A Few Brilliant Tips To Deal With Cravings
So you have decided to stop smoking, first of all, well done! it is without a doubt one of the most important things you will ever do for yourself, your loved ones and your bank balance. And I sincerely hope you stick to it and get past the first three months, which is usually long enough to have outrun the cravings and be pretty much free and clear of the stinking things.
But its the cravings and dealing with the cravings that I want to address in this article, because once you know how to deal with them you will know how to stop smoking and it will no longer be such a monumental Goliath of a task, in fact hopefully you won’t see it as a task any more but as a gradual release back to full health, which is really what stopping smoking is, although it doesn’t always feel like that in the first week or so!
And it is in this first two weeks or so that the cravings are the most terrible, I won’t swear because my article won’t get published but I remember these first cravings being forking awful! I guess it’s because your body and mind has become so used to getting this nicotine fix that when it is suddenly removed every fibre of your being screams out for it, usually over and over! ha, if only we had listened to all those older people when they told us “it’s far easier to start than it is to stop” but we were young and it seemed at the time like we had a thousand healthy years in front of us, so who cares about a few cigarettes or whatever that old guy was talking about?
So back to dealing with those first phase, really annoying cravings. The first and best way to deal with them is stubbornness! Good old block headed, stubborn as a mule stubbornness, and it’s one of those characteristics that you usually hear discussed in a negative way, “he’s so stubborn, he never does as he’s told” that sort of thing. But when it comes to beating your cravings its is your diamond in the dirt, your light in dark places, your hefty boot heading straight towards the groin of cigarettes! And anyone can be stubborn, that’s the beauty of it, you don’t have to be talk to Stephen Hawkins about quasars intelligent. You just have to dig your mental heals in and proclaim to yourself “No! I’m not doing that”
And if you are slightly, just fractionally more stubborn than your cravings are annoying then you will beat them.
Now the second really good way to get rid of your cravings is exercise, now I know this is not everyone’s idea of a good time but by exercise I don’t mean press ups until you puke or anything extreme if you don’t want to. It could be just walking the dog a little further or going for a lazy swim, even a float!
Its basically any activity that gets your body moving for an hour or so and uses up some of the twitchy extra energy you will be getting. For some reason when your system is full of nicotine it makes all your muscles work fifty percent harder, so when you start to release yourself from this you get quite a boost of extra energy.
This is where some people fall down and go back to smoking because the extra twitchy energy with no outlet, combined with the irritation of the cravings makes them start again. Adding even a little more physical activity to your week will be a huge step towards quitting for good, it will relax you, get rid of the extra energy and to tell you the truth you will probably enjoy it, unlike before because your lungs were like shrivelled carrier bags!