Stop Smoking Tips

Handling the emotional as well as the psychological urges to grab a cigarette can be difficult – but never impossible. There are several tips that you can use and when planned they work wonderfully.

Do NOT wait until the urge is so great that you can’t figure out how to stop yourself. Instead choose several of these tips and keep them with you at all times.

1. Don’t fantasize about the cigarette but instead visualize what life would have been like as an addicted smoker, clothing filled with stench and lungs slowly turning black with tar.

2. Visualize that with each inhalation you are being robbed financially of thousands of dollars, of your health, your endurance and possibly your life.

3. Smoking is unacceptable in many circles; you’ll be inhaling thousands of poisonous chemicals into your lungs and poisoning the children and friends who choose to stay around you.

4. Consider all of the consequences when you think about smoking again or watching another smoker. Feel pity and not envy. Consider the life they are leading as compared to the healthier, simpler and wealthier life you are living today.

5. Take a deep breath, hold it for a few seconds, and exhale as if you had just taken your first puff on a cigarette. Part of the feeling you get from smoking is a direct result of taking a deep breath. A deep breath allows you to take in a maximum amount of oxygen, and exhaling lets out large quantities of carbon dioxide. This results in a feeling of relaxation. Try it, you’ll see.

6. Take a sip of water several times during this five minute period. It can help to diminish the need to smoke, and gives you something to do with your hands. The extra water will also help to flush the nicotine out of your body.

7. Put something in your mouth that has no calories, such as a stirrer, gum, a toothpick, or another substitute for a cigarette.

8. Get busy with something, anything, to keep you busy for the next five minutes – walk, talk with a friend, talk with your boss. Make it something active and not passive – do NOT read a book or magazine or watch television. DO – use a medicine ball, take a walk, brush the dog, etc.

9. As long as it does not lead to a craving, chew a piece of gum or a piece of hard candy. Life Savers work well.

10. Get up and move around for five minutes. It will help the urge to smoke to pass
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If none of these ten tips to stop smoking works, try a nicotine replacement therapy such as the nicotine patch. It’s better to use a nicotine patch, gum, inhaler or lozenge and quit smoking than to suffer through the cravings and give in to another cigarette.

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