You know you’re not doing yourself any favors by continuing to smoke, yet despite your best intentions, the first thing you do each day is light up a cigarette. If you’re wondering whether you’ll ever be able to quit, consider this. Smoking – nicotine – is addictive, and with any addiction, quitting brings with it withdrawal symptoms. You can conquer these.

There are many ways to quit smoking. There is the “cold turkey” method where you simply decide to stop. You throw away your cigarettes and you just quit – cold turkey. This method is appealing to many people because they seem to be able to get it over with quickly. Withdrawal symptoms will occur, but as long as their mind is firmly focused on the desire to quit, it is very successful.

There is also the “cutting back” method, in which you set a timeframe during which you will smoke less than you have been in the past. Once that time period has ended, you decrease even further and proceed incrementally through more timeframes at lesser and lesser amounts of smoking until you finally reduce the amount you smoke to zero.

At first glance, this cutting-back method may seem like the easiest way to quit, however it may be harder than it looks. Studies have found that often when a person has cut back, they eventually go back to smoking as much as they were before the quit attempt started.

Another way to stop smoking more easily is to use stop smoking aids – or nicotine replacement – in order to manage the cravings for this addictive substance as the smoking decreases. Nicotine aids popularly come in the form of stop-smoking gum, or nicotine patches that apply to the skin and supply small amounts of nicotine through the skin into the bloodstream.

More recently, there has become a stop smoking aid available in pill form that helps to block the receptors in the brain, decreasing the need for nicotine. There are potential side effects to this pill, but it appears to be very effective in helping smokers quit the habit.

So, what steps can you take to make it easier to quit smoking? Keep a journal of any activities, events, or stresses that seem to trigger a need for a smoke. For instance, when you find yourself absolutely craving a smoke, make a note of what things you were focused on leading up to the event. Then on a regular basis keep track of what seems to trigger this behavior.

Once you have chosen a method to quit smoking, whether cold turkey, cut-back, or through the use of a stop smoking aid, keep another journal in which you describe the results. Have the symptoms or cravings improved? Are they worse?

If you are taking a stop smoking aid, keep a record of what you take and when. Is it helping with the cravings? Are there any side effects? Keep track of when side effects occur and how severe they are. Having this information handy will give you an objective view of how this aid is assisting with your efforts to stop smoking.

Setting up journals like the ones described here is easy to do. You can use a paper worksheet, a computer word processing program, or even a spreadsheet program like Excel.

You owe it to yourself to take an active role in managing your own health. Smoking is not simply detrimental to your health. It has the ability to kill you in so many different ways, that is has become one of the greatest poisons of all time. With a proper approach, it can be controlled and eliminated, but you need to use every tool at your disposal to be successful in quitting smoking.

About the Author:

Jason Jantzi writes for www.Health-Kit.com and is a specialist in researching treatments for pain and discomfort. Download a free Quit Smoking Health Kit from http://www.health-kit.com/health/quitting-smoking/ and get the best help quitting smoking today.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Smoking Cessation Techniques Makes Quitting Smoking Easy

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