Plan to Stop Smoking

It requires a lot of effort to quit smoking. There are many stop smoking aids and methods available for us and for addicts like it is very important to take time to use these methods. There are forums, patches, pills, hypnotism, meditation, NLP and many more methods which we can use to stop smoking successfully. Stopping smoking cold turkey is not actually cold turkey method because you need to keep motivating yourself and get enough continuous inspiration by reading about the ills of this addiction and participating in forums.

If you are so busy that you have no time to take help of any of these methods, it is hard to stop smoking. It is for this reason, I have started a blog and participated in the forum to keep myself busy not only in my daily activities but also in the activities which will keep my motivation strong. I have found that it is very easy to quit smoking if the motivation is strong enough. But unfortunately, the emotional status of a strong motivation is not long lasting if you are not continuously feeding it with thoughts which can trigger and sustain that state.

To do this, you need to consider quitting smoking as a long-term project and plan accordingly. I know that I cannot just visit the forum just once or twice and write just a couple of blog posts and quit smoking. I also know it is okay to relapse but need to get up dust me off and try again. But it is important to bear in my mind that relapse and try again method should not become a habit in itself. For this reason, I took the decision to reinvest my time to read more about stopping smoking and plan well.

After my first relapse, I started planning in a different way. Now along with blogging about my progress in quitting smoking and participating in the forum. I decided to make exercise, yoga, and meditation a habit. Smoking as a habit leaves little space to other good habits to enter. I think replacing it with good habits enables you keep yourself aware of your aim and remain motivated. You have to spread all the activities you plan to replace the addiction of smoking throughout the day. For example, I started with yoga and meditation right after getting up in the morning, writing for the blog and visiting the forum after breakfast, avoiding junk food throughout the day, forum and reading in the evening and meditation at night.
This is how I planned my project of stopping smoking. I am sure of success this time.

Stop Smoking Blogs As a Support System

After relapse, I started planning for further quitting. In this process I have visited a lot webs and blogs and started reading tips to stop smoking and other smoking related topics and stop smoking topics in particular.

When I started this blog, I thought the idea of starting a blog to support ones quitting program would be very rare. But, I was wrong. There are many blogs which were started by ex-smokers just to support themselves and others who wants to quit. Some of these blogs are very impressive.
The main reason for this blog is AA. This success of AA is continuous support to remain sober throughout the life and not to relapse. AA members meet everyday to help others and in turn help themselves from relapsing. Addiction to alcohol has stronger damaging capacity socially than smoking.

I want to continue to write in this blog years after my quit date both to help others and myself as I know very well that I can relapse at anytime if they say I carry a smoking gene. These blogs gave assured me of their usefulness as a support system. I am listing some of them here. I would advise you to start your own blog if the idea is interesting and I like writing.

http://help-me-quit-smoking.blogspot.com/
http://tammysquitsmokingblog.blogspot.com/
http://stopsmokingblog.blogspot.com/
http://myquitsmokingblog.com/
http://thestaticsilence.com/

Quit Smoking Relapse and A Great Forum:

Yes I relapsed a couple of hours ago and took few puffs from a friend who was smoking. In spite of this blog and the great website http://quitsmoking.about.com which is my main source of motivation, I relapsed.

In the past when I relapsed, I just quit the idea of quitting and continued smoking not now, not with the help of those beautiful people there in the forum helping me. Quitting smoking I know is one of the hardest things to do. The way my brother quit this habit has also told me that continuous effort eventually leads to success.

Please friends, if you are serious about quitting join this forum. You will get all the support you need to quit smoking successfully. There are many people like me and you who relapsed but never stopped to quit and are successful in their quitting. These people are very eager to help you and with so many kindhearted souls helping success is not a difficult.

I request you to join the quit smoking forum, keep reading and I am sure it will help you.

Side Effects Of Quitting Smoking:

There are many products available in the market which claim to help you dealing with the side effects of quitting smoking, especially cold turkey. Most of these people list indigestion, flatulence, gas, diarrhea, constipation, sinus congestion, voice hoarseness, phlegm production as some of the side effects of quitting smoking cold turkey.

There is a great list of side effects of quitting smoking listed in many websites which I do not want to repeat here. There are times when I quit smoking up to two weeks in the past. Apart for strong urge to smoke, there were no side effects of quitting on my body.

Most of the side effects which are quoted by these internet markets are actually the side effects of smoking not quitting smoking. For example voice hoarseness and sinus congestion. The strong side effect of smoking which affects you negatively is only the strong uneasiness which your body feels which makes you desperate to smoke. Other than this I don't think there are any major side effects. Few side effects like headache and numbness and tingling in the fingers are actually psychosomatic where you try to fool yourself to smoke.

I also belief that it is the availability of the smoke which plays all the tricks on your mind and body to convince yourself to smoke. Once I spent about fifteen days in an ashram where there is no chance of smoking or coming out of the ashram. I had no side effects as my mind clearly knows that smoke is available only fifty miles away and almost impossible.

Do try cold turkey keeping in mind that all the tricks your mind plays on body is because of the fact that smoke is available in the vicinity. See if you get any of the so called side effects of quitting smoking.

Quit Smoking Meditation Which Worked For My Craving | Successful Completion of Day One:

I have successfully crossed my one-day mark of quitting smoking. As I said earlier, being busy with my quit smoking program helped me adequately pass through the periods of craving. I had a small craving after my dinner last night and heavy craving where there was a lot of discomfort in my body today after my breakfast.

There is a simple meditation technique which I use when I am in little stress. This meditation worked well with my craving also. After writing my hubpages post on quit smoking, and twitting , I had my breakfast. Immediately after my breakfast, there was a strong sense of urge to smoke. I tried to distract myself by reading some other helpful material available in the forum (I kept that window open all the day).
I must say this helped me a little, along with this I tried my favorite meditation technique. In my past, I noted that not all types of meditations are equally effective to everyone. I will describe my meditation here. Please try this and see if it is as helpful to you as it was for me.

Switch off the monitor, sit in your chair comfortably, close your eyes and relax your body by saying to yourself relax..... relax..... relax...... Imagine your body muscles being relaxed from tip of the toe to the tip of your head. Then taken three deep breaths. Remember you can do this successfully once you distracted yourself by reading material about quitting smoking. This leaves you into a positive mode. No concentrate in the center between your eyebrows. I usually the light penetrating through my closed eyelids increasing and giving a soothing feeling.

Continue the meditation for five minutes and you can find the craving disappears without a trace. I want to tell you one more fact here, there are no cigarettes available for me in my house and for any smoke I have go out by. I just resisted from going out (this worked well because I am a lazy person).

Try this meditation technique while you have urge to smoke when your are in the first day of quit smoking. Strong motivation with lot of emotional energy helps you a lot in stopping smoking successfully.
Quit smoking, craving, urge, meditation, strong emotion, motivation.

The Easy and Best Way To Quit Smoking

I always wanted to know some miracle method, the best way to quit smoking which will help me quit smoking with little effort and without craving. Obviously, I could find none. But there are methods which can make to stop smoking with a lessor degree of pain and frustration.

I have not tried hypnosis or NLP, but I know two people who are close to me who stopped smoking relatively easily. The first person is my brother who could successfully quit smoking habit of 25 years. I can tell you that he could do this without any pain, guilt of relapsing, planning or even a quit date.

He smoked one, two or three cigarettes per day for a week instead of his regular twenty cigarettes and stopped taking stopped smoking altogether within week. He is smoke free for ten years now and is sure of not becoming a smoker again. Yes he smoked twice in these ten years, but never relapsed.

The other person who could quit smoking easily is one of my friends. He also things this method as the best way I tried to quit smoking. He stopped smoking after smoking continuously twenty cigarettes per day for five years. He followed the same pattern, smoked one or two cigarettes for few days and then quit completely.

Can You Stop Smoking Easily:
There is a reason for them to quit smoking so easily. The first one is even though they are smoking addicts (smoking was the first thing in the morning and last thing before bed ) they were not chain smokers. The second and most important reason is quitting smoking was just a part of complete lifestyle changes they underwent.

My brother converted to Born Again Christianity and became a seriously religiously Christian. Along with smoking he also stopped drinking. He changed the way he used to dress. He started attending church every Sunday. Most of the free time he spent reading bible. This helped him quit smoking so effortless. Complete change of personal image and personality. It is difficult to quit smoking being the same person because smoking so strongly adheres to your life it is big task to remove it from your life being a same person.

The second person, my friend could stop for similar reasons but not religious. At 29 years of age and smoking for five years and working is small jobs, suddenly to get a big job in a different country. His entirely lifestyle changed big house, bigger cars, own gym different society everything changed. He as a person underwent a lot of change. He stopped eating junk, started golf (social influence), got married and stopped smoking.

I think you understand that quitting smoking is easy when there is complete lifestyle change and change in personal image. But the secret is changing your personal image is not so easy. You cannot leave your society and daily life so easily. You cannot become religious suddenly without any major event happening to you. But if you are fed up with your life and want yourself to be different person, then as a part of this most difficult transformation, quitting smoking is easy.

For me the best way to quit smoking is to have a lifestyle change and change of personal image. This helps in a overall developement of you as a person and makes quitting smoking easy.

Motivation and Quit Smoking

It has been more than five hours since I smoked my last cigarette. These five hours are relatively easy for me I am just a ten cigarettes per day addict and I have spent many times awake without smoking for a couple of hours. Among these five hours, the first craving came after about four hours. I could easily manage because of this blog and the forum.

As this is my new project I was thinking a lot of positive things that are going to happen to my that I would be sharing with my readers both through this blog and the forum. The hope for a better future is one of the reasons why I am so positive of success in quitting smoking this time.

As for my personal thoughts and insights about smoking, I think craving is something which happens to our body. I am strong believer of body-mind relationship experiencing life. A thought of cigarette triggers in a craving feeling in the body. Once this craving sensations become strong, body can easily manipulate your thinking style and lead you take action of smoking another cigarette. The thought of cigarette emerges into your brain at the first place because either the habit or from body itself due to the decrease in nicotine level.

The craving was not strong enough because of my enthusiasm and motivation towards quitting smoking. It is very important to have lot of positive motivation to deal easily with smoking cravings (that is my opinion and hope I am right). As for now I am sure I am looking forward towards a great life without smoking.

I wish here to tell you about an incident which happened a couple of years ago. My cousin Neal is one of my smoking partners. We always smoke a lot of cigarettes together whenever we meet to spend sometime with each other. My ten cigarettes a day would turn into fifteen easily whenever he is around.

One day, after reading literature of Alcoholic Anonymous and finding a lot of logic into their method, I planned of starting a club of people who wants to quit. I starting to think and plan towards goal. And then when my met Neal in the evening, I was filled with enthusiasm and explained my plan to him. Fortunately, he liked my plan and we planned a great way to start the club of smokers who want to quit and stay quit.

We never went a step further from this and eventually forgot all our planning. But the surprising fact is not both of us failed to smoke that entire evening. We just forgot smoking. This body failed to send the signals to the mild. There was completely opposite thoughts filled in the mild which failed to register anything about smoking. To make your quit easy it is very important to have a strong motivation. The stronger to motivation to easier the quit. The longer the motivation, the longer the quit. I hope this information would help you in your endeavor.