I Will Quit Smoking – With determination anyone could do it!

Making use of dangerous drugs such as Prozac or Zyban are not really the way to go about stopping your addiction to nicotine. In a way it is just like replacing one dangerous drug with another. So to is using NRT, so there has to be another way to stop smoking without using nicotine replacement, and there is. In fact there is a wealth of information available in the form of self help, but it is hard to stop smoking and even harder when you are on your own in this quest.

And we do not all have the willpower of General De Gaulle who was a heavy smoker. He just realized one day that the cigarettes were controlling him, and not the other way around, so he just stopped! But we are not all made of the same stuff. Physical, psychological and emotional addictions are very difficult to control and changing the way we do things is also not easy, particularly if we still want to be around others who smoke. You can’t all of a sudden stop being friends with smokers because they smoke and you don’t want to.

What seems to be working very well is the free telephone counseling some states in the US have started. Counseling is a far better alternative to nicotine replacement therapy and has actually proven to be working. Findings have shown that with this kind of support, smokers are twice as likely to stop.

As nicotine is such a difficult drug to give up, in order to be successful it is not only about the smoker. It is about the kind of support and encouragement they receive from others. This includes counselors, friends, family and the people they work with, all of these people play a role in the support team of someone trying to quit smoking. We often hear ex-smokers say that they would never have been able to quit if it was not for the support they were given.

Information for the smoker who wants to stop is available from many resources. Health insurance companies, your local gym, hospitals, support groups and even your employer. However these just make some of the resources available, and the most efficient assistance does come from a trained counselor.

You can receive both group and individual counseling or as we said before, simply over the telephone. A counselor will assist the smoker to recognize the emotional and psychological issues that arise when they first stop smoking and withdraw from nicotine. It is not an easy task as the addiction to nicotine is one of the strongest there is.

The thing to remember is that once you stop smoking, the nicotine remains in the body for as long as three to four days and it is when this period is over that the withdrawal symptoms begin to manifest. These are liable to last just a couple of days or in some instances even weeks. It is this time when the support is needed most so that the smoker has someone to turn to rather than back to the cigarettes.

The beauty of using counseling to get over the urge to smoke is that you don’t have to use NRT, and you also don’t have to use any dangerous drugs. Clinical studies have shown that when a smoker received the correct counseling or attends a specialist clinic, they are four times likelier to succeed in their attempts to stop smoking. Trying to do this completely alone has been found to be the least successful strategy of all.

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