the smoker can call when the urge gets too strong, is required to do this.
- Nicotine Gums & Nicotine Patches
Some smokers use nicotine gums and / or patches to help them quit smoking. These nicotine patches replace the nicotine the smoker normally gets from the cigarette. The idea is to wean the smoker off the cigarettes by gradually using patches containing less nicotine. This technique to quit smoking sounds like a perfectly reasonable approach, however critics claim that nicotine patches merely prolong the painful nicotine withdrawal period. Each smoker and their doctor will have to decide for themselves whether the nicotine patch is right for them.
- Hypnotism
Hypnotism is a popular method with varied effectiveness. The hypnotist places the smoker into a highly suggestive state, and convinces the smoker that he or she no longer needs cigarettes. The effectiveness of hypnotism in quitting smoking is questionable, however. The results are almost impossible to reproduce in a laboratory setting, and the effectiveness varies with the skill of each hypnotist and the ease with which the patient responds to the hypnotism.
There are other alternative methods people use to quit smoking cigarettes such as substituting a sweet for a cigarette, only buying 10 cigarettes at a time, only going shopping when you still have some cigarettes, etc. It is far more difficult to quit smoking than non-smokers think. For reasons only they understand (and sometimes even they don't), smokers have become addicted to the potent and dangerous drug nicotine. Some experts suggest that nicotine is as addictive, or more addictive, than many illegal drugs. The effort to quit smoking is worthwhile and any reduction in smoking will help to improve your health, whichever method is chosen. Once the body is free of cigarettes for a while, it begins repairing the damage of years or even decades of smoking. That's why people who want to quit smoking should keep trying as many times as it takes to succeed.
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