Smoking

Smoking is the worst thing you can do to your health. Everybody knows that, and yet in the UK today, around 13 million adults (28 % of men and 26% of women) smoke cigarettes. Around one in ten teenagers in the UK is a regular smoker. By aged 15, more than one in five children have smoked.

So why do these people smoke? Well, most smokers start young. It's still an 'image' thing. Wanting to appear as 'grown up' as their friends who smoke. Not wanting to be the 'odd one out'. Boredom and lack of satisfaction with life can also play their part.

Once you've started you're hooked. Nicotine is very addictive, and the addiction produces tolerance, and your body gets used to having nicotine. So you need to smoke just a bit more to get the same effect, and so gradually over time your one cigarette a day becomes five a day, and then you are smoking forty a day without realising how you got to this stage.

You now smell like an ash tray, cough like a bronchitic, and burn your money away into thin air every day. Your health is poor, you get every cold that is going around. Your skin looks grey, dry and wrinkled. You are constantly stressed and tense. If you don't look and feel this bad, don't congratulate yourself, because as a smoker you soon will. It's just a matter of time!

So you decide to cut down. In fact you try this several times, because however hard you try you just keep going back to the old habit, and smoking as many as before.

So you decide to give up. Almost everyone who smokes tries to give up. If it was easy there would be an awful lot of ex-smokers, but it just isn't that easy. Nicotine's addiction has a powerful hold over most smokers that is difficult to break. Coupled with the fact that most smokers don't really want to give up anyway. Not really. Because most smokers can't even imagine a life without smoking. As soon as they feel a bit stressed, or go down to the pub, they are hooked again.

If you smoke 20 cigarettes a day for 20 years it has cost you £30.000 at today's prices.

The Effects Of Smoking -

• Every year around 114,000 people die from smoking, accounting for a fifth of all deaths in the UK
• Half of long-term smokers will die prematurely from smoking, with those dying in middle age losing on average 21 years of life.
• One in four smoking related deaths in the UK is from cardiovascular (heart and circulation) disease. Although lung cancer is the disease most commonly associated with smoking, cardiovascular disease is the bigger cause of death from smoking.
• Secondhand smoke exposure equivalent to just 1 per cent of that of active smoking carries a risk of coronary heart disease almost half that of smoking 20 cigarettes a day. In the UK many hundreds of heart disease deaths each year can be attributed to passive smoking

If You Stop Smoking -

• To stop smoking at any age reduces the chances of dying. The greatest benefits are found the earlier the smoking cessation takes place.
• When you stop smoking there is a rapid, partial decline in the risk of coronary heart disease (about 50% decline in excess risk within 1 year of cessation), followed by a more gradual decline, with risks reaching those of never smokers after a number of years of abstinence.
• Stopping smoking cuts the risk of a heart attack to about half that of a smoker within one year, and after a number of years the risk is the same as someone who has never smoked. Even for people already with heart disease, stopping smoking has many benefits. Stopping smoking soon after a heart attack reduces the risk of dying of a subsequent heart attack by around 25%.
• If you stop smoking before middle age you avoid more than 90% of the risk of lung cancer attributable to tobacco.

So how can you stop smoking successfully? Well there are really five ways -

1. Just stop. You have to be pretty motivated to make this work on your own, but some people can do it. Get your friends and family to help you.
2. Use Nicotine Replacement Therapy. With Nicotine Replacement Therapy you stop smoking and use nicotine to replace the nicotine you are missing. Get over the habit of smoking, and then cut down on the nicotine. Nicotine replacement therapy is available in patches, lozenges and tablets to dissolve in the mouth, inhalators and even a nasal spray. There are three popular brands available, Nicorette , Nicotinell and Niquitin CQ .
3. Hypnotherapy either with a local hypnotherapist or using a hypnotherapy CD.
4. Read the books or listed to the audios that have helped thousands stop smoking by changing the way you think about smoking.
5. Counselling. Your doctor may be able to help with a local smoking clinic, which uses counselling, and often nicotine replacement therapy as well.

Who Would Like To Stop Smoking?

• The majority of current smokers (70%) in Britain would like to stop smoking and over half have made a serious stopping attempt in the past five years.
• How many people have managed to stop smoking? In the UK today, an estimated 11 million adults (27% of men and 21% of women) have stopped smoking.