2612568276918. Quit Smoking

Quit Smoking – Don’t Scrap the Whole Plan if You Slip-Up

Quit Smoking – Don’t Scrap the Whole Plan if You Slip-Up

When you try to quit smoking, you must understand that statistically, most ex-smokers had to try multiple times before they eventually quit. It is completely normal and in no way a failure if you slip-up and start smoking again. The key, though, is to not give up: you simply cannot say yourself “okay, it didn’t work, it’s impossible” etc.

If you do slip-up up – let us, say you were doing fine and then went out with friends and drank heavily and smoked all night – try to quit again immediately. Do not wake up hung-over after a night of smoking, get up and go to a store to buy cigarettes.

Instead, acknowledge the lapse and understand that it is a common part of the process. You are in no way a failure, and you can still get your quitting attempt back on track.

This does not mean, of course, that you should think of lapses as something that is completely okay – you cannot say you have quit smoking and then go out and smoke every Friday night. On the contrary, you should very much try and avoid even the most innocent of lapses: do not get stuck in the line of thinking where “one drag” is okay.

If, however, you do have a lapse, you must make sure it is not thought of as a failure. You should still think of yourself as a non-smoker. To give up and decide that you are going to smoke again after you slip-up is to deny one of the most fundamental realties about quitting smoking: it is an exceedingly awkward thing to do, and for most people it takes multiple steps.

Change Your Lifestyle

While you by no means must avoid your friends and start an entirely new life when you quit smoking, you should – at least in the beginning – try to be realistic about your socializing. Do not spend a lot of time with smokers in places where you can smoke if you have just quit. The hardest period when trying to quit smoking will always occur at the beginning and will end up torturing yourself if you spend that period in bars or other places that you associate with smoking.

One of the reasons people sometimes hesitate to quit smoking is they feel that they will no longer be able to socialize with their friends, or that they will be ostracized in some way. This really is not the case, but you do have to understand that in the pilot stages of quitting, some lifestyle changes are going to be in order.

Avoid situations you associated with smoking in the past. You should also try to make your lifestyle more active – once you quit smoking, you will be dealing with a lot more pent-up energy and anxiety, especially during the preliminary stages, and the best thing you can do to deal with it is to incorporate more activities into your lifestyle.

When you change your lifestyle, you also benefit from creating new associations that have nothing to do with smoking: you will be starting to partake in new activities that are in a “post quit” phase of your life. By slowly accumulating the number of things you do that you do not associate with smoking, you will be gradually creating an entire life of which smoking is not a part.

Regards, Coyalita

See Next: “Quit Smoking – Basic Tips for Every Smoker”

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