Counseling To Stop Smoking Without Using Nicotine Replacement
Making use of dangerous drugs such as Prozac or Zyban are not really the way to go about stopping your addiction to nicotine. In a way it is just like replacing one dangerous drug with another. So to is using NRT, so there has to be another way to stop smoking without using nicotine replacement, and there is. In fact there is a wealth of information available in the form of self help, but it is hard to stop smoking and even harder when you are on your own in this quest.
Nicotine dependency has to be dealt with in the right way. Not every one has the will-power to stop this addiction cold turkey and on their own. The addiction to nicotine has emotional, psychological and physical affect on the smoker and these all need to be dealt with when they stop this habit. An addiction such as this is not something that is easy to control and people around you will always still smoke. You can’t go changing your entire circle of friends just because they are smokers.
Making use of free government telephone counseling services is a good route to take to stop smoking without using NRT. These services have shown excellent results in the states that operate them and they have seen smokers able to stop twice as fast as others who do not make use of these services.
As nicotine is such a difficult drug to give up, in order to be successful it is not only about the smoker. It is about the kind of support and encouragement they receive from others. This includes counselors, friends, family and the people they work with, all of these people play a role in the support team of someone trying to quit smoking. We often hear ex-smokers say that they would never have been able to quit if it was not for the support they were given.
Information for the smoker who wants to stop is available from many resources. Health insurance companies, your local gym, hospitals, support groups and even your employer. However these just make some of the resources available, and the most efficient assistance does come from a trained counselor.
You can receive both group and individual counseling or as we said before, simply over the telephone. A counselor will assist the smoker to recognize the emotional and psychological issues that arise when they first stop smoking and withdraw from nicotine. It is not an easy task as the addiction to nicotine is one of the strongest there is.
The thing to remember is that once you stop smoking, the nicotine remains in the body for as long as three to four days and it is when this period is over that the withdrawal symptoms begin to manifest. These are liable to last just a couple of days or in some instances even weeks. It is this time when the support is needed most so that the smoker has someone to turn to rather than back to the cigarettes.
The beauty of using counseling to get over the urge to smoke is that you don’t have to use NRT, and you also don’t have to use any dangerous drugs. Clinical studies have shown that when a smoker received the correct counseling or attends a specialist clinic, they are four times likelier to succeed in their attempts to stop smoking. Trying to do this completely alone has been found to be the least successful strategy of all.