However you decide to quit, your chances of success improve if you plan ahead. When choosing your quit date, make it a time when you are least likely to 'need' cigarettes.

Some people find it easiest to quit:

• when they're busy
• when they are not in an abnormally stressful time
• when they're away from some social situations
• when they're on holidays
• when they're not pre-menstrual

Everyone is different. Choose a quit date that suits you.

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How will I quit?

 

How you quit is also up to you. Some people do it without help, others feel they need some sort of medication to help them through. It might depend on whether you've tried to quit before and what worked for you.

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Cold turkey

When you're smoking one day, and stopped completely the next, you've gone 'cold turkey'. For most people this is the most successful.

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Cutting down

Sometimes people think that stopping suddenly will be too hard - especially if they are really heavy smokers. There are a number of ways to gradually reduce the number of cigarettes you smoke, including

• smoking five cigarettes less every day until you aren't smoking at all (count out how many you are allowed that day, and don't smoke any more)
• smoking half your usual number for a week, and going cold turkey the next
• delaying your first cigarette by a hour each day

The hardest thing about this method is sticking to it. There's always the temptation to cheat a bit. If you're going to cut down, make sure that you have committed to a quit date no more than 2 weeks after you start.

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A word of warning: Cutting down by itself will not reduce the risk to your health.

The only way to do that is by stopping completely - and staying stopped. If you are concerned about reducing your risk of getting any of the huge number of well documented diseases and conditions associated with continued smoking, you must stop completely.

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What about herbal cigarettes?

Substituting one type of cigarette for another is not very likely to lead to quitting. Smoking herbal cigarettes might continue to reinforce the links between smoking and certain situations. Some herbal cigarettes contain small quantities of nicotine.

There are two important things to remember.

• There is no evidence that there is a number of cigarettes that you can smoke without risk.
• Any reduction in the risk only starts once you have stopped completely, and every year you remain a non-smoker, your risk of disease decreases. But for some conditions, it takes a very long time for that risk to reduce to levels similar to those of a non-smoker.

So the take home message is...

Don't delay.....start stopping now.
Call the Quitline 13 7848 for extra help.


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