I think I was around 9 years of age when I used to roam my village on behalf of my older friend who would have been about 14 years old. My job was to source cigarette butts that had been prematurely stumped out and thus provided him with a free supply of smoking tobacco. Many of us are first introduced to smoking in our younger years. For some reason it seemed to install a sense of growing up, feeling ‘hard’ or important – when the reality was of course very different.
Back then the concept of smoking held much more of a positive vibe than it does now. In the 1950’s, the stars of Hollywood portrayed smoking as a cool habit. Stars like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Audrey Hepburn were forever pictured with a cigarette in their lips. This soon spread to other countries and sectors like the pop music and even the sporting world. Later, famous models like Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss strutted down the cat-walk also with cigarettes prominently displayed!
The tobacco business grew to a monster industry. At the time of writing this, the tobacco revenue is deemed to bring in over $60,000,000,000 per year. Advertising in the United States alone is estimated at around $25,000,000 per day!
However, the glorious and glamour days for smoking are truly over, as due to the links to heart-disease and cancer, governments around the world have finally begun to clamp down on both advertising and consumption rules. Nowadays smoking can no longer be advertised as a benefit of persona. Smoking is prohibited in many public venues. Companies have been sued in court for damages from smoke, sometimes even from secondary inhalation.
Here are some statistics on the negative effects of smoking tobacco:
- Smoking is perhaps the world’s greatest health problem.
- Smoking is directly related to several ill-health conditions, including heart-disease, cancer, lung disease, strokes, diabetes, chronic bronchitis and more.
- Smoking kills approximately 8,000,000 people every year.
- For every smoker that dies, there are around 30 still living with related diseases.
- On average, a long-term smoker erases 10 years from their natural lifespan.
So if smoking is so bad, why do some still smoke? Well, a lot of people do actually wish to stop smoking and most have tried – more than once. As you are now reading this it is highly likely that you have already tried to give up smoking. Maybe you failed miserably, or maybe you managed to stop smoking for a short period of time before relapsing back into the habit. I am often contacted by these people, they come to me not first, but later down the road of trying to give up smoking.
Help is here:
The good news is that further help is available and I have had good success in coaching people to quit smoking. What other helping applications miss is that smoking is in fact an addiction. I do not only mean to the nicotine itself. Smoking is a behaviour that is serving an underlying need. There is a psychological aspect to the habit that must be addressed if the smoker is going to quit for good. The need has to be replaced, and by this I do not mean the usual advice of ‘drink plenty of water’ or ‘eat a piece of fruit’.
Yes, the permanent smoking cessation process is not a simple one, and the underlying factors are very different and unique to each person. Fortunately my tool box of strategies stemming from a range of applications helps me to tackle the smoking habit from a wide range of perspectives.
If you would like to find out more about how I can help you to stop smoking forever – please connect with me.