Smoking Quit Tips & Things You Can Do For Stress Relief

Stress relief or relaxation is a major reason smokers give for not being able to quit smoking.

However, as a smoker you've probably not asked or thought - why and how does smoking relieve stress? But this is a very important question if you are a smoker who needs cigarettes when you encounter a problem, or hear bad news or rely on cigarettes to calm your nerves.

Relying on something other than yourself for stress relief is a major barrier to quitting smoking. If you are like most smokers you probably find it difficult to calm yourself without cigarettes. This has a negative effect on your quit for two reasons.

1. When you stop smoking you lose your stress relief tool and often stress yourself out more, resulting in a return to cigarettes

2. You are subconsciously telling yourself that you personally are not good enough to deal with that particular, or any other stressful, situation on your own and without cigarettes. This knocks your self-esteem and builds on the belief that you cannot stop smoking.

And if you believe that you can't handle a situation without cigarettes, then the likelihood is that you won't ever be able to stop.

So what is the solution? There are two things you need to do.

Firstly you need to realise that cigarettes and nicotine do not reduce stress, in fact they increase it. How?

1. When carbon monoxide and nicotine enter your brain they reduce the amount of oxygen you get. Oxygen is the fuel of the brain, and without it we struggle to function properly, think clearly and without oxygen we also struggle to concentrate.

It is a fact that nicotine and carbon monoxide starve the oxygen in a smokers body, and it is also a fact that the brain needs oxygen to concentrate - ask a doctor. Oxygen is the basis of all activity in the body - any effort the body makes from thinking to running is harder with less oxygen.

Carbon monoxide and nicotine prevent oxygen from reaching your brain and the other organs in your body - this simplay cannot help you to relax or concentrate.

2. Nicotine is a vaso-constrictor – it contracts your veins making them smaller and narrower. When you smoke your veins and arteries shrink in size, meaning that your heart has to work harder to pump the same amount of blood around your body, but through a smaller space.

Add to that, the fact that tar and the other chemicals are deposited in your veins reducing blood flow even more. The resulting strain means that a smoker’s heart will beat an additional 35,000 times per day more than a non-smoker and their blood pressure is also ten to twenty points higher than it should be.

3. The effect that nicotine has on the insulin in your blood puts your body under constant stress. Every forty five minutes or so, when you smoke, your body blocks the release of insulin. Once the nicotine has worn off insulin is re-released, but then you have a cigarette again (instead of naturally replenishing your blood sugar levels) and you block the insulin again.

This stop start process puts a huge strain on the body – a non-smoker’s body will only reduce the flow of insulin when he really needs it – when he hasn’t eaten in a while. But smokers make their body’s stop-start this process twenty times more, or more a day than a non-smoker.

4. The several thousand chemicals, poisons, toxins and carcinogens in a cigarette force your body into a state of shock. Every time you smoke your body has to adapt to the presence of the foreign harmful chemicals. Each of those chemicals are deposited in your veins, organs, lungs, heart, arteries and other organs in your body.

When you don’t smoke for a few hours your body does it’s best to clear out all those foreign substances.

You experience this process through a ‘smoker’s cough’ in the day and also in the morning, when your body has had eight hours or so to start the cleansing process. You also cough up a lot of phlegm. Both of these attempts to clean out your body put your body through a rigorous cleansing process every time you stop smoking, every day of your smoking life.

A non-smoker will only experience this cleansing process, as extensively as you do when they have a virus or infection or if they smoke a cigarette.

The truth is that you only believe cigarettes and nicotine can relax you. And that is the key – you believe.

It all comes back to what you think. Because you tell yourself that cigarettes calm you, you think they do. Because you tell yourself that they help you concentrate, you think they do (despite the fact that you are putting a huge strain on your system – your heart beats an extra 35,000 per day due to the reduction in vein size making your blood pressure higher).

So even though cigarettes and nicotine are having a harmful and weakening effect on your body, which you have always known, you believe that they make you stronger and more capable of dealing with life. It is a clever trick that the tobacco companies have played on you.

They have shown you on films, on TV and in commercials that cigarettes help you concentrate, relive stress, beat problems, enjoy sex more and that they make men more manly and women more sexy.

You have to give them credit because it has worked and it is still working! But once you take a step back and look at the overall picture, you can see that advertising and your beliefs have led you to believe that you need cigarettes and nicotine, and that they bring you many benefits. When in fact that is all in your head!

It can’t just be the placebo effect (believing something makes it happen) that makes me concentrate and relax can it? Well the truth is that there is a little bit more to it than that.

Smokers may feel a little more relaxed when they smoke for two reasons.

Exercise:

Before we go into the details, either smoke a cigarette or put your hand to your mouth, as if you were smoking a cigarette and inhale just as you would a cigarette. If you are just inhaling, rather than smoking a cigarette make sure you do it several times.

Make sure you do one of the two before you read on, and also notice any patterns that develop and pay attention to your breathing

Smoking As A Way To Relax / Relieves Stress

1. When you smoke your in-breath is much stronger than when you breathe normally. Try it again, inhale as if you were smoking a cigarette. You will notice that you are breathing in a lot more air each time you inhale from a cigarette, than when you breathe normally – this is because you are breathing through your diaphragm, which sucks in a lot more air.

And with this extra air also comes more oxygen – your brain and body’s fuel, this can sometimes be up to 20% more oxygen than you get through normal breathing.

In effect every time you smoke you are just practicing deep breathing exercises – you are providing your body and organs with more oxygen, which helps you relax, to a degree. I say to a degree because that extra oxygen is not enough to compensate for the strain that the chemicals in a cigarette put on your body.

2. A few minutes ago when you smoked that cigarette or inhaled as if you were smoking, you should have also noticed another pattern. The other pattern is the way you exhale. Just like your in-breath was stronger and deeper, your out-breath was also stronger and deeper. And what happens when you breathe out heavily?

Try it. You feel relaxed. Have you noticed that we we laugh and sigh we are exahling? Despite the smoke putting a strain on your body, when you exhale you feel good.

Again when you smoke all you are doing is doing a deep breathing exercise – deep breaths, with more oxygen, and deep and long out-breaths – releasing stress! That is why smokers claim that cigarettes help them to relax. But you don’t need to have an IQ of 180 to figure out that this isn’t productive.

The fact of the matter is that smoking doesn’t actually reduce stress, or help you concentrate. It actually puts your body under more stress. Each time you stop smoking your body has to go through the cleansing process.

Every time you have a cigarette you put your body under stress. Then your body tries to clean out the chemicals, which again makes you feel uncomfortable, and puts you under stress. Then when your body realises it has extremely low blood sugar you get pangs and cravings because your body needs sugar – it becomes stressed.

You then have a cigarette to relieve that stress. Then after forty five minutes or so the process starts all over again! You are just going around in one huge destructive and pointless circle.

People say smoking reduces stress, when in fact – the stress is caused by the last cigarette – when the nicotine and chemicals enter the body it is put under a huge strain. And when nicotine leaves the body it becomes stressed because there is no nicotine to release sugar into the blood.

Tobacco increases stress and then relieves it when you smoke – smoking is basically like hitting yourself over the head with a hammer because it feels really good when you stop!

A major reason why people say they can’t or won’t stop smoking is – they feel they would be giving up a very effective stress management technique. But once you stop smoking for a short period of time, you will become calmer, even under stress, than when you were a smoker.

The second thing you must do to overcome this problem is to find an alternative stress relief method.

Although you know that smoking does not reduce stress, in the back of your head you may still rely on cigarettes. So you need to find alternative things you can do for stress relief when you stop smoking.

There are many things you can do, only you will know what works best for you - wether it be a session in the gym, reading a book, spending time with your children, breathing exercises, spending time on your hobby or disctraction techniques.

Most of the above methods are not instant - you have to make plans for them - but this ie very important - they will all take about half an hour to an hour of your day. And when you think about it, you probably spend that same amount of time smoking every day.

But you also need to have a few other things that you can do for stress relief, that work immediately. One such techniques is called an anchor - it ties a good, relaxing, confident feeling to a certain act you can do. It only takes about fifteen minutes of work a few times to become powerful enough to work.

Other things you can do are to learn some effective breathing techniques. And ther are some good ones about. Try exhaling all of the air out of your lungs, without inhaling first. Exhale unitl there is no more, then allow your inbreath to happen automatically. Try this five times.

Also try a stress ball, get up and leave the situation you are in. Take fifteen minutes to forget about work, the problem or whatever it is. Don't go over and over the problem, just forget about it for fifteen minutes and distract yourself doing some mindless daydreaming. Maybe even take a walk.

There are many things you can do for stress relief that don't involve smoking. Once you do stop, you will see that there are plenty more, much more powerful methods out there. But make sure you use at least three or four different methods to keep you from returning to cigarettes.