How to Quit Smoking for a Healthier You?

Why Quit Smoking?

It is widely accepted and has also been thoroughly well-researched and validated using scientific means that smoking is bad for thehealth.

Smoking invariably leads a person to have a shorter life than what he or she will otherwise have. Smoking adversely affects the human body in many harmful ways. And it leads to cancer and many other life-threatening diseases.

Do we all not know this already? Everyone reading this post is assumed to be aware of why smoking is bad and how severely it can harm you and your family. So this post will not talk about “Why Quit Smoking?” and would rather focus on “How to Quit Smoking for a Healthier You?”

How to Quit Smoking?

There are many methods and systems which have been proposed. Some of these are listed below:
1. Eating anti-smoking chewing gum
2. Making use of tobacco-free substances as a psychological substitute
3. Exercising willpower

Information on these techniques is already available in abundance. Instead, a personal experience about a friend (X) who quit smoking is being narrated in this post.

Personal Experience

X was not an addict, so as to say, but then there is no way he could have been called a non-smoker. He wanted to give it up and had tried everything possible – all physical and mental techniques – but had failed every time. He used to jokingly say, “I am able to quit smoking, you know… I mean, I stay away from smoking… hmmm… at least till the time I have that one more cig!”

And then, X quit smoking completely – and it took him just 1 (one) day!

It was around the time one of X’s close friends lost his job and within a few days of that was detected with a life-threatening disease (the cause was smoking – X’s friend was also a smoker).

While X was discussing about this one day, mentioning how badly he would like to give it up, he decided to work upon the idea to think of a similar extreme situation for himself and use that as a factor to motivate himself to quit smoking. He also followed the suggestion to quit smoking on an occasion which is very dear to him and he would never be able to forget that, such as the birthday of a family member.

X’s daughter was about to turn 3 years old in a few weeks time. And he used that occasion to quit smoking. Now, anytime he has the urge to take that one more puff, he thinks of the extreme situation and the occasion when had said "quits". It has helped him so far and it has been more than a year now that he has stayed away from smoking.

And what was the extreme situation that both of us thought of that could happen in his life? Well… here it is:
•X loses his job
•X is detected with lung cancer and has to be admitted to hospital for an extended duration and exhausts almost all his life’s savings
•X’s spouse meets with an accident and passes away
•X’s little daughter has to be pulled out of school as X has no money to continue her education
•X’s little daughter has to be sent to an orphanage to spend the rest of her life there

Why it worked for X? Not sure... one thing is that for X his little daughter meant the whole world.

It's not sure if this technique would work for others but all of us are like X in many ways and would be able to relate to this incident.

You may have already been trying very hard… just try one more time. Wish you all the best of luck in your mission to quit smoking!

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