<p>Hi! I’m a senior in college, and around three years ago, I made the idiotic decision to start smoking. I’m about to graduate, and it seems like this is a good time to quit. Do you have any suggestions about how to quit smoking? Some caveats:</p>
<p>a) Please no advice on reminding myself how bad smoking is for my health. I know that it’s terrible. In fact, my desktop background is a picture of rotting teeth that were caused by smoking (it draws some weird looks in the library).</p>
<p>b) I can’t afford Nicorette gum. I know that it’s an investment to quit smoking, but I’m really interested in other ways to quit.</p>
<p>c) Most of my friends smoke. I don’t want to switch to a whole new group of friends, but do you know how to deal the urges when many of your peers smoke?</p>
<p>d) Many of my friends have told me that a good way to quit smoking is to use chewing tobacco and to whittle down usage after time. This doesn’t seem like a good idea to me, just wanted to hear your thoughts on this.</p>
<p>e) Finally, I’ve noticed that my “sticking points” in quitting are after meals and when I’m studying. Right now, smoking is a big stress reliever for me from work. Do you guys have any substitutes for this? I’ve tried exercising as a substitute, but it doesn’t work since it requires a lot of time to change/lift/shower; are there any good stress relievers that are quick, which I can do while working?</p>
<p>Thank you! Hopefully this thread can be useful for others who are trying to quit.</p>
<p>Good for you, for wanting to quit. Don’t be an idiot and start chewing tobacco. OMG.</p>
<p>Use the Nicorette. If you can afford cigarettes, you can afford Nicorette.</p>
<p>Yes, you may have to find some new things to do with new people, at least until you’re “safe” around smokers. If your smoker friends want to go out or whatever, tell them you want to go but ask them NOT smoke, or not smoke in your presence. If they’re normal, decent people, they should be able to accommodate this simple request. If not, steer clear. Stay home if need be. What you’re doing – quitting smoking – is so much more important than anything else you could be doing.</p>
<p>Eat a carrot. Go for a walk. Find a buddy who’s also quitting. Take a shower. Read.</p>
<p>Congratulations on deciding to quit. It’s a very wise decision. My advice is to see your doctor and discuss options with him/her. Everyone I know who has quit, successfully and longterm, used the patch. Best of luck to you. This is one decision that does not come with the possibility of regrets.</p>
<p>My parents quite cold turkey after smoking for 20+ years. I don’t think getting yourself addicted to nicorette is that much better than being addicted to cigarettes. I think you need to find other things to do when you really want a cigarette and perhaps to try to cut down on situations where you will be around cigarette smokers or have the urge to smoke. I also believe that exercise and eating well go a long way to cutting down stress and making one feel better.</p>
<p>I know a number of people who quit cold turkey - especially once they could no longer smoke at work inside the building. In California they can’t smoke at work, in restaurants, or in bars, so that urges some people on due to the inconvenience of smoking. At work they have the other issue in that if they go outside to smoke they’re very obvious standing out there sucking down the smoke while other people are working - not a good impression to keep making.</p>
<p>Fortunately, I never smoked. For the life of me I can’t understand how HS or college kids these days can start with all of the info available. But, I’m glad you’re taking action on this. Maybe you can serve as a leader in showing your friends that quitting smoking is possible to do and a good lifestyle and health choice. If nothing else, it’s a way to exhibit your mental toughness. </p>
<p>Definitely don’t do the chew since I know some people addicted to that disgusting habit. I don’t know about the gum or how effective it might be but with the amount of money being spent on cigs now is the cost really a factor?</p>
<p>Regarding the stress relief, firstly decide if you even have stress that needs to be relieved. The term ‘stress’ is used too much. While I rarely feel stress, there are times I need a break from what I’m working on. At work I’ll sometimes just head outside and do a brisk 5-10 minute walk which helps. I also will do a workout in the middle of the day but I understand that it’s not always convenient. Sometimes it helps to just do something different for 15-30 minutes - so you can put the HW assignment on hold and do something different for a break whether it’s different HW, CC, the brisk walk, or spontaneous stretching exercises or situps. </p>
<p>I quit after 38 years and will share more later (I’m cooking).</p>
<p>1) It’s insane to try to break a nicotine drug addiction by using nicotine gum. Like trying to cure an alcoholic by giving him bourbon instead of vodka.</p>
<p>2) Forget chewing tobacco, eletronic cigarettes, and all the nonsense. You are a nicotine drug addict and the only way to stop smoking is to break that addiction. It’s not that hard if you get your mind wrapped around it.</p>
<p>3) There’s no point in talking about health issues. Smokers know all that. They aren’t stupid. They are addicts.</p>
<p>More later. Go to [WhyQuit</a> - the Internet’s leading cold turkey quit smoking resource](<a href=“http://www.whyquit.com%5DWhyQuit”>http://www.whyquit.com) to get started. Over a million people have downloaded their free book. Good place to begin.</p>
<p>Nicotine is the most addictive drug on earth. Recent research suggests that some teens (virtually all smokers get addicted as teens), are physically addicted after one cigarette. There is increasing belief that we are addicted in the womb from our mother’s smoking, in remission as young children, but the first cigarettes immediately trigger the latent addiction as teens.</p>
<p>There are diabolical brain chemistry changes with nicotine addiction, basically swamping the pleasure/reward mechanisms in the brain so that nicotine is the only thing that stimulates a dolpamine release that normal people get from food, etc. Takes about a month for the brain chemistry issues to revert after stopping the use of nicotine, but they are always latent after that. 95% of ex-smokers who smoke one cigarette, even years later, are back to their full addicition in a short period of time.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the messages. I might come on here for cheering up once in a while. I started the way most stupid college students do–thinking that it’s just a “social” thing that people do once in a while. For a few months, I used to bum cigarettes off of others every week or so. It was only after the first year that it became an addiction. </p>
<p>Part of the reason I smoke right now is that I’m used to holding something while I’m outside. I’m really thinking of buying a toothpick and just chewing on it when the urge comes to smoke. To tell everyone the truth, there is one great thing about anti-smoking campaigns these days: most college students think smoking is stupid. I’m so embarrassed when I smoke that I have to go behind the building to avoid getting angry stares from others.</p>
<p>I’ll check out the website you gave me interesteddad. I’m “interested” in hearing about your story. Also, will look into meditation. Tried doing that for a while, but it just seems plain silly to exercise and meditate while you know that you are “living unhealthily.”</p>
<p>There’s no point beating yourself up. You made a mistake. You got trapped. It’s an insidious product, marketed by rat b**tards specifically to teenagers, designed to trap you into a drug addiction. No point in crying about it now. Focus all that anger on the companies and the product that did this to you and how you are going to break free, right now, so that you don’t end up 40 years from now still living the life addiction. </p>
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<p>Quitting smoking shouldn’t cost one red cent. Forty-six million Americans have quit smoking. More than 90% of them quit cold turkey. They just woke up one day, said enough is enough, and stopped. Once you understand the trap of the addiction, your desire to smoke will go away and then quitting isn’t that hard. Just because the drug companies want a share of the nicotine addiction market, doesn’t mean that it works. The percentage of smokers who had quit declined steadily, year after year, from 1965 to the 1990s when the drug companies started pitching nicotine gum and patches. Since then the rate of smokers quitting has stopped dead in its tracks – this despite the fact that smoking has been banned in virtually all public places and been taxed to high heaven. Large scale population studies – one in California, one in the UK – are starting to show that these products don’t increase quit rates at all. Some studies have shown that second time users of nicotine gum or the patch have ZERO quit rates. There’s no free lunch. You have to pay the piper and get through nicotine withdrawal – either right off the bat or down the road when you try to get off the drugstore nicotine (Obama’s been addicted to the gum for more than two years now).</p>
<p>The people who really struggle are the people who tell themselves they are “giving up” something by quitting. Like having to stand outside in the rain like a leper to get a drug fix that kills one out of two users is something that would really be a shame to “give up”. It’s like saying, oh, I kind of like cancer. I’d sure hate to “give it up”. The people who motivate themselves by wanting to gain a life of freedom from addicition have a much easier time.</p>
<p>A guy named Alan Carr does the best job of laying out the trap of nictotine addiction. His most famous book is “The Easy Way to Quit Smoking”. It’s probably in your library. Here’s a link to a free on-line illustrated short version of the book. Take you about an hour to work through it. I guarantee you will walk away knowing why you smoke and what you need to do to stop. You very well might just read it and quit on the spot. Unless you’ve already quit, smoke as much as you can while you read it:</p>
<p>Actually, I doubt this is true. Only 21% of adult Americans smoke today. The percentage is just slightly higher for young adults, maybe 23%. So 3 out of 4 people around you do not smoke. Many of them won’t hang out with you our your friends because they think tobacco smoke is disgusting. That includes 3 out of very 4 people you might want to hook up with.</p>
<p>Once you get a little ways down the road with your quit, you’ll start seeing your drug addict friends in a different way. You watch them smoke and then need another fix 30 minutes later and another one 30 minutes after that. You’ll start to see that they plan their whole lives around their addiction. You’ll see them start to climb the walls near the end of class when their nicotine levels fall and they need their drugs bad. </p>
<p>Here’s the bigger issue. Your quit will be a major threat to their addiction. Smokers know that they are social lepers. Every day they have fewer and fewer people to smoke with. To seek out at parties. To stand outside doorways together like junkies. So it is very likely that your friends will try to undermine your quit by leaving cigarettes around and otherwise tempting you. Joel Spitzer at [WhyQuit</a> - the Internet’s leading cold turkey quit smoking resource](<a href=“http://www.whyquit.com%5DWhyQuit”>http://www.whyquit.com) has a simple way to deal with this issue. Ask them ONCE to please not leave cigarettes lying around. If they leave them after that, just destroy them. At $6 a pack they won’t play that game. If they offer you a cigarette, decline politely. If they offer again, take the cigarette and destroy it. They will stop. </p>
<p>A bigger issue is smoking and drinking. That is the one exception to the rule that you should just live your life while quitting. For the first week or two of your quit, you probably want to avoid hanging out with smoker friends in a bar. Ask some non-smoking friends to help you out. Set up a dinner in a non-smoking restaurant. Maybe a movie. Maybe cocktails with non-smoking friends. Just for the first weekend or two. Give yourself a fighting chance.</p>
<p>Once you have quit, you have to find some mechanism of avoiding a stupid, cheap relapse. There are people who quit for years and then think it would be OK to have a one cigarette. Huge mistake. It triggers all the brain chemistry changes and 95% are back to full-time smoking within weeks. Really bad odds. All successful long-term quitters have some mechanism for reminding themselves to never take another puff. That one little commitment is 100% guaranteed insurance against a relapse. I do renew my pledge mothly and spend a few minutes reading stories of people who threw away quits after ten years. You will want to find a way of reminding yourself when you go out drinking for a while.</p>
<p>I am not a smoker, but I studied smoking cessation programs for my company. I was very impressed by the prescription drug Chantix. It works by blocking the nicotine receptors in the brain, similar to how methadone works for heroin addicts. But with Chantix, you start taking it a week before you plan to quit, then you take it for 12 weeks. By the end of the 12 weeks, your addiction is gone.</p>
<p>Pfizer makes this drug and has significant on-line and, I believe, telephonic support. While the addiction is significant, so are the social cues, as posters above have pointed out. The extra support helps you deal with all that.</p>
<p>Be sure to surround yourself with people who support your quitting and who won’t sabotage your efforts. Sometimes other people with bad habits don’t really want to see anyone else succeed in breaking those habits.</p>
<p>You might want to update your research on Chantix. It has now received more serious complaints to the FDA than any drug in history. The side effects being reported include very serious psychiatric issues including vivid violent dreams, hallucinations, serious depression, and suicide. Both the FAA and the NTSF bus/truck driver agencies have withdrawn usage approvals. Chantix is the new darling of the class action lawsuit sharks. It will never survive.</p>
<p>It was rushed to market and the issues in the field started cropping up almost immediately.</p>
<p>It is designed to partially attach to the same brain receptors as nicotine. The difficulty is that these receptors trigger reactions throughout the brain, only some of which are understood.</p>
<p>Good luck and feel free to ask people here for help- Interesteddad has a lot of useful advice- I bet you could PM him on occasion for support (and others). Remember tobacco chewers are at risk for oral cancers- no fun to get your jaw cut away (I’m a physician and could tell hundreds of tales). Don’t worry about the friends- there are probably a lot of people who have avoided you because you stink of tobacco smoke. Your smoking friends can still see you- without smoking. You are at risk for smoking again- just as an alcoholic can’t handle drinking, you can’t handle “just one” cigarette. It’s hard, but you can do it. Once you reenter the nonsmoking world it will be easier to avoid smoking now that it is less popular. Perhaps chewing regular gum (ie not nicotine gum) when you study, after meals could substitute for the cigarette habit.</p>
<p>This method never works and, more often than not, results in an increase in smoking. You smoke for one reason and only one reason, nicotine addiction. To try to “cut down”, knowing that you are ultimately going to smoke after waiting an hour or two hours or whatever, is pure hell. It’s not like starting the day firmly resolute not to smoke, end of discussion, period. It’s starting every crave knowing that you are going to give in, but only after depriving yourself for as long as you can. That is hell. You can’t quit by willpower. You quit because you want to become an ex-smoker. </p>
<p>What ends up happening is that the “gradual quitter” starts to see each cigarette of the dwindling number as being more and more important and bringing more and more relief to interminable suffering. That is precisely the opposite of how you want to view your last cigarettes. You want to remember the worst, nastiest, standing out in the rain, being sneered at cigarette as your lasting memory. They one that was so disgusting you finally said “enough is enough”, not the one that brought relief after hours of forced withdrawal.</p>
<p>People don’t get it. Nicotine withdrawal isn’t that bad (it’s like a bad cold usually), but it sure as heck isn’t any fun. You want to get in, get through it and get out the other side as quickly as you can. One week, 10 days, 14 days tops. It doesn’t do you a darn bit of good to unnecessarily put yourself into forced withdrawal a month early. Or to keep quitting, relapsing, quitting, relapsing, so that you are living half your life in withdrawal. That’s no way to quit. You want to dive in and GIT 'ER DONE! the first time.</p>
<p>Stress reliever, yadda yadda. Ex-smokers see that for what it is. Just junkie talk.</p>
<p>The only stress that nicotine releives is the stress from withdrawal when your nicotine levels start to fall after your last cigarette. A stressful event actually causes the nicotine to be metabolized a little quicker. The “relief” you feel is the freebase drug hitting your brain 8 seconds after the first puff and relieving the withdrawal symptoms.</p>
<p>But, here’s the kicker. It’s not really relief because smoking that cigarette guarantees that you will stay addicted and the next withdrawal cravings will start again in 30 minutes to an hour. That’s the trap.</p>
<p>The only way out is to break the active nicotine addiction. And that means stopping all nicotine usage. In 72 hours, it will all be out of your system and the physical withdrawal will peak. Then it starts to ease off. Withdrawal is mostly over in 7 days, pretty much completely done in 14 days. It’s no worse than getting your wisdom teeth out. You know it will probably suck. You deal with it as the price of getting better. It could be worse. It’s not like getting a lung removed.</p>
<p>Once the physical withdrawal is over, you have the mental triggers. Remember, you have based your entire life around making sure that you had cigarettes (ever walk to the store at 2 in the morning? Every fish through ash trays looking for butts?) and could smoke one every x number of minutes. (Ever dash out of class? Any mothers out there ever put down their baby to go smoke?). Junkies.</p>
<p>So, over time, you teach yourself to associate almost everything in your life with smoking. Eating. Talking on the phone. Driving. Working on the computer. It’s a false association, but that’s the way a junkie brain works. So, what you have to do is work through each of the triggers and teach yourself that, yes, you can do that without smoking.</p>
<p>One way is to divert attention. Just force your mind off it by eating a piece of candy, sucking on a straw, chewing on ice, drinking cold water, whatever. Research has shown that it doesn’t mattter what you do, just so you do something when a trigger hits. You just have to get through it. For me, I walked out on my deck where I smoked and took five or six deep cold breathes, feeling it go into my lungs and imagining the healing that was starting to take place. </p>
<p>At a certain point, you want to embrace the crave. Say, heck yeah, I want a cigarette, I’m addicted, but I’m an ex-smoker, I don’t do that any more. From the moment I knew I was quit for good (day 3), I never once entertained even the slightest thought of smoking. The craves became somewhat interesting, seeing just how strongly the triggers were engrained and how silly they were. When you laugh at a crave, you completely destroy it.</p>
<p>By the one month mark, you’ll only think about smoking a couple times a day. At two months, you’ll have your first day when you never think about smoking. By, four months, a thought of smoking is the rare exception, not the rule. </p>
<p>If you are geek, download John’s book. It has everything you ever want to know about nicotine addiction, what symptoms you will encounter, how to deal with them, etc.</p>
<p>The videos are organized by day – Day One of your quit, Day Two, etc. Or you can just pick topics. Or download the MP3s to your ipod. Or go here for an MP3 player:</p>
<p>Each of these lessons will get you through one crave. I know. I spent all night on my third day watching them 'til dawn. (Insomnia is a common symptom).</p>
<p>This link will get you started with everything you need to know for week one:</p>
<p>Here’s the bottom line. Smoking one cigarette is not an option. You have two choices:</p>
<p>a) Smoke no cigarettes and start enjoying the freedom of being an ex-smoker. No more late night run to the store. No more standing in doorways. No more looks of scorn. No more stink. No more worrying about that cough.</p>
<p>b) Smoke all of 'em. A pack a day. Seven thousand five hundred cigarettes a year. Fifteen thousand every two years. Seventy-five thousand every ten years.</p>
<p>When you quit and get a craving for just one, don’t picture that one magical cigarette that smelled like lilacs with frollicing puppies and unicorns and rainbows and when the Marlboro cowboy didn’t die of lung cancer. No forget that mythical cigarette. You think of the 7500 nasty foul butts that go with the first puff over the next year and ask yourself if you really want THAT cigarette. I think the answer will be no and you won’t feel like you are “giving up” something.</p>
<p>One more point. The single biggest way to boost your chances of successfully quitting is active education and support. This used to be done in group quitting seminars, often lasting for the first few weeks. All the health care dollars are going to the drug companies now ($275 per failed quit attempt on the patch) so there’s no longer any money for group support clinics. </p>
<p>Internet support can be pretty good. I gave you the link to the whyquit forums. They are hard core. You can’t join to post until you’ve been off nicotine for three days and you are barred permanently from posting if you relapse even once. But, that kind of education and support works. They can identify about 35% of their members who are still quit after six months, and that doesn’t include those who may have successfully quit but just stopped posting after, for example, celebrating 3 months. 35% is an astonishingly high number for internet support. The Mayo Clinic’s in-patient residential program barely equals that.</p>
<p>[Become</a> An EX - BecomeAnEX.org Online Support Network](<a href=“http://community.becomeanex.org/]Become”>http://community.becomeanex.org/) is a pretty good blog social network for quitters. It’s a bit unfocused with people trying every darn-fool hairbrained method. My favorite was the woman who started last July to cut down one cigarette a week 'til she was down to nothing on New Year’s Day. She lasted less than a month on that plan. Had kind of sad ending as I believe she had a mild stroke (smoking related) the week before New Years. This is serious business. There are too many serial pretend quitters – people who play this weird game where they feel like they should quit, so once a month they go through the motions. Over and over and over. But, mixed in with all that, there are some hard core long-term quitters and some people quitting successfully every week. It’s a good place to post blogs during the first week and find some people who will kick you in the butt if that’s what you need or give you a shoulder to cry on. There’s a high school senior there right now who just celebrated his first week anniversary. As a parent, that is the greatest thing ever. There’s not a smoker in the world who wants his kid to smoke.</p>
<p>You should check with your health insurance to see what it covers.</p>
<p>On the non-prescription side, nicotine patch with gum/lozenge for cravings is the most successful. On the prescription side, Chantix is more effective than bupropion (Zyban/Wellbutrin). I would still recommend that you buy gum/lozenge to help with the intense cravings. You should avoid Chantix if you have a history of mental illness. When Chantix was going through its drug trials, they excluded people with severe mental illness. It those people who are now reporting the psychosis.</p>
<p>You’ll need to come up with a nicotine craving plan. You need to avoid situations or have plans on how to deal with situations in which you normally smoke.</p>
<p>There are many local and national support groups. You should look into them.</p>