What type of smoker are you?
Your personal quit strategies
What type of smoker are you?
Quitting smoking is a very personal journey that each person experiences differently. Here we suggest ways to reflect on your habits as a smoker. This will help you better understand these habits and eventually change them.
Answer the following questions to gain more insight into your profile as a smoker:
- Why do you smoke?
- When do you smoke?
- How do you smoke?
- Where do you smoke?
Your personal quit strategies
To outsmart your cravings, you’ll need to adopt a series of strategies that reflect your habits and personality.
Here are a few suggestions:
- Always keep in mind your motives for wanting or having to quit
- Get rid of all objects that could remind you of your life as a smoker: ashtrays, matches, lighters.
- For a time, avoid places, people and activities that could make you feel like smoking.
- Kindly ask the smokers you know to refrain from smoking around you.
- Avoid your triggers.
- Establish a new morning, noon or evening routine, eliminating the situations that might tempt you to smoke.
- Don’t drink coffee, alcohol or any other beverage you associate with cigarettes.
- Spend more time with colleagues and friends who do not smoke.
- Change your habits.
- If a craving hits, get moving and distract your thoughts, by taking a walk for example.
- Practise breathing and relaxation techniques.
- Stay physically active.
- Keep your hands busy by playing with a pencil or an anti-stress ball, for instance.
- Keep your mouth busy: chew gum, liquorice, cinnamon sticks, etc.
- After eating, brush your teeth instead of smoking.
- Pick a specific day on which your new smoke-free life will begin.
- Choose a quit buddy to help you get your mind off smoking at crucial times.
- Reward yourself for quitting !
Remember that each urge to smoke lasts only five minutes. By putting into practise the above strategies, you can delay each craving, one at a time, until they disappear altogether!