This is the final blog on smoking cessation in this series. If you have managed to overcome smoking addiction, you are probably feeing pretty pleased with yourself. You can rightly acknowledge that you have overcome one of the most addictive substances known to humans. If you have fallen off the bus, then now is your opportunity to assess what when wrong and how you can do better next time.
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Remember, an alcoholic will always be an alcoholic, but doesn’t have to be a drinking alcoholic. Even though an alcoholic may be dry, they just have to take one drink to return to dependence upon alcohol again. So too with nicotine. If you just smoke one cigarette, your chance of returning to regular smoking again is extremely high.
You have used a number of interventions to quit smoking. You can use those same interventions to stay quit. It may have been because of health issues, or family health, or wasteful expenditure, or a desire to be in control of your destiny rather than to be controlled by a miserable little cigarette.
How can you apply what you have learned during this process to other aspects of your life. Remember these principles:
Set long term goals, but also short term achievable steps – break up the process into short segments.
Make a list of what you want to achieve and why you want to achieve it, and remind yourself often.
Identify what factors are strongly associated with smoking behaviour and make plans to avoid those triggers. Keep up your fluid intake, as well as plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables.
Avoid alcohol, caffeine and lack of sleep – which can all reduce your coping abilities.
Learn how to deal with stress in a constructive manner.
Remember trust in a higher power.
Enlist the support of friends and family – especially your children.
An important motivator to stay smoke-free is to enlist others in the process. By sharing your experience, and offering support and advice, you reinforce your own success and share the benefits with others.
Remember, it is sometimes possible to become obnoxious as an ex-smoker. You may become proud of your achievements and look down on others who struggle. You may feel that because you have succeeded, there is no reason why everyone cannot succeed. It is good to be humble and to be sympathetic to the challenges of others. Remember there may be all manner of contributing social and psychological factors that make it difficult for others to overcome addiction.
It is helpful to speak to young people – through church youth groups, or Scouts, or school presentations about the effects of smoking addiction. There is no more powerful message to promote a smoke-free lifestyle than from someone who has experienced addiction and the struggles to break free.
ALSO READ : FREE lifestyle health seminars offered in Port Shepstone
So how are you going to reward yourself? You can celebrate after 3 months, 6 months and 12 months. It is worthwhile using what you have saved through quitting to do something memorable – go on a holiday; invest in your future or your children’s future; make a difference in the life of someone else.
Remember if you have been addicted to nicotine, it is very possible to transfer that addiction to something else – food, alcohol, pharmaceutical drugs, “recreational drugs”, pornography – anything that stimulates dopamine in the brain and that takes control of your life. Sometimes the addiction is because of underlying insecurity, or feelings of futility or emptiness or guilt or lack of purpose in life. Often it can because of a hunger for spiritual fulfilment.
You have learned through this process how to live a healthful life free of smoking. But also pend time in learning about how else to improve your health – through enjoyable exercise, adequate rest and relaxation, plenty of clean water inside and out of your body, enough sunshine, positive attitudes to life, spiritually fulfilling activities and wholesome diet – as we have been presenting in our lifestyle series thus far. Another important positive intervention in life is to do something for others. It is so easy to expend all our energies and resources on ourselves.
Remember the adage that happiness is not gained through seeking for it for oneself, but rather in trying to make others happy.
As Mark Twain said: “The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up”. Albert Einstein said: “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile”.
Conquering tobacco is one of the most important interventions to prolong meaningful life – both quantity and quality. Welcome to a life of freedom!
To a great life.
Dave Glass
Dr David Glass graduated from UCT in 1975. He spent the next 12 years working at a mission hospital in Lesotho, where much of his work involved health education and interventions to improve health, aside from the normal busy clinical work of an under-resourced mission hospital.
He returned to UCT in 1990 to specialise in obstetrics/gynaecology and then moved to the South Coast where he had the privilege of, amongst other things, ushering 7000 babies into the world. He no longer delivers babies but is still very clinically active in gynaecology.
An old passion, preventive health care, has now replaced the obstetrics side of his work. He is eager to share insights he has gathered over the years on how to prevent and reverse so many of the modern scourges of lifestyle – obesity, diabetes, ischaemic heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis, common cancers, etc.
He is a family man, with a supportive wife, and two grown children, and four beautiful grandchildren. His hobbies include walking, cycling, vegetable gardening, bird-watching, travelling and writing. He is active in community health outreach and deeply involved in church activities. He enjoys teaching and sharing information.
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