To Quit Smoking is the goal of 90% of smokers.
However, to quit smoking successfully (that is - permanently) most smokers find that they need some outside help.
A few can manage to quit smoking on their own, but it's not so easy.
Plan to quit smoking by:
* Setting a date upon which you will quit smoking
* Asking friends and family to help by NOT offering you a cigarette
* When you have quit smoking on that date, make a promise to yourself that you will NEVER ever touch a cigarette again
* TREAT yourself! On the day that you quit smoking, buy yourself a Rolex, take a holiday - whatever, just treat yourself
Giving up smoking is definitely NOT the easiest thing in the world.
However, there are many things you can do to make it simpler.
First, you must genuinely WANT to quit. I had a huge problem when I wanted to give up, because I simply ENJOYED smoking. OK., I didn't enjoy some of the things that went with it - nicotine stains on my fingers, that awful cough, the background certainty that I was slowly killing myself and that feeling, as Harry Secombe once said, of my mouth tasting like the bottom of a birdcage in the morning.
So understand that, anything else apart, you ARE - not you may be - you ARE committing suicide, slowly but certainly. A much quicker way to commit suicide is to shoot yourself - and it's certainly less painful - all done in an instant.
Smoking kills you slowly and painfully. It may take years before you are dead, but in the meantime you have all the unpleasant symptoms that you suffer through smoking.
Remember how you first started smoking. Sheer bravado, wasn't it? Made you look "grown-up". I remember my peers asking me "don't you inhale?" (I didn't). But they did. So I tried it. I can still remember the awful, unpleasant taste, the retching cough as my lungs reacted dreadfully and the spinning head. But I persevered. Oh, yes, I persevered! I wasn't going to look stupid in front of my mates - no sir!
Later, I took up cigars and then even a pipe! When I think about it now this is rather like walking about with a small bonfire burning three inches away from your nose. But, oh boy, didn't I look grand - or so I thought.
So let's make a start. Check out the bullets at the top of this article. Set a date. Ask friends and family to help.
Affirm to yourself that you will NEVER touch another cigarette again once you have stopped. This is vitally important, because if you DO you have failed and will immediately return to smoking as many, if not more cigarettes per day than you used to.
Furthermore, this will make it ten times as hard to stop the next time you try because you will have the nagging feeling that it isn't possible. So vow NEVER - under any circumstances - to touch another one.
Then, as I said, TREAT yourself. Have a little treat at the end of your first smoke-free day. Have another one at the end of the first week. PLAN your treats, so that you KNOW you are going to get a reward for succeeding. You will looks forward to getting your regular treats. Plan them a year in advance, if you like - one a week, one a month and a VERY special one at the end of your first year.
By then you will be FREE! You may still have the odd craving - I had the odd craving for nearly eighteen months - but it's easy to resist. Just KNOW that if you EVER give in and take even a small puff you are sunk without trace.
