How Easy is it to Quit Smoking?

There are millions of people all over the world who smoke and want to give up. Maybe you are one of them. It would also be fair to say that there are millions of people who have tried to give up, only to slide back into the cigarette packet habit again. You could be one of those too.

So how can you quit smoking? Is it easy or incredibly difficult? We’ve all heard of people who have tried time and time again to give up without success. We’ve also heard of people who woke up one day and decided to stop smoking, and never picked up a cigarette again. So how easy is it?

It’s important to realise that there are physical and mental elements to smoking. Firstly there is the physical habit of actually picking up a pack of cigarettes, shaking one out and lighting it. Then there are the physical effects you get from smoking. These combine to make it difficult - but not impossible - to quit smoking.

Next you have the mental side of things. We all have habits - some good, some bad - that are ingrained into us so deeply we don’t even think about them. Have you ever brushed your teeth in the morning without being consciously aware of doing it? That’s because it is a habit. Smoking too is a habit, so we have to learn how to break it. The good news is that it only takes a month or two to form a new habit. In fact it sometimes takes a lot less than this. It all depends on the person and the habit!

So if you want to know about how to quit smoking you need to remember that you have to conquer both the mental and the physical side of smoking in order to conquer your habit.

Most smokers believe they can’t quit because they don’t have enough willpower. But actually it’s not down to willpower. It’s actually down to the fact that we enjoy smoking! It’s strange to think of all the negative things associated with smoking, and yet we enjoy doing it. This is precisely why so many people find it hard to quit smoking. They struggle to do so because they believe they will lose that sense of pleasure if they stop - and they enjoy that sense of pleasure.

In truth then, the people who succeed in stopping smoking are the ones who do so through looking at their problem from a different angle. Most smokers who try to quit think about willpower and how much (or little) of it they have. Certainly some of them succeed in quitting, but many more fail or go back to smoking again. It is only by looking at smoking in a totally different way that it becomes easy to stop. That’s when you can quit smoking and never go back to it again.