Break Free from Smoking: Tips to Kick the Habit

Many of us know that tobacco is a harmful poison to those that use it and those that breathe in secondhand smoke. This page offers helpful tips and strategies to support you in quitting smoking. Always remember that there is hope and it’s never too late to quit.

Benefits of quitting smoking include:

• Improved sense of smell & taste
• Better mental & social health
• Reduced risk of smoking-related disease
• Better blood regulation to your heart and muscles which will make exercise easier
• Many more!

Source: https://www.nhs.uk/better-health/quit-smoking/benefits-of-quitting-smoking/

Dangers of continuous usage:

“Tobacco is a slow, insidious, but most malignant poison. In whatever form it is used, it tells upon the constitution; it is all the more dangerous because its effects are slow and at first hardly perceptible. It excites and then paralyzes the nerves. It weakens and clouds the brain.” {Ministry of healing, page 327}

“We found that smokers had a thinner cerebral cortex than non-smokers – in other words, smoking was destroying the grey matter in smokers. This is important because the cerebral cortex is a part of the brain that is crucial for thinking skills including memory and learning, so thicker is better…Although behavioral effects of nicotine had been recognized and described hundreds of years earlier, the physiological roles and importance of neuronal nAChRs in the brain were not widely appreciated until as recently as the early 1980s” – National Library of Medicine

In other words, smoking was found to thin the cerebral cortex, a crucial part of the brain for thinking skills like memory and learning, in smokers compared to non-smokers. The role and importance of neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) in the brain was not understood until the 1980s.

Tips to help you quit:

• Remember why you want to quit. Write them down.
• Find an accountability partner. Let them and others know that you want to quit.
• Find out what triggers your habit and seek to avoid them.
• Seek specialist help.
• Distract yourself when you’re tempted, find something to do and tell your accountability partner.
• Don’t “just have one”.
• Remove all smoking reminders (lighters, ash trays, remaining cigarettes, etc).
• Set up milestones & reward yourself as you progress. (E.g. put the money that you’d spend on smoking aside and treat yourself every “smoke-free month”).
• Click on the link below for more help.