5 ways to stop smoking

It’s interesting how different health ailments crop up in the news from time to time. One week it’s obesity killing us, the next it could be smoking, and then even early signs of ageing such as greying hair and baldness reportedly lead to heart disease, or so the media says.

It can all be quite depressing, and the fact is, we know a lot of the hard facts already, smoking is bad, over-eating leads to all sorts of problems and if we drink to excess, it’s not going to end well. We know this, so, why aren’t we being offered more solutions instead of this constant useless information? Perhaps it’s because the media just wants to make us feel bad about ourselves. We disagree, we know people make mistakes and we understand that once you are a smoker, or overweight, or a regular drinker, it can be very hard to get things back under control. We’ll be looking back on this on the blog in time, but for now, here are five ideas that might just help you quit smoking.

Smoking increases your risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, in fact, roughly one out of five deaths from heart disease are directly related to smoking. Due to inhaling nicotine, smoking temporarily starves your heart of oxygen, this speeds up your heart rate (in a bad way) and raises your blood pressure. All of this harms the inside of your blood vessels and so you’re more likely to get blood clots, all not great for your overall health. With the negative bit out of the way, let’s have a look at some solutions including a couple of unlikely suspects.

5 Tips to Quit Smoking:

Start Vaping

Vaping is now recognised as a ‘safer’ step to quitting smoking by healthcare companies on a global scale. Vaping might not be for you, but if the action of smoking and the nicotine hit is what’s preventing you from quitting, this could be the perfect temporary alternative. That’s until new research suggests that vaping is far from harmless, but for now, they’re far less harmful than conventional cigarettes.

Listen to Audio Tapes

Not your average advice, but smokers have spoken about the real benefits of replacing their bad habits with an audiotape distraction. There are so many great free podcasts out there these days such as Serial, My Dad Wrote a Porno, The Dollop, and many many more that are both education and a great distraction from taking a cigarette break. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it!

Join a Club

A running club more specifically, where you’ll be too busy trying to gasp for air in-between nattering about the weather to even dream of picking up a cigarette ever again in your life. The beauty of a club is that the guilt of not going makes you go each week, and as the running gets easier, you’ll realise why you’ve stopped smoking, hopefully.

Meditate

We’ve already written a blog post on how to get into meditation through various apps on your mobile phone, but research shows that meditation can also help us with cravings. Perhaps it’s the deep breathing or it could just be the distraction and relaxation but for some people, meditation has worked wonders for cutting out smoking from people’s lives.

Drink More Water

Water can help you stop snacking and in some cases, stop you smoking too. Increasing your intake will keep you hydrated, serve as a distraction from the action of smoking and may even help keep the withdrawal headaches at bay.

Some of these methods could really help you to stop smoking, but at the end of the day, it’s your choice. What may come as a surprise is that even if you are a smoker, it doesn’t affect your health insurance premiums, we’re here to look after you no matter what you do in your own time.