Smoking Cessation: The Good Habit Exchange

Over the course of several generations, instructors who teach life-saving techniques commonly used a catchphrase when it came to providing direction to students in regard to mouth to mouth resuscitation:

 “In with the good air … out with the bad.”

 

This directive actually can be rather helpful when it comes to designing a program to be used for smoking cessation. Of course, when it comes to a stop smoking initiative in your own life, you really are quite literally replacing the bad air of cigarette smoke with “good air.” However, this life-saving mouth to mouth resuscitation is useful and informative on another front as well.

 

Many experts now agree that a multi-faceted approach to smoking cessation gives you the greatest chance of successfully “breaking the habit.” In other words, those people who have enjoyed long term success away from smoking all seem to have one factor in common: These people did not rely on the only tool in their smoking cessation plan. For example, they did not just use nicotine patches alone. They used another tool or tools – another product, plan or program – along with the nicotine patch to stop smoking.

 

The reality is that one step everyone interested in stopping smoking should take is what might be called “the good habit exchange.” The fact is that a typical smoker, on any given day, spends what really does amount to a significant amount of time, puffing. In this day and age of extensive no-smoking zones, the smoker actually has to devote a good deal of time just getting to a smoking area, never mind smoking, time and time again throughout the course of any given day.

 

Research has demonstrated that those smokers who consciously select a “healthy habit” to replace the time they’ve spent smoking have an enhanced chance of stop smoking success. Moreover, by adopting a healthy habit to replace smoking, they are bettering and enhancing their lives on whole new additional levels.

 

The healthy habit alternative to smoking does not have to be anything complicated. For example, rather than smoke a cigarette at the designated smoking area at work, take a brisk walk around the block. Rather than smoking, resurrect the age-old art of letter writing and send a true piece of written correspondence (on paper!) to a friend or family member. The list of healthy alternatives and healthy substitutes to smoking is literally endless. And again, accompanied with other smoking cessation tools, the good habit exchange really will increase your chances of ultimate stop smoking success.