TIPS FOR QUITTING SMOKING

Before Your Quit Date

• Set a quit date.
• Recognize the places and situations in which you smoke.
• Rehearse alternative plans (a walk, a shower, a phone call) for the times you feel an urge to smoke.
• Inform others of your quit date and your reasons for quitting. Ask your friends, family and colleagues to support you in this process and not to smoke around you.
• Visualize yourself moving through familiar situations cigarette-free, breathing full and deep, and appreciating how good you feel.
• Begin reducing the number of cigarettes you smoke each day.
• Write down your reasons for quitting on a card. Frame your reasons positively, focussing on the future (e.g., "I will smell fresh and clean." "I will breath deeply arid clearly."). Refer to your card when you have the urge to smoke.
• Start an exercise program.
• Keep a diary of each cigarette that you smoke: the date, the time, the situation and why you smoked it.
• Lock your cigarettes in a drawer or move them to an inconvenient place.
• If you use a lighter, switch to using matches. Keep cigarettes and matches in separate rooms. Buy brand of cigarettes different than your favorite kind.
• Smoke with your non-dominant hand.
• Write down, add up, and contemplate how much money and time you spend on smoking daily, weekly, monthly, yearly.
• Each morning take one cigarette, thank it for having been your friend but let it know that your needs have changed, that its function in your life has become obsolete, that you are now parting ways. Then destroy it with fervor.

After Your Quit Date

• Avoid activities arid situations that might lead you to smoke. Lessen your intake of alcohol and caffeine.
• Keep nutritious snacks like fruit or carrot and celery sticks on hand to eat when you get the urge to smoke.
• Set aside a certain time each day for pleasurable exercise such as a brisk walk through a park.
• Learn a craft such as knitting or cross stitch that will occupy your hands while you are watching TV or talking on the phone.
• If smoking is the way you give yourself a rest, find other ways to give yourself a break: allow yourself to lie down for fifteen minutes after work or listen to a guided relaxation tape during your breaks at work.
• Get your teeth cleaned and resolve to keep them white.
• Put the money you would have spent on cigarettes into a special bank account. Treat yourself with the proceeds.
• Remind yourself often of how much better you are without cigarettes and honor yourself for restoring your power to shape your own life.
• Remember your card of reasons for quitting that you made? Now make e new card, only this time frame those reasons in the present tense. Refer to it any time you feel the urge to smoke.
• Visualize yourself moving through famniliar situations cigarette-free, breathing deeply, and appreciating how much more air your lungs can take in, how much better you can smell and taste, how good that feels.
• Forgive yourself for any weight you may gain during the initial quitting period; most people shed this weight naturally once their bodies adjust to being free of the nicotine drug.