How to Quit Smoking

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By Shari L, eHow Member

Article Rating: (4 Ratings)

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Quit smoking! Yes you can! You can stop smoking! You can stop smoking without gaining weight. You can stop smoking without drugs, patches or other costly measures. Smoking is as much a psychological addiction as it is a physical one. It's a habit that is mentally and physically addicting and it's going to kill you. You can quit smoking the same way you started: one cigarette at a time.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Desire
Determination
Love of Ones Self

Step 1

Decide that this is the time. Have faith in yourself. Share your decision to quit smoking only if you must. If you know someone in whom you can trust your inner most thoughts and really, really feel you want to tell someone, share your decision with them. Otherwise, keep this between you and yourself for now. I'll explain why later.
Step 2

Spend some time in an honest review of when you smoke, where you smoke and who you are usually with when you smoke.
Step 3

Make an honest count of how many cigarettes you smoke each day.
Step 4

Buy an inexpensive cigarette case. You can find this at any cigar store. Don't spend a lot of money on it because you're going to give it away in about a month.
Step 5

Now that you know how many cigarettes you really smoke each day, you are going to take that number of cigarettes out of the box and transfer them to your cigarette case. Return the open box of cigarettes to a drawer, out of site. The cigarettes in the case are the only cigarettes you will smoke the next day.
Step 6

Each evening you will refill your cigarette case, reducing the number of cigarettes by one. If you started out with 20, the next night you will only put in 19. The next night you will only put in 18 and so forth. By doing this process at night you don't run the risk of being in too much of a rush in the morning to follow through. (There's one excuse you can't use.) It also gives you a renewed "I can do this" feeling every morning because you know it's already set up for you.
Step 7

You will continue this process until you are at about the half way point in reducing the number of cigarettes you are smoking each day. At this point you will want to start giving some thought to avoiding those times, places and people who you associate with social smoking. Make mental notes to yourself of ways to avoid being in the position in which smoking was part of the ritual.
Step 8

As you continue to reduce your daily cigarette consumption and avoid the occasions to smoke, your body is slowly getting used to the reduced amounts of nicotine without causing the side affects that come with total withdrawal. By doing a slow and calculated reduction in smoking, it reduces your need to replace one bad habit with another.
Step 9

Why not tell the world you are going to quit smoking? Because there are always those cruel, mental midgets who will see you with a cigarette and bury you with the "I thought you were quitting!" or even worse "I knew you couldn't do it!"