A decade of decline in tobacco usage has not reduced smoking rates enough. About 30.8 million persons in the United States in 2020 were current cigarette smokers, or 12.9% of the adult population.
Similar numbers were found in the United Kingdom, with 15.9% of males and 12.5% of women continuing to smoke, respectively (collectively about 6.9 million).
For over fifty years, it has been widely accepted that tobacco use is directly linked to lung cancer and death. Young individuals continue to pick up packets and start along the road of this harmful habit year after year. Even though it has been surpassed in fatality rates by such factors as obesity, substance misuse, infectious diseases, firearms, and motor vehicle accidents, it continues to be the leading preventable cause of death in many developed nations.
So why do so many people continue to light up?
People keep smoking cigarettes for a variety of reasons.
They’ve been duped into thinking their addiction is physical. They get angry, weary, nervous, agitated, and apprehensive when they go too long without smoking.
– A lack of self-control; giving up an activity that one enjoys doing is difficult, especially if there is no obvious drawback to doing so. The health benefits of quitting smoking are well known, but surely one cigarette won’t be fatal, right?
Peer pressure: social groups comprised primarily of smokers.
– Reducing stress is a common belief among nonsmokers, but this is not the case. But if you ask smokers, they light up when they’re feeling calm, anxious, joyful, sad, bored, busy, and needing a break, among other emotions and states of mind. Smokers are experts at rationalizing their habit despite their awareness of its negative effects.
How do people often go about breaking the habit of smoking?
These days, those who want to quit smoking have a lot of options.
The market for electronic cigarettes, or “vaping,” has grown exponentially over the past decade. It is expected to grow from its present value of $18.5 billion in the US to $61 billion by 2025. Kits, disposable vapes, coils, pods, tanks, and mods have all contributed to the explosion in popularity of vaping as a hobby. There’s good reason to believe that vaping has contributed significantly to the decline in smoking rates seen in recent years.
Zyban, a rebranded antidepressant previously known as Wilburton, is recommended in conjunction with counselling to help people quit smoking. The degree to which it actually helps is up for debate.
The success rate of hypnotherapy for quitting smoking varies from 25% to 90%, depending on who you ask.
To quit smoking in the United Kingdom, visit the NHS’s website and register for the NHS Stop Smoking programmer. Sadly, the one-year success rate is only 8%.
Again, the effectiveness rate of nicotine patches varies widely, from 25% to 94%.
What none of these approaches emphasize is that the desire to quit is the driving reason behind any success in quitting smoking. Initial success depends on a solid will to do so. If you put your faith in a certain approach, you run the risk of giving up when it fails to deliver the promised results.
The decision to quit smoking and adopt a healthier lifestyle is only half the battle; the other half is in your head. Rather than adopting a “ex-smoker” perspective, where you are continually at odds with yourself, work on developing a “non-smoker” mindset that convinces you there is no need to smoke.
