When you quit smoking, you will experience a number of symptoms, also called the quit smoking symptoms.

It is quite natural because, your body over a longer period has become accustomed to take in poisons in the form of nicotine, tar and the like. When you quit smoking, and thereby no longer lets those toxins into the blood, the body begins a cleansing of the poison, and that is what might be called quit smoking symptoms.

The symptoms you may experience vary significantly from person to person, but it is important that you prepare yourself for the coming internal fight. The quit smoking symptoms you suffer from will give you an excuse to try to justify that you start smoking again. You must fight against this negative process and stick with your decision to stop smoking.

One thing that is important to remember before reading further, is that I will list the most common quit smoking symptoms, and you will most likely only be able to recognize some of them, but do not worry, it is quite normal.

1. The most normal quit smoking symptom, would be your almost irresistible urge to start smoking again, your body will almost scream for nicotine, and your internal dialogue will be divided between your desire to escape your addiction, and the desire to to stop the unpleasant symptoms.

This symptom is not so hard to get through, a little steadfastness, and you will be over the worst after the first 3-4 days.

2. You’ll also find that you are a little under the weather, in the form of more frequent coughing, mild colds, and other lung and breast related symptoms, it is again quite natural, since your body is cleansing, and restoring its natural functions. In addition to your immune system, being hard at work trying to purge the poison from your body.

3. Your bowels may also provide a little sound from within, as a symptom of you quitting smoking, you may even feel constipated. You have to understand that smoking affects many parts of the body, cleaning out the poisons that smoking have added to your body, have meant it has had to relocate a lot of energy that could otherwise have been spent on many other things, therefore many functions in the body will have suffered from smoking.

4. You will most likely also experience an increased appetite, and a greater desire to stuff your mouth, and if you absolutely have to give into the temptation, look for fibrous food, coarse bread, nuts, grains and prunes could be fine eating, and remember during your quit smoking period, to drink plenty of water, all things will help ease your quit smoking symptoms.

5. Headaches can also be a quit smoking symptom, it is often followed by a lack of focus and concentration, and you will find that you easily become irritated.

Experts believe that headache is due to changes in the blood / oxygen ratio simultaneously with a change of blood sugar levels, caused by the lack of nicotine, all changes the brains normal environment. In time, these levels will return to a normal state, so you may simply arm yourself with patience, plenty of water, and take advantage of medication against the pain for a while

6. Nicotine is a stimulant, and it can affect the way your brain works. When you stop smoking, it may cause a number of changes in the way you are as a person and in how you conduct yourself.

You may also experience insomnia as a result of you quitting smoking, and thereby also feel tired during the day.

7. Irritability, depression, lack of concentration, restlessness, boredom, anger, aggression and general discomfort are all potential quit smoking symptoms, you should be aware of. The good news is that you will only suffer from them for a short period of time, perhaps one or two months.

If your quit smoking symptoms are about to take control over you and you feel you are falling back towards smoking, you should try to remember that your stopping smoking is the biggest single step forward in the direction of better health, you can do. You are not losing a friend, when you quit smoking, even though it may feel like a great deprivation in the beginning, you are actually separating yourself from one of your worst enemies.

This enemy slowly but surely works towards sending you earlier in the grave… Remember it, and hold on to your decision to quit smoking, regardless of your quit smoking symptoms.

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The thought of quitting smoking produces a paralyzing fear in some people. They know they want to quit, but the comforting effect of inhaling smoke along with the nicotine is not easily given up. Many people do want to quit smoking cigarettes for various reasons, although these reasons are not sufficient motivation to quit. Many who smoke will always find a reason to smoke if they want to. Listed below are five reasons to quit smoking.

The first reason to quit is that you may live longer and live healthier. This is absolutely true as the days string together and you have a successful recovery from using nicotine and/or other tobacco products. Although no one can forecast the future and truly know how long we will live, quitting smoking may give you the edge you need to live a longer and healthier life.

Your children wanting you to quit is seen as the second reason. Quitting tobacco products and smoking is actually one of the greatest things you could do for your family. You could be a role model to your children and your grandchildren; someone they would want to emulate. When an adult in the family does not smoke the children are much less apt to. If your children do not smoke as an adolescent or teenager they are much less apt to as an adult.

The third reason to quit smoking is that your breathing will become much easier and you will regain your lost energy. Both of these are true providing you follow a regime of psychological and behavioral changes throughout your quitting process.

The fourth reason is you will have a much greater chance of lowering the risk of heart attack, stroke, or cancer by quitting. This is all true, although you will never regain the pure body you had before you started smoking, stopping now significantly reduces these risks the longer you do not smoke.

The fifth and final reason to stop smoking is that the cost of cigarettes is becoming too expensive. This is very true and you can see it on a daily basis. One more cost of smoking relates to the medical costs associated with usage. Quitting may cut the medical costs significantly over time. Add the two together and there is quite a sum to pay if you continue smoking.

Do you really want to quit or are you ambivalent about it? Deciding that you want to quit smoking and making a commitment to stop will provide motivation to follow through. The five listed reasons are just a few known for quiting smoking. You can use any reason that means something to you to quit. The road can go uphill for only so long, then the process of quitting will become easier. Make your commitment to stop today—you will be happy you did.

Don’t keep it in the family. NHS smoking campaign advert.

How many people do you know who have quit smoking for a month or a year or and then started up again? What methods did they use to quit smoking: hypnosis, drugs, cold turkey? If they started back up after trying to quit smoking, hypnosis was probably not one of the things they tried. Is that your story, too? Unfortunately, it’s really common.

Anyone who has smoked for a number of years comes to a point where they really want to quit. In fact, they’re desperate to quit. That’s when they find out just how addicted they are. Because even though they have really good reasons, and a lot of motivation to quit, they can’t.

Has this already happened to you? Have you already had the experience of wanting to quit because the new baby was on the way? Or your new boyfriend or girlfriend doesn’t smoke. So you don’t want to anymore either? Or maybe you’re just tired of seeing so much of your hard-earned cash literally go up in smoke!

Whatever your reason for wanting to quit smoking, good intentions are usually not enough. Nicotine addiction is so strong, that you’ll need all the help he can get. The good news is, there’s a lot of help available. You have a lot of good quit smoking methods and products to choose from.

Quitting smoking is really a two-pronged process. You have to deal with both the physical nicotine addiction, and the psychological habits that you have created around smoking. Let’s call them your “smoking rituals”.

Everyone who has smoked for any number of years has actually built a whole set of smoking rituals that are unique to them. One of the reasons it’s so difficult to quit smoking is that the rituals become self reinforcing. What exactly does that mean?

It means that when you first began smoking you developed a set of habits, or actions, that you used every time you lit up your cigarette. And these are things like having a favorite ashtray, preferring a particular brand of cigarettes, using matches instead of a lighter, or always buying a red or a yellow lighter.

Now think about how many cigars or cigarettes you smoke every day. Do you smoke one pack a day? That’s 20 cigarettes. So that’s 20 times a day that you use your red lighter, or you look at that gold and white cigarette package. And then there are all of the habitual places and times that you smoke. You have a cigarette sitting in your favorite chair, or you light up after every meal.

So after even one year of smoking, do you really wonder why every time you see your cigarette lighter, or you finish a meal, it just feels natural to have a cigarette? In fact, it feels uncomfortable not to have one. And we’ve only been talking about your behavioral habits.

When you quit smoking cigarettes, you also have to face your nicotine addiction. And the physical addiction to nicotine is as strong or stronger than a physical addiction to heroin. The good news about that is: once you stop putting nicotine into your system, most of it flushes out within a couple of days.

Quit smoking drugs, like patches and pills and nasal sprays, are intended to help you get through the physical withdrawal period. They’re supposed to help reduce the nicotine cravings, and you’re supposed to gradually taper off from them. They work about 20% to 30% of the time for long-term smoking cessation. But if you talk to people who have successfully quit smoking for 10 or 20 years, you’ll probably find that they used self hypnosis at some point to help them stop smoking for good.

Behavior Modification: Smoking

Even as a child, I’ve always known smoking was bad for your health. My dad smoked when I was very young, but quit due to the health risks he imposed on his family as well as himself. He quit cold turkey, meaning immediately and solely by himself. He said it was hard, but he got over it. Since then he told me never to smoke. Now I can’t exactly tell you how I picked up smoking, but it definitely started after my 18th birthday when I was legally able to purchase cigarettes. I bought my first pack just because I could, and I smoked them periodically at school, especially when others were doing it, and especially if they were attractive females. This made me think I was cool enough to associate with them. As the months went on, I started getting more and more stressed with school and work, I slowly grew dependent on cigarettes. By the time I was 19, I needed to smoke whenever I studied, worked, or socialized with my friends, because most of my friends were also smokers. I have quit numerous times and succeeded at the goals I’ve set because I would set goals such as not smoking for two weeks, however I have never set a permanent goal due to fear of losing my crutch. For example, I would not smoke for two weeks, what allowed me to abstain was the thought that I can have a cigarette after two weeks.

Tracy Orleans, et al., (1991) conducted a research study on quitting smoking interventions. The study consisted of four groups, (a) the self help group, who were given a standard self quitting guide to quit with no other support, (b) the social support group, who were given the same self quitting guide along with a support guide for their family and friends, (c) the telephone group, who were given the same self quitting material, but with four telephone calls to a counselor, and (d) the control, who were given only tips to quit smoking and a referral to local quit smoking programs. The results of the study were not significant, the quit rates of the control and experimental groups were about the same, the only difference was the way the two groups quit. The experimental groups tended to quit using behavioral requiting strategies (e.g. setting a quit date, switching brands, etc.) while the control group tended to use outside interventions (like voluntary group therapy, nicotine gum/patches, etc). An interesting finding in this article was that heavier, long time smokers were less likely to quit using self help interventions alone, than were lighter, less addicted smokers (Orleans et al., 1991). This may appear like common sense in hindsight, because clearly longer, heavier smokers are more addicted, therefore its harder for them to quit, similar reasoning could be added to the opposite; lighter smokers are less likely to quit because they feel that the health threats are trivial because there is no immediate concern, whereas long time smokers are more likely to be diagnosed with a chronic illness as a result of their smoking, thus forcing them to stop due to their health. Although the former is a finding as a result of the study, the latter was found in my specific intervention, as well as my brief encounter with smokers in the past.

My specific strategy was to monitor my smoking for five days, then implement my plan, which was to smoke one less cigarette a day. Now I only smoked about 4-5 cigarettes a day so my plan was to start with five, then kick it down to zero. Of course, as I’ve stated before I knew this would be easy because my goal for the future was to smoke again. I started my change in behavior smoking five the first day, only three the next day, but then on the third day I was angry at the thought that nicotine was controlling me, so using self control, I smoked no cigarettes on day three. Day four I was supposed to smoke two, but only smoked one at night, this one cigarette at night felt better than any cigarette I had previously smoked in weeks. I wanted this feeling again; I knew it was from nicotine withdrawal. The next three days I went off track of my original plan and smoked one cigarette a night. I used a form of operant conditioning, where “the individual performs a behavior, and the behavior is followed by positive reinforcement” (Taylor et al., 2006). In this case the very euphoric feeling of a nicotine rush is the reward due to a nicotine withdrawal from not smoking all day (which is the behavior). Sure this may not be the ideal goal of operant conditioning, but it did greatly reduce the number of cigarettes I smoked in a day.

This behavior change was only temporary in my mind, as were the past attempts. I chose to monitor my smoking habits because it is probably my most health compromising behavior (aside from riding my motorcycle but I don’t think that is a “health” issue, more of a “lifestyle” issue). According to the text, “smoking is the single greatest cause of preventable death…In the United States, it accounts for at least 430,700 deaths each year” (Taylor et al., 2006) Even without the book, and without the media telling me the negative effects of smoking, I knew it could not be good for me. When I go to sleep just after smoking, I notice my heart rate is very high, anytime I do strenuous physical activity, I always gasp for air after, although I do notice that I can hold my breath longer than many of my non smoking peers. I smoke mainly because the immediate payoffs outweigh the immediate consequences, and because I am human, evolutionary psychology shows that my immediate future is more salient than anything many years ahead (Ornstein, 1991). Sure I can get lung cancer or heart disease in 20-30 years, but that is less salient on my mind, besides I, like many others fall into the false consensus effect theory; I believe that the same health compromising behavior that kills hundreds of thousands a year, probably won’t affect me.

After the twelve day period, I continued with the one cigarette a night, after a few days of that, I went to one every other night. As I am writing this paper, I am down to two a week. My goal is to bring it down to zero, however as I have implied, the thought of being able to smoke in the future is the only thing allowing me to go without a cigarette for a period of time. What worked well in my intervention was that I did not give in to the abstinence violation effect which is “a feeling of loss of control that results when a person has violated self-imposed rules” (Taylor et al., 2006). On a couple of days I gave in and smoked more then I was supposed to, mainly because I was with my smoking friends, a main effect of abstinence violation is relapse, but I made sure I did not by telling myself it was a one time thing and I will continue with my original plan, that definitely helped me from saying “screw it” and continue to my old ways of four to five cigarettes

This intervention has taught me a lot about my specific cues for smoking and I have realized that for the most part it is not a severe addiction for me; rather it is just something to do between classes, lunch breaks, or socializing with friends. I am very thankful that I had the opportunity to do this, as I probably would have never monitored my smoking otherwise. Because of this project, I have cut my cigarettes down to only six percent of what I used to smoke, with no signs of relapse, or cravings during the day. Perhaps for the future, I will only smoke when girls hit on me, which is never.

References

1) Orleans, CT, Schoenbach, VJ, Wagner, EH, et al. (1991). Self-help quit smoking interventions: effects of self-help materials, social support instructions, and telephone counseling. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 59(3), 439-448.

2) Ornstein, R (1991). Evolution of Consciousness: The Origins of the Way We Think. New York: Touchstone

3) Taylor, S.E (2006). Health Psychology: Sixth Edition, Health-Compromising Behaviors (pp. 133-148), Health Behaviors (pp. 54-78). New York: McGraw Hill

The story of Joe Smoker when he is hospitalized with a smoking-related illness. Smoking cessation specialist, Dr. Poteryko, and friends help Joe quit for good! Interactive bedside teaching video with EXERCISES for smoking cessation. Part 1 of 4 Derek Squared Productions.

Should you quit your smoking habit? Well, everybody has his own personal reason to quit smoking. It is plain obvious that the best reason to quit smoking is because it is bad for a person’s health. There is just no denying to that fact. Even if some heavy smokers survive during their old age, smoking did not help them do that.

Everybody knows that each stick of cigarette is a small stab at your life. More than four thousand poisonous substances in cigarette exists. Lung damage is absolutely inevitable and lung cancer is also likely.

Another reason why some smokers quit smoking is because each smoke seems to be a waste of money at a time when each dime is valuable. The accumulated amount of cigarettes purchased is like your money burnt. There is certainly a lot more productive and healthier things to spend money on.

If one does not care about his or her own health, then he should think about the health damage he or she is doing to others who live near him or her. The fact is that second hand smoke is even more hazardous than first hand smoke. Second hand smoke stays a longer time in the air, invisible and unnoticed. Those who live around the area cannot escape breathing it in. Thus, smoking at home will also increase lung illnesses such as colds, and cancer to everyone living in the same house such as family and friends.

Aside from health reasons, it will also damage your look too. Smoking is proven to rob one’s skin of its health. It makes one prone to pimples and other blemishes. In time, it will make one’s skin age, wrinkle, sag, and wear out faster than it would normally do.

Personal reasons for quitting abound. Some people have been asked to quit by their loved ones or family, whom are of course worried as well as discomforted. Smokers who really want to quit may have had it with the ridiculous and vicious cycle of addiction. It really affect’s one’s self image.

It does not really matter what the main reason for quitting smoking is, the most important thing is to quit starting right here and right now. It might be tough for a start. It might even be tougher if the person is going through some issues right now since cigarettes are always used as a crutch to help you get on the day. But really, after this, you will find that you are a better person with a cleaner and clearer perspective.

I really want to quit smoking it makes me feel lousy but Im having a hard time.

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