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Smoking Alternatives

Knowing you have to quit smoking is one thing. Everyone knows smoking is bad for their health, for other people’s health, and for the environment.

Mainstream science has proven these facts. Meanwhile, a smoker’s associates show them in no uncertain terms that their smoking habit is unwelcome in their homes, cars, and places of employment by ushering them outside to smoke.

Friends, colleagues, and bystanders make faces when they smell the chemicals that seem to surround a smoker like some unholy aura even after they have stubbed out their latest cig.

As for the money: people who buy cigarettes realize only too well how much their habit eats into a pay cheque each month, gobbling up money that could be spent on adventures and enjoyable extras.

Why Not Quit?

More difficult is figuring out how to quit smoking. Non-smokers tell their smoking counterparts they should just give up, but they have no idea what they are saying.

Having never had to give up cigarettes themselves, they imagine this is an easy step: stop buying cigarettes; simple. Smoking is an addiction, not just a habit, and even habits not involving a change in one’s brain chemistry are hard to break.

Smokers know that giving up nicotine is going to put them through the discomfort of withdrawal. Common complaints are nausea, headaches, pain elsewhere in the body, dizziness, and feeling irritable.

For a lot of smokers, a fear is that they will pick up a different habit like overeating which will cause them to lose weight. Being slender is more important to many people than avoiding cancer or heart disease.

How to Quit

What a smoker needs is a good idea. For him, only one of the many alternatives available will be the successful answer. It probably will not be quitting cold turkey: more than three quarters of people who try that method return to cigarettes relatively quickly.

Most smokers will choose another method, one that is more practical and realistic. It will address the two things a smoker is addicted to: smoking motions and nicotine.

Nicotine Replacement Therapy

Several methods of nicotine replacement therapy can be purchased over the counter from a pharmacy. Instead of inhaling nicotine, consumers are urged to try nicotine patches on their skin, sucking nicotine candies, or chewing nicotine gum.

These are all tools used to reduce nicotine consumption slowly but do not help with the related, relaxing ritual of lighting, inhaling, and holding a cigarette.

Packages of nicotine replacement products contain items with decreasing amounts of nicotine or one is encouraged to use fewer of them every day.

Within a few weeks to around 6 months, users of nicotine replacement gums, candies, or patches have effectively withdrawn from nicotine, enduring withdrawal symptoms in manageable doses rather than being hit by the full spectrum of symptoms at their highest levels.

Doctors will sometimes prescribe other methods of nicotine therapy like aerosols. Hypnosis is a nicotine-free means of quitting for a very few people. This can be used to plant a subconscious idea in the mind of a smoker which makes even holding cigarettes revolting.

Mainly, however, over-the-counter remedies and all other methods work very well if a person has the will to quit and adequate support around him or her.

What about Electronic Cigarettes?

These are becoming some of the hottest nicotine replacement options on the market, quickly overtaking gum, patches, and candy because they provide a double-barreled answer to the problem of smoking addiction. One has something to hold and suck on plus a level of nicotine which can be reduced and eventually omitted completely.

Smokers can still “light up” as a way to relax, except they are just pressing a button; maybe just inhaling without having to press anything. Users find that e cigs cost less than cigarettes, although they can be addictive in their own right.

But electronic cigarettes contain no tobacco and a fraction of the chemicals, if any at all. The science is incomplete on the question of whether the heat of an e cig causes materials to release toxic fumes at potentially harmful levels. Nicotine is an optional ingredient in e liquid.

Forms of electronic cigarettes include disposable and rechargeable items. Rechargeable ones last for up to 300 charges and each battery will operate for between 90 minutes and 4 hours on a charge.

Refill cartridges are available, but many consumers purchase blank cartridges and fill them with something called e liquid. This is a tobacco-free product containing vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol, possibly nicotine, and flavoring (natural or artificial).

E cigs (a.k.a. cigalikes, mini cigs, or smokeless cigarettes) resemble cigarettes. They are about the same length and width. In place of glowing tobacco embers, an LED light glows when a person puffs on this item and doubles as a charge-level indicator. Some are white and tan but black is also popular.

The next option is an eGo cig which offers a higher level of battery power and a bigger-capacity clearomizer or tank to fill with e liquid. As consumers become more interested in this method of replacing nicotine and tobacco, they upgrade to bigger and more complicated machinery. Instead of using tobacco or menthol-flavored e juice, they experiment with flavors like custard, chocolate, and fruit.

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Quitting Smoking With E-Cigs

Reasons to quit smoking are so obvious and numerous that it’s difficult to defend continuing the habit. There are the social ramifications of being allowed back inside with non-smokers.

Dating possibilities open up when you don’t smell like a chemical experiment. That cough was ugly too: you will be more attractive once you stop coughing up phlegm all the time.

Then there is the fact that, with no more smoking habit, you can afford to take a girl to better restaurants. If she wants to go Dutch, that’s even better: more money for a new shirt to make a good impression.

You won’t spend half your date in ER, either, suffering from a suspected heart attack. If you already found love, cancer won’t cut your marital bliss short and you get to meet your grandchildren.

Quitting Smoking

Okay, you know why you should butt out those nasty cigarettes, and that’s without even talking about environmental reasons. What you want now are some solid ideas as to how you should go about quitting.

After many years of puffing away you probably already tried a few and they didn’t work. Most of them involved replacing nicotine and slowly weaning while some (like hypnosis) made you deeply suspicious. Counseling uncovered your dislike for authority or a long-held resentment of mom and dad, but the cigarettes are just as tempting as ever.

Methods of Nicotine Replacement

Nicotine replacement therapies include aerosol sprays, nicotine gum, special candies, and patches. Most of these products can be purchased without a prescription from almost any pharmacy.

Aerosols are typically prescription medications. They are all designed to give the user a dose of nicotine every couple of hours throughout the day and to gradually reduce this dose until the user is no longer addicted to this stimulating drug.

Without nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), smokers experience heavy withdrawal symptoms including heart palpitations, sweating, headaches, nausea, sleeplessness, poor appetite, irritability, and more. Nicotine exposure causes these symptoms in many people too.

It sounds like a drug addiction, which is what addiction to nicotine is. There is also a second part to the addiction which involves the physical behavior and associations of smoking with activities like waiting in the car for a child to finish hockey or talking on the phone to mom and dad. NRT does not help with this facet of addiction.

Quit Smoking with E Cigs

They are not FDA-approved smoking cessation tools, but e cigs are often regarded by users as devices to help them quit smoking. In the eyes of many smokers, the problem is smoke, not nicotine.

Although nicotine poses some health risks, they are not as severe or prevalent as those related to smoke. As such, “vapers,” as they call themselves, argue that e cigs are effective for quitting smoking and passionately support vaping.

One can also use an e cig filled with nicotine-free e liquid. This makes it possible to continue the habit of smoking without actually inhaling smoke or ingesting nicotine. Many smokers have tried NRT, simply quitting, hypnosis, and counseling.

None of these methods worked. When e cigs came along, they finally found a means of ending their addiction to cancer sticks and were liberated from the health problems they once suffered or symptoms were reduced so they could start truly enjoying life.

E Cig Controversy

But the FDA has not approved e cigs as smoking cessation devices because they feel the need for more studies into the side effects of inhaling this vapor. They are also concerned about attitudes to vaping: that because it is safer than smoking many people regard it as safe.

The electronic part is worrying to environmentalists who count the e waste and wish consumers could simply stop smoking without picking up a new habit. Health gurus wonder if non-smokers will try vaping out of curiosity or to lose weight.

If vapers continue using nicotine, they can reduce the amount, but countless addictions carry on unabated. This is a health concern apart from that of inhaling smoke which advocates of e cigs play down.

Doctors and scientists have a lot of evidence to support their view that nicotine is a danger. Vapers say it isn’t any worse than coffee which, unlike e juice, is not being banned by or coming under scrutiny from the FDA.

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Timeline Of The Benefits Of Stopping Smoking

What would happen if you stopped smoking today? Is this a resolution you made in January 2015? Are you succeeding or putting it off?

Perhaps you are already trying but wondering when the benefits will really start to kick in and you can stop feeling irritated by the nagging need for nicotine.

Maybe it would help if you could see a picture of what is happening in your body and what will happen in your life if you give yourself enough time.

Timeline of Benefits

Change, especially big change, doesn’t happen overnight. You need to realize that at first it will be very hard to quit smoking. Each minute you go without a cigarette will seem like hours, even an eternity at times.

Challenging an addiction takes support and determination. You will need a lot of friends on your side and potentially some kind of nicotine replacement from the pharmacist.

The general outline looks like this:

Quitting, craving, slowly noticing returning sense of smell and taste.

Coughing gets lighter.

Cost benefits become noticeable.

A doctor’s report is excellent.

You start to notice and dislike the smell of tobacco.

Finally, you are done; a cigarette is the last thing you want, although a niggling reminder of that old addiction might remain.

Starting Small

You obviously have not been offended by the smell and taste of cigarettes up until now. Other people have, and they have kept their distance owing to the odor that lingers on your hair, clothing, skin, and breath.

You became accustomed to this distance knowing what it was caused by, but now that you don’t smell so bad and people are moving closer, you realize what you were missing. It’s an added incentive to continue seeking out other ways to occupy your hands. Add to that returning taste buds, and now you can really taste a good meal.

Wanting something to hold is another challenge apart from giving up nicotine: finding something to replace the motions of smoking. Instead of lighting up, you will find it easier to resist the urge to smoke if you locate a substitute: a pen to chew on, lollipops, an e cig, or something you say to yourself every time you want to light up.

Next Stop: Health

Slight changes in your health will take a while to become noticeable. A little at a time, you can go further without coughing, take steps faster, talk for longer or even sing without breaking out into an alarming cough that makes others fear for your life.

Eventually, though, you will realize you climbed the stairs without stopping. You went for a long walk without having to catch your breath.

If chronic health problems have bothered you, your doctor will see that you have quit smoking by the lack of phlegm in your lungs, greater lung capacity, and other signs of a strengthening cardiovascular system. As your health improves, so does your social life.

You can join a local drop in soccer league or take up ice hockey with the guys at work. Instead of having to bow out of a walking club because you couldn’t keep up with the other participants, you are now feeling fit and meeting new friends. All of these little changes might take months, but not years.

Changing Perspective

After anything from 4 months to a year, you may realize the odor of tobacco smoke offends you. Once the aroma was either an invitation or something you could ignore. Now you feel nauseated by the stench of other people smoking. Your body has gone through an extreme change and along with your mind is helping you to fight off any last urges that might remain.

Now, instead of spending your tea break in the alley in all weathers smoking with other colleagues, you actually spend it drinking tea indoors out of the elements.

Change in your Pocket

It doesn’t take long to realize that smoking cost you a small fortune. Shortly after you quit, you notice the bank balance looking healthier than usual, although if you tried to replace cigarettes with something else for a while, the shift will be more gradual than if you refuse to replace one habit with another.

After many months, however, your bank balance isn’t just better; it’s incredible. If you saved instead of spending the small savings, you now have enough money to take a long vacation to a place you have only ever dreamed of before. On your one-year smoke-free anniversary, you and your friends are looking at photos of sandy beaches and blue water.

Suggested:

Tips For Stopping Smoking

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Tips For Quitting Smoking

Quitting smoking is an excellent goal no matter how many months or years you have been lighting up. It is never too late to make a positive impact on your life and the lives of others who might be inhaling your second hand smoke. The benefits are far-reaching. Now the question is: how do you get started?

Quit Smoking with Help

Do not try to do this alone. Quitting smoking is a potentially monumental task. For every person who quits cold turkey overnight, there are at least 10 who feel like they have tried everything without success.

A big difference between success and failure is the help and support one receives from others. Let everyone know what you are trying to do. This will alert them to your need for support.

Also, by announcing what you plan to do, you are made more accountable and motivated. Failing to give up cigarettes when no one knew you were even trying is much less embarrassing than failing when others are rooting for you.

Smoking Cessation Challenges

The two things your body wants when you stop smoking are nicotine and the smoking behavior. Your arm, hand, fingers, and lips are used to doing something at particular times of the day, several times each day. Your brain is used to receiving stimulation from nicotine.

When you stop performing the smoking ritual during coffee break, while talking on the phone, or when you drive, you go through withdrawal. Your brain craves the ritual both chemically and psychologically.

Cravings become withdrawal when you experience physical symptoms such as shaking, nausea, headaches, pain, and/or vomiting. You can expect to be irritable with people around you and sleep poorly without nicotine. Severe moodiness is almost inevitable.

As the body goes through these dramatic extremes:

Equilibrium will also be restored eventually.

Moods will no longer be so extreme.

Sleep cycles will return to normal.

One’s appetite comes back.

In the meantime, you might eat more or less, consider drinking more and, thus, replacing one addiction with another, or take up some other hobby or habit which could be positive or negative. If you are looking for a replacement, sports, clubs, and volunteer work are far better options than drinking, gambling, or overeating.

Smoking Cessation Tips

Consider some of these over-the-counter remedies for overcoming cigarette cravings. Use patches, gum, or lozenges to replace nicotine.

Their purpose is to provide the drug without smoke, chemicals, or the associate motions of smoking. Every couple of weeks, it is advisable to reduce nicotine intake by an amount suggested in the literature supplied with each product.

Behavioral changes come first (no more hand-to-mouth movement) while nicotine is still released to your brain, so you are handling one challenge at a time. When a week has passed, you are ready to lower your dose of nicotine and face mild symptoms of withdrawal. After anything up to 6 months, you could be free of cravings for cigarettes.

Follow recommendations which come with these products. You will be receiving nicotine at different levels from what you are used to because the body absorbs nicotine differently through skin or by mouth than when you inhale it. That might take some getting used to.

Secondly, since every smoker is different, guidelines can only estimate how much nicotine you currently need to avoid extreme side effects or equally extreme withdrawal symptoms. Nicotine patches in themselves can also cause side effects similar to those produced by nicotine, like a racing heart, dizziness, and sleep disturbance.

If a product is not working after the time recommended, consider a different method of trying to quit smoking. Sucking on candies, chewing gum, or wearing patches is not working for you. All you are doing is wasting money.

This could be when a doctor’s help is called for. He can prescribe medications not available over the counter including injections. Counseling is a useful supplement to any OTC or prescription medications, uncovering troubles which could be reason you began smoking initially and stressors which see you lighting up today.

Some smokers have enjoyed success with hypnosis, although the medical community does not support its usage for smoking cessation. They don’t know what to do with this alternative healing method which falls outside of quantifiable standards.

When to Expect Results

Quit smoking today and you will notice results right away. In particular, the financial rewards mount up overnight.

Add up how much you spend on cigarettes daily: it’s a lot of money. A single pack costs anything from $6 to $15. What if you smoke two of those daily?

The savings from not smoking, even when using gum or patches, will be noticeable from the start. Give yourself a week or more to add up the savings for the greatest impact.

Your breathing could be deeper within a month or less, during which time a chronic cough could lighten. By that time, the smell of smoke will also have faded and your taste buds will have returned.

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Quitting Smoking With Hypnosis

There are many excellent reasons to quit smoking, most of them health related. Besides risks of heart and lung disease, stroke, or cancer, there are also the social negatives related to smoking.

Other people don’t like the smell of lingering smoke on your clothing, skin, and hair, and they certainly don’t want to be around when you are actually smoking. If you’ve tried virtually everything to quit — cold turkey, patches, gum — is it time to consider hypnosis?

What is Hypnosis?

While you are in a hypnotic state, a person trained in the art of hypnosis plants suggestions in your mind. You are fully conscious, but not completely awake. It’s an in-between state.

If you are susceptible and the hypnotist is very good, it is possible to overcome issues such as phobias and to learn to control behaviors. The urge to smoke might be one of them. Drugs are not involved in the art of hypnosis. But is it safe?

Effectiveness and Safety of Hypnosis

Studies are inconclusive as to the effectiveness of hypnosis in general. People who practice it and those who have been hypnotized successfully are vociferous advocates of the power of this form of treatment.

Not everyone is susceptible, however, and as for the scientific community, they have a hard time with this area of pseudo-treatment. It isn’t measurable in the traditional way, so finding evidence to support or disprove hypnosis is difficult. They won’t argue for it but can’t argue against it owing to the benefits many consumers have enjoyed as a result of hypnosis.

Quitting Smoking with Hypnosis

What about using hypnosis to quit smoking? All of the arguments for and against hypnosis in general apply to this specific topic. Smoking is an addictive behavior, however, and there is more to the desire for cigarettes than associations between smoking and certain activities or a need to repeat hand-to-mouth movements.

Hypnosis cannot fight the chemical need to replenish the stimulant nicotine found in cigarettes. Reliance on nicotine is the result of chemical changes to the brain and withdrawal is a physical experience.

Hypnosis can benefit the person who, while trying to push through withdrawal symptoms, is fighting against physical pain. Hypnotists often help individuals overcome pain not by getting rid of it but by suggesting ways to unconsciously regard pain differently and, thus, handle it better.

They also use their skills to alter attitudes to cigarettes. Practitioners convince their subjects of negative qualities in cigarettes but might even exaggerate those qualities or suggest consequences to smoking.

As a result of the suggestion that a cigarette will smell, taste, or feel a certain way, subjects actually have those experiences. Hypnotism reveals the power of psychology to alter perceptions of the concrete world in ways which are difficult to quantify.

Success of Hypnotism for Quitting Smoking

Even for people susceptible to hypnosis, this method isn’t always going to work. Sometimes the power of hypnosis works for a little while and this could be long enough to overcome the need for cigarettes.

It might not be adequate if the chemical addiction to nicotine is too powerful. Also, a subject has to want to quit smoking: that’s the key.

Finally, a hypnotist must be skilled at what she does. When all of the pieces fit together, hypnosis can be effective.

It might be even more successful as part of a bigger plan which involves over-the-counter nicotine replacement therapies or prescribed therapies to combat withdrawal.

Another psychological approach — counseling — can also be useful. When someone becomes hooked on a substance or activity, there is usually a reason. Looking at causes of stress, anxiety, or depression gives consumers a deeper awareness of why they picked up cigarettes in the first place.

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Smoking Vs Vaping

Does the world have to see smoking and vaping as locked in a vicious battle where only one can survive? This does not have to be the case.

Many consumers have chosen to not even try electronic options feeling suspicious about this relative newcomer while they know the risks associated with smoking but feel it is too late to do their bodies any good by quitting now.

There are also non-combustion tobacco products to compete with electronic cigarettes and vaporizers which use tobacco. Choices abound, but is there room in a contest of smoking vs vaping for both to survive?

Smoking Facts

First, let’s look at the facts about smoking. Quite apart from nicotine-related risks the chance of developing a lung problem or cancer related to smoking is high enough that almost everyone who smokes has a health concern.

Smoking causes or exacerbates asthma, COPD, pneumonia, and heart problems. Smoking-related cancers include lung and oral cancer.

Health problems are just one part of the debate: there are other ugly facts too. Smokers age prematurely. Their breath smells of formaldehyde. Their clothing, house, and car smell nauseating to non-smokers.

Second-hand smoke is a danger so smokers tend to go outside no matter how cold or wet it is if they want to smoke during their work break or at home because no one wants to be exposed to smoking dangers or to the aromas associated with it. Then there is that ugly and distressing smoker’s cough.

Nicotine is not usually related to illness or death but it is a drug that has the potential to do what all stimulants do: interfere with normal rhythms of the heart. This is serious business. Consumers who chew tobacco still ingest a lot of nicotine and are at risk of suffering from seizures, high blood pressure, or heart attack.

Vaping Facts

Since smoking is addictive because of nicotine but also an addictive behavior, vaping satisfies both elements of this habit without the smoke. Smoke is where the toxins come from; the stuff people breathe in and die from. Vaping eliminates this problem whether one uses a dry herbal vaporizer or an e cig.

Vaporizers, however, come with their own risks. In particular, nicotine is frequently still present in e liquids and remains in ground herbs so consumers are still getting their fix of this socially acceptable drug. They can continue to put their nervous systems at risk without really understanding the dangers.

But vapor smells much better than smoke. It tastes better and many bosses will allow their vaping employees to use an electronic cigarette indoors although smokers are sent outside.

Vapor, if it lingers on the air, smells like tobacco without the chemicals. Many vapers choose flavors of e liquid such as mint, chocolate, coffee, and custard. There are countless flavor possibilities. Vaping with an e cig is cheaper than smoking by many hundreds of dollars each year.

Yet scientists are still unsure about the properties of vapor. Is it dangerous in its own right, just less dangerous than cigarette smoke? Or is vapor completely harmless?

As a nicotine replacement therapy, vaping appears to be a method of choice for thousands of Americans who continue to “smoke” without combustion. Many never really give up the habit, though, because they are still addicted to the motion and to the nicotine.

Smoking vs Vaping: the Winner

There is no clear winner in this race. At least, with cigarette smoking, consumers know the facts; they realize what they are doing. With vaping, a lot of people are deluded because they hear the good news and ignore the bad. They are also undeniably healthier, richer, and have more friends.

It’s not an easy choice to make which habit is better, but one can be thankful that scientists continue to study this intriguing topic, looking for facts and dispelling myths.

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