‘Smoking Kills, Quit today’ or ‘Cigarette Smoking is Injurious to Health’ are some of the few anti-tobacco campaign messages we hear trying to convince smokers all across the world to quit smoking. However, not all smokers heed and are courageous enough to take themselves in the right direction. The question that arises here is - What are the ways of quitting the habit of smoking?
Even though there are several answers to this question, there are some that are useful in the real sense. One such answer is making use of patches. When you apply a quit smoking patch which is also an Over-The-Counter product, it should help replace for the nicotine you usually get from cigarette. It is also called a transdermal nicotine patch because little doses of nicotine are transported to your body through your skin to gradually wean you of nicotine.
Smokers are always advised to leave the patch on to their bodies for maximum times up to 24 hours. This patch would release nicotine steadily in your body. Wearing it will reduce the effects of highs and lows that come with the consumption of tobacco.
Patches Relieve Physical Addiction
A quit smoking patch would give you a steady kind of feeling all throughout the day. This is because you would not experience any type of "high" after smoking cigarette or any type "low" when you feel like going for another smoke.
When you are applying the stop smoking patches on a regular basis, then you should make sure that you apply them to different parts of your body. If you apply two patches on the same area within one week, then it could result in some kind of skin irritation. In some cases, people also have experiences of sleep disruption when they use such patches. For such types of cases, one can apply a 16-hour patch, or else you can take off the patch when you are going to sleep.
However, doing such a thing like removing of patch at night would reignite the craving of smoke in the morning, until you put over the next patch and till the time it yields its effect.
Patch-Use for 12 Weeks
The user should continue the use of the patch on a daily basis. This should be done till the strongest of all have not been used.
After using all the strongest ones, the user should then resort to middle-strength patches, and then finally applying the weakest ones. So it is like this; the smoker begins with the 21mg, reduces to 14 mg and then at the final stage, it become just 7mg.
On an average, it takes about eight to twelve weeks to completely use up all the patches. According to some surveys, people who are into heavy smoking might benefit if they keep using the patches for even a longer periods of time, which is more than 12 weeks. However, the patch works only in cases of physical addiction.
Meditation and Counseling
Apart from application of these stop smoking patches, the cigarette user should also adhere to other steps as ways to quit smoking. These steps include counseling, meditation that would also play a good role in ending the behavioral, as well as psychological addiction that one has with the cigarettes.
While quitting smoking can seem as a tedious task, it can be achieved through your grit, passion and hard work.
