No matter how much you have your mind made up, quitting smoking can be difficult – especially if you are quitting smoking cold turkey. Quitting by simply stopping without transitions or pharmaceutical aid can be difficult for heavy smokers. Medical News Today reports that only about 10% of people quit successfully in their first year. Quitting this way will also make you experience the worst withdrawals.
If you want to effectively quit smoking and get your lungs clean again, there are other ways to make this possible. Remember that your end goal is to stop and to create better habits for yourself. After that, you can even minimize the effects of smoking on your lungs. Like what we wrote in our previous blog post on ‘Lung Cleansing After Quitting Smoking; Natural Remedy’, there are various techniques on how you can improve your lung health – just like how there are many ways on you can quit smoking without going cold turkey. Read more on this below.
Avoid Triggers
One of the things you can do is to avoid your triggers. As a smoker, you already have a smoking routine drilled into your subconscious, so you need to outsmart yourself and create new healthy routines. For example, you might be a habitual smoker that smokes whenever you are drinking coffee. You can change this up by moving to a different coffee shop, going for a different drink, or keeping yourself busy with other things while drinking your coffee. For those who smoke every time they finish a meal, WebMD recommends immediately brushing your teeth or popping a breath mint to tweak your routine. While you won’t completely stop, avoiding your usual triggers will make the eventual move away from cigarettes much easier.
Try Replacement Therapy
Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT), is one way that can help you quit smoking. This replaces cigarettes with nicotine in a different form. It could come in a gum, patch, pouch, spray, and more – but without the harmful chemicals in cigarettes. It is understood that NRT can help people with high dependency on nicotine by allowing them to still have small doses of nicotine through products like nicotine pouches, patches, and nasal spray, among others. In the case of pouches, Prilla’s nicotine strength guide explains that these products can range in nicotine content, with 7mg, 14mg, and 21mg available. They suggest that light smokers test out the smaller and less powerful nicotine pouches first, but hard smokers might need stronger pouches to help for an easier transition. Similarly, nicotine gums like Nicorette are an over the counter option that come in different strengths allowing the user to slowly wean themselves off nicotine.
Take Medications
To quit smoking without going cold turkey, it will be beneficial for you to take medication. There are two recommended medicines for this: bupropion and varenicline. Bupropion is an antidepressant medication that affects your brain and helps weaken smoking cravings. In contrast, Varenicline is a smoking cessation aid that works by blocking the effects of smoking on the brain. A clinical study on ‘ Effect of Cytisine vs Varenicline on Smoking Cessation’ found that a standard 84-day Varenacline treatment can demonstrate its effectiveness with a higher abstinence outcome in favor of Varenicline. As such, Varenicline is more widely recommended than other options on the market.
If you are looking to quit but don’t want to go cold turkey we hope the above tips prove useful.
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