How to Quit Smoking

How to Quit Smoking: Understanding Nicotine Addiction

If you've spent a lot of time wondering how to quit smoking, or have tried to quit smoking and failed, you know how tough nicotine addiction is to overcome. Just thinking about quitting is enough to make most smokers edgy.

• Understanding Nicotine Addiction

Quitting tobacco is possible, though, and thousands do it successfully every year.

How to Quit Smoking: Banishing Junkie Thinking

It's been said that the psychological, or mental side of nicotine addiction is more difficult to beat than cocaine or heroin because of how thoroughly interwoven the habit of smoking is in our daily lives.

• Rationalizations for Smoking

How to Quit Smoking: Adopting a Good Mindset

So, how do other people quit smoking? More importantly, how can you successfully learn how to quit smoking? What is the trick to finding the motivation to quit and the will to stick with it no matter what? Does smoking cessation just magically happen when a person is 'ready'?

Rarely.

If you rely on being 'ready' before you quit smoking, you run the risk of never quitting.

• How to Quit Smoking - The Mindset for Success

It's possible -- in fact, it is likely that you won't be 'ready' to quit when the time comes. You'll probably feel some mixture of sadness, loss, anger and fear as you embark on your quit program. With some tools in your how to quit smoking arsenal however, you'll find cessation is manageable, and probably easier than you expected.

Change is hard for most people, but is a necessary part of life. Embrace the process and don't look back! You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

How to Quit Smoking: Education

They say knowledge is power, and it's the truth, especially when it comes to learning how to quit smoking.

Do you know what to expect as your body moves through physical withdrawal from nicotine? Do you have any idea how to quiet the thoughts of smoking that bombard our minds (seemingly nonstop) during the first several weeks of the recovery process?

The more you learn about what you might experience when you quit smoking, the more easily you'll be able to navigate the ups and downs. Early smoking cessation is intense to be sure, but with a little preparation, you can maintain control and move past this phase of recovery from nicotine addiction.

• Nicotine Withdrawal Symptoms

• 10 Tips for Managing Nicotine Withdrawal

How to Quit Smoking: Removing the Blinders

Once you're ready to quit, looking at the hazards smoking presents to your health is powerful medicine. As smokers, we all know tobacco is bad for us, but we keep a layer of denial in place and avoid looking at the dangers too closely. We have to in order to be able to smoke in relative peace. We tell ourselves we have years before we need to worry; that it won't happen to us; that cancer doesn't run in the family...the list of justifications goes on and on.

An important part of learning how to quit smoking involves removing the blinders and soaking up every bit of information we can find about the damage tobacco use causes and the diseases it has been linked to. It will help you shift your attitude away from thinking of smoking as a buddy and help you see tobacco for the killer it is.

• Smoking and Heart Disease - Statistics

• How Smoking Harms Us - Head to Toe

• Smoking and Cancer: Questions and Answers

How to Quit Smoking: Support

Simply put, your chances for success with smoking cessation are many times greater when you have the support of like-minded people. Enlist the help of family members and close friends who want the best for you. And visit About.com Smoking Cessation's forum for the best support community the Internet has to offer.

• Smoking Cessation Support Forum

Letter to a Loved One below was composed by the husband of an About.com Smoking Cessation forum member who had started the process of learning how to smoking. It was written from the quitter's perspective and expresses beautifully what friends and family can expect as their loved one recovers from nicotine addiction. Print it out and share it with the supporters in your life. It may help them understand what you're going through when you quit smoking.

• Letter to a Loved One

How to Quit Smoking: Patience

Smoking cessation is a process that takes time. Expect that you will have ups and downs as you work through recovery, and learn the art of patience, mostly with self. One day at a time we release this addiction that has held us tight for years. Give yourself the time and space you need to heal.

• Patience with the Process

How to Quit Smoking: Practice

A fundamental step in the process of learning how to quit smoking is plain old practice is a must. Smoking cessation can't be rushed, so try to relax and think of time as your quit buddy. The more of it that you put between you and that last cigarette you smoked, the stronger you'll become. We spent years learning to associate smoking with literally every activity in our lives, good, bad or indifferent. Unlearning those associations takes time and practice.

• There is No Substitute for Time

• 4 Steps to Defeat the Urge to Smoke

How to Quit Smoking: Building Momentum

Practice has another benefit that will help fuel your motivation as you learn how to quit smoking: momentum. What starts out as a struggle minute-by-minute will gradually become more comfortable for you as you get some practice under your belt. Momentum is a great tool - build up that initial head of steam, and momentum will help propel you through the process.

How to Quit Smoking: Empowerment!

People often come through cessation strengthened in ways they never expected. Believe in the the principles of recovery from this addiction, and believe in yourself. You have what it takes to succeed within you right now. Take the time to learn how to quit smoking and tap into the potential to make smoking a thing of the past – your past.