Stop Smoking Help Blog

:{Sarah}: says:

I quit because I was starting to have trouble breathing and my overall health was being effected. When I quit I started listening to music alot to distract me, I also started exercising. Good Luck

Mohammed Delmar says:

I found after I quit, that I was mainly smoking because of boredom. The reasons for me were so I could get in better shape (by the way I lost like 96 pounds within a year after I quit), heard a few studies say that it can cause certain parts of the male body to halt growth, my appearance (all the blemishes, lines, and yellow teeth go away), better smelling breathe, clothes, no yellow finger nail residue, oh…. and didn’t want it to stunt my growth I’m only 6’3″ you know.

Patrick H says:

I smoked only briefly when I was younger and worked at a cigarette factory where they actually gave us free cigarettes – a pack a day and a carton every payday!
But I was also an ass of sorts, because I never dated girls who smoked – kissing them just tasted gross. So when I met the girl who I eventually married, I realized what a double standard I used, and decided right then to quit, even though it took months before she’d even go out with me for the first time. So I guess my answer is that what encouraged me was that I realized I didn’t want to be involved with anyone who smoked, and couldn’t expect someone who didn’t smoke to be interested in me.

It may sound shallow, but when I see a cute teenage girl or young women smoking, I always think “what in the world is wrong with her – doesn’t she know how disgusting that is?”. And it’s not just me – my son, who’ll be graduating college and going to Naval Flight School this spring, was with me this summer when we pulled up next to a car with three 20 something girls at a light. They were all healthy, fit, attractive young women, but they were all three smoking. A couple of them looked over and smiled at my son, and he looked kind of funny and said “you see those girls in the convertible?” I said sure, joked about the at least they weren’t driving around on a nice day with the top up, and he said “yeah, but they might as well put a bag over their heads because they were all puffing on cigarettes”. I kidded him that the really pretty Catalon looking girl was still smiling at him (my mom was from Italy, and I’ve always liked the Mediterranean look) and all he said was “Like I’d even look twice at some slut who smokes”. I was really taken aback and asked if he wasn’t being a little rough, and he said if a girl tried to take care of herself at all but smoked, knowing how bad that is for your health, then he just figured they must lack self esteem or something and wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them.

So that’s another motivation – I’ve noticed that none of my sons or my daughters friends smoke, and none of them date smokers. And I’m talking about generally high achievers, not preppy or a bunch of rich bitch types, but young people determined to get the most out of life. And that’s the same way that even people my age (50′s) are more and more portrayed depending on if they smoke; smokers are stereotyped as lower class, less educated, and less attractive, even though that’s not true. But true or not, that’s the perception, so if you’re already unhappy about your habit, just recognizing how it limits your potential relationships and job opportunities should be enough to give you the extra incentive to quit while you can.
Good luck, and if you decide to quit, do it for yourself. Doing something just to please others is never satisfactory, but doing something for yourself is something you can always remember and use as a building block to do more for yourself.