In the last issue we talked about some of the basic facts and about doing a personal analysis to help you get started. In this issue we are going to go over few tips and suggestions that will help you stay on track while you are trying to kick the habit!

So you have made this far and you really want to quit smoking!

Quitting the smoking is a desire that many chain smokers wish would come true. Unfortunately it is not as easy as making a simple wish. However, it is often possible using the following tips and suggestions:

Have self-confidence: If you can believe in yourself then you have already won half of the battle. On bad days try to focus on days when you demonstrated strong willpower. To help boost your spirits and stay on track.

If you are having trouble quitting cold turkey, try cutting down on your smoking a little at a time instead. Think about how smoking is eating up your body and then focus on the reasons you want to quit. Remind yourself that when you quit smoking you will feel better and increase your lifespan.Think about how happy your family will be when you quit.

Add up all of the money you will save when you quit smoking. When you are feeling down dream about how you are going to spend it.

Remind yourself how nice it will be when your friends who hate smoking find out you quit.

Don’t panic: At first you may behave illogically and find that you will be restless and irritable. During those times keep in mind your friends and family are there to help you out . Ask them to be patient and understanding with you and give you support.

Exercise: This will allow you to relieve tension and will help you to stay on track. You could start walking, jogging or join a gym.You will be amazed at how much better you will fell after a short strolls and some fresh air. Don’t take on too much the beginning stages because you may feel fatigued when you first quit smoking. Be sure that you talk to your doctor before beginning any exercise routine.

Deep breathing is great to relieve stress as well. Try it for 3 to 5 minutes every day. Picture the times that you’ve refused a cigarette offered by someone and remember how proud of yourself you were.

If you are comfortable quitting cold turkey then go for it if not then take some time and plan to gradually cut down on the number of cigarettes you will have each day until you reach your goal and quit for good!

Keep changing your brands. This way you will stop enjoying smoking.

Search for a friend to quit with. That way you can motivate each other. Experience the pride in your clean teeth and fresh breath that isn’t possible with a smoking habit.

Make sure that you drink plenty of water everyday. It will help to flush all harmful chemicals out of your body. Did you know that it helps to reduce your craving for cigarettes?

Try to avoid all of the triggers that cause you want a cigarette like; stress, work load, a certain drink or perhaps a certain habits that you do everyday that involve smoking . In the beginning keep your mouth busy with things like hard candy, chewing gum or breath mints.

Plan your journey all the way to the day that you quit for good. Reward yourself over the passage of time. For instance after two weeks of being a non smoker, plan to see a movie. After continuing the battle for one month go to your favorite restaurant and so on. Above all remember quitting is a process and you may have good days and bad days. The most important thing to remember is to never give up until you win the battle!

Make sure you look for your next issue soon. We will be talking more about the advantages and side effects associated with quitting.

In each issue of Quit Smoking – The Road To Success you will learn valuable information on how you can successfully make it through the journey of becoming a non-smoker!

In this first issue we are going to go over a few basic facts about the dangers of cigarette smoking and talk about doing you own personal analysis, so that you can begin your journey.

First the facts:

Based on recent studies conducted by AMA, American Lung and Heart Associations and also the American Cancer society cigarette smoking is one of the main causes of premature death. Smoking is basically the same as giving yourself slow acting poison.

Smoking doesn’t just destroy the smoker’s health it also impacts the people close to you, like your family, friends and especially your children because their organs are still developing.

It is an accepted fact that cigarette smoking is the primary cause of preventable and premature death. Did you know it is the cause of one in every five deaths in United States alone. The data shows the deaths of over 400,000 individuals from 1995 to 1999 in the U.S. each year. Cigarette smoking acts as a catalyst in lung cancer, cardiovascular
diseases and persistent airway impediments.

Studies have shown that both adult males and females who smoke lose an average of around 13 to14 years of their life expectancy. If this pace of tobacco consummation goes on then approximately 6.4 million children will loose their lives prematurely.

Why am I telling you all of this? The answer is simple. Before you can quit you must come to terms with the fact that cigarette smoking is slowly killing you and the people close to you. Once you understand that you can begin your journey to becoming a non-smoker!

If you really do want to quit smoking you must be prepared to be completely honest with yourself about the dangers associated with smoking. Be ready to experience good and bad days and the possibility that it may take several attempts before you are successful.

- To begin your journey let’s start by doing a personal analysis.

It is a basic fact that smoking is more of psychological addiction than physical addiction. The Nicotine addiction in your body can be controlled, but the mind addiction is tough to control. One thing that helps you when it comes to quitting is to do a complete personal analysis.

Take a piece of paper and make two columns on it. At the top of one column put, the reasons for quitting. In the other column, write down the reason you started smoking.

Firstly, write down the reasons you took up smoking. It might have been some kind of pressure, family trouble, financial problems or some other reason. Now, determine whether or not these problems still exist. If they don’t, then it stands to reason that there is no need to smoke.

Now, write down the reasons you are thinking about quitting. It might because of the threat of fatal illnesses you caused by smoking, or your concern of causing harm to your loved ones. You may be experiencing breathlessness while coming upstairs. Your feet may be cold due to high blood pressure. You may be suffering from a persistent cough and it makes you feel uncomfortable. If this is the case then, health and well being will be one of the big reasons that you want to quit smoking.

On the other hand, it is very possible that health reasons alone will not convince you that you need to quit smoking. After all there is no way to be sure that you or your family will develop lung cancer or breathing problems because of smoking.

So you will also want to include other reasons. Such as, wrinkles, premature aging and drying of skin due to smoking. Bad breath, Your fingernails and teeth being yellow and stained. The smell that gets into your hair, cloths, home and even your car that tells everyone you smoke no matter how hard you try to cover it up. The looks from other people
when you smoke at public places. Not to mention the huge amount of money you are spending on cigarettes, air fresheners and breath mints. Have you ever added up how much you can save by quitting? I bet it would be enough for a nice little holiday.

Think about your family. How happy they will be after your quitting smoking. Think about your house. How clean and fresh it would be, no dirty yellow walls, or smelly furniture. Think about your friend and how you won’t have to hide your bad habit form them anymore. These are all great reasons to focus on for quitting smoking.

When you can divert your mind by focusing on all of the good things that will take place when you kick the habit once and for all, you will have a much easier journey on your road to becoming a non-smoker!

Make sure you look for your next issue soon. We will be going over a few tips and suggestions that will help you stay on track while you are trying to kick the habit!

When you start smoking, where would you place your chances for success at quitting one day? If you put your faith in statistics, you’d have a 5% chance at success. What happens to the rest of us is a potent mixture of extreme craving, unbearable headaches, and irritable twitchiness. The brain wants its nicotine the stimulants in tobacco that make receptors in the brain release pleasure-making dopamine.  Do you realize that in a world where smokers for 40 years have endlessly seen smoking bans, dire cancer warnings from the Surgeon General, pressure from friends and family, that 19 out of 20 people fail to quit even once they try? That is the power that chemicals like nicotine have over us; but if you want to quit, it does make sense to try to fight chemical with chemical, does it not? If you want to stop smoking, medication could be your way out.

When you have medicines pulling for you, what do those statistics say for your chances at success then? The improvement isn’t dramatic, but you do stand a fair chance now. That is what the US Public Health Service says -  if you wish to stop smoking medication can improve your odds by three times. It all depends on what kind of smoking habit you carry actually. If you take in more than 20 cigarettes a day, antidepressants like Wellbutrin and smoker-specific drugs like Chantix the most important drugs to really help you. Anything less than 10 cigarettes a day or so, and you need no help from drugs – you’re probably not addicted.

People realize that tobacco addiction is a pretty tenacious thing; and they understand that the drugs that you take for it would have to be particularly strong. They wonder if they’ll just end up substituting one addiction for another, or face up to some pretty serious side effects or organ damage these medicines can bring to the heart. Of course, you have to understand that tobacco smoke isn’t exactly the greatest thing for your heart either. None of the side effects actually have anything on nicotine when it comes to hurting your heart. But if you want to stop smoking medication is never going to cure you.. Think of it more as a way to treat your condition for as long as you live. The best thing to do would be to never let the habit in your life.

Let’s see then how the best stop-smoking medication can help. Wellbutrin happens to be your top-of-the-line drug choice. It’s actually an antidepressant that’s been discovered to help with nicotine cravings. Antidepressants are well known for the way they deal with the production of dopamine in the brain (you’ve heard of dopamine, haven’t you? It’s the chemical that helps brain cells communicate one with the other, and it also helps you feel pleasure and craving). Wellbutrin masses up the way nicotine jump starts dopamine production, and you stop getting your nicotine high. Chantix does great withheavy smokers who do two packs a day and have done so for decades. What it does is, it keeps the nicotine receptors busy in the brain so that you don’t feel the cravings at all. And if you happen to weaken midway and get a cigarette, Chantix makes sure that you don’t enjoy it at all.

The worst that you have with Wellbutrin is that you don’t just lose your interest in cigarettes; you lose your interest in food and sex too. And when you add into the mix some problems you might have with sleeping, your weight, and keeping your mouth properly moistened, it can get a little difficult. Chantix doesn’t make it any easier. You have constant suicidal thoughts when you take it, and you have trouble sleeping to boot. And with both drugs, you become less than friendly, and you’re likely to lose your cool rather often. Doctors use Wellbutrin with a tobacco patch sometimes too, and that’s a pretty successful approach. You need to ask your doctor. If all these side effects are beginning to scare you off, you need to think of this – when you quit, you stand to gain an additional 13 years in your life. That should be worth a few measly bucks now shouldn’t it?

There are countless individuals around the world who would like to quit smoking once and for all. This is to be expected when you consider all of the harmful effects smoking can have on your health. Now that everyone knows what smoking cigarettes does to the human body, smoking has certainly lost the bulk of its appeal. It is not like it was back in the 1950s when everyone thought it was so cool to have a cigarette hanging out of your mouth. These days men and women are doing all they can to kick this dirty habit. In fact, one of the newest methods is a stop smoking laser treatment. This can be acquired under the care of a real physician.

As time moves forward, more and more stop smoking programs and methods arise. Although you may not be familiar with it, there is acupuncture that is supposed to help people quit smoking. There are also patches that can be worn on the skin in order to deliver nicotine into the smoker’s body. There are several chewing gums that do the very same thing. The purpose is to give the smoker just enough nicotine so that he or she is able to quit smoking, but deal with the cravings at the same time. As far as stop smoking laser treatments go, this is one of the latest approaches to smoking cessation. It may be exactly what you have been looking for.

Naturally there are some pertinent websites that offer valuable information regarding stop smoking laser treatment programs. Take a look at sites like SmokingCessationOption.com, yourtotalhealth.ivillage.com, and nicorette.com in order to learn more about stop smoking laser treatment options. This is merely one of many options available to smokers everywhere. However, it does not mean that a laser treatment for smoking cessation is the best option out there for you. Then again, it is something worth talking to your doctor about. Be sure to ask him/her how the procedure works, and what the risks are. This way you can decide if a stop smoking laser treatment is right for you.

Most smokers know that this can be a very difficult habit to kick. In other words, you may have to try more than one approach to smoking cessation. The longer you have been smoking, the more difficult it may be to stop. This because you body gets so used to the habit and nicotine addiction, which makes the quitting process unbearable for some. However, with more powerful treatment options at your disposal, beating this addiction can be much easier than it was 20 years ago. Take the time to really investigate stop smoking laser treatments further. Especially since this method could be what stands between you and your next cigarette.