10 Worst Ways to Quit Smoking

It isn't hard to get advice on how to stop smoking. Everyone seems willing to dish it out. Sometimes its from people with a cigarette hanging out of their mouth. (They could quit if they wanted to!) And sometimes its from people who have never smoked a day in their lives (How would they know?)

They'll usually tell you all of the things you need to do to be able to quit. I'm going to do it a little different. I'm going to tell you the worst ways ever to quit smoking. And they are (in no particular order):

1. Cold Turkey – If this one worked there would be far, far fewer smokers in the world, because nearly every smoker has tried this at one time or the other. Success often ranges from a few minutes to a few days. In fact, at most 20% of people trying to quit smoking cold turkey succeed. Ironically though, 90% of ex-smokers stopped smoking abruptly rather than using one of the methods below.

2. Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) – This method is based on the theory that overcoming a nicotine addiction is hard and you need help. Generally in the form of replacing the nicotine in cigarettes with some kind of controlled nicotine. Popular choices include nicotine gum, nicotine patches, nicotine lozenges, and drugs such as Chantix or Zyban. (The drugs aren't actually nicotine, they imitate it instead.)

This makes no sense though. How does continually feeding your addiction help you overcome it? How often do you hear of heroin users being given smaller and smaller doses of heroin in order to stop using heroin? All this does is put you in a constant state of withdrawal. True the withdrawal is not as full-fledged, which is what NRT promotes as giving you the edge. Yet, NRT success rates aren't any higher than cold turkey rates. So why spend all that money on the products?

3. Aversion Therapy – Chain smoke until you make yourself sick. That's aversion therapy at its most basic. The idea is to combine your thoughts of smoking with unpleasant thoughts, memories or stimuli so that you will no longer want to smoke. It will be too unpleasant.

   One form of aversion therapy is to combine smoking with electric shock therapy. (No. Don't try a home version of this!) Sound unpleasant? That's the idea. Yet this form of quitting smoking only has about a 2% success rate.

4. Hypnotherapy – Sounds a little out there, but hypnotherapy is simply the use of deep relaxation to put everyday problems on a back burner and focus on what you want to fix. Such as stopping smoking. On its own, hypnotherapy doesn't have a very high success rate as a stop smoking program. When used with other methods it can increase success rates though.

5. Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) – Very popular these days, NLP is a set of techniques or strategies for enhancing communication and personal influence. It is used to stop smoking by creating new feelings, emotions and associations to cigarettes. In simpler terms, messing with your mind so that you won't want to smoke anymore.

6. Antagonist drugs – This is the use of prescription drugs to block the feel good effects of nicotine. Some of these drugs include Lobeline, Mecamylamine and Naltrexone. Only your doctor can give you these. Be sure to discuss all medical history (including depression) first.

As far as results go, the use of antagonist drugs on their own have a very low success rate.

7. Keeping a diary – Often referred to as a smoker's diary, this is simply a written record about all of your smoking habits. By writing down things like when you feel the urge to smoke, what you where doing when you got the urge, how often you smoke, etc. then you have valuable information about your smoking habit that can be used to help you quit. Knowledge is always good, but you are going to have to act on that knowledge for it to do any good.

8. Exercising through the cravings – Exercising releases endorphins. Those feel good chemicals that body produces on its own. In essence you are trying to replace the way nicotine makes you feel with the way exercising makes you feel. Of course if you are a heavy smoker, chances are exercising makes you feel like crap.

9. Flushing toxins from the body – No doubt about it, smoking puts poisons in your body. The theory is that by removing these poisons, you can overcome your addiction even sooner. Drinking lots of water and performing juice fasts are just two of the ideas behind this theory.

10. Never trying to quit smoking because you 'know' it will be to hard – This is perhaps the saddest of all. To want to do something but never attempt it for fear of failing.

Despite all of these poor ways of quitting smoking, it is still possible. All you need is the right way to quit that works for you.