Stopping smoking is always going to be difficult. There is the combination of a physical craving and a psychological one to deal with, and it is unsurprising that many people who attempt to give up smoking don’t last long on their first attempt. One of the hardest issues is the craving that affects a lot of smokers. Trying to break those cravings is something that prevents a lot of people from giving up.
The best way to start to get rid of cravings is distraction. When you give up smoking you are always going to have a problem if you keep thinking about how you’re giving up. This keeps cigarettes in the forefront of your mind and makes it very difficult to keep it up. However, if you fill your time with other things, you can keep your mind off the cravings for at least a while – hopefully long enough to get you over the tricky first week.
Once you have broken the firmest psychological and physical cravings, you stand a much better chance of giving smoking up entirely. That’s not to say that the cravings go away entirely and immediately. It is likely that you will still miss cigarettes and at certain points will think “This would be a lot easier/more pleasant if I had a cigarette right now”. But if you aren’t feeling a strong physical pressure to smoke, it will be a lot easier to deal with the psychological cravings – and at some point, you are going to have to face the struggle of making a clean break anyway.
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