Do you realise that smoking lowers your immunity to illness and is bad for your health? You perhaps started smoking because you thought it was fashionable and macho! Maybe you had planned to stop burning your money but found that when you were stressed, cigarettes helped. Now you continue smoking because you can't help yourself. You not only have a conditioned response (a habit) to smoke when you are doing certain things, but you suspect that you are addicted to nicotine!

Nicotine is a drug

In high doses, nicotine causes respiratory paralysis. Nicotine raises your blood sugar levels and reduces your appetite. At low doses, nicotine increases dopamine in the blood causing relaxation, arousal and pleasure. When nicotine levels fall, you feel a craving for more resulting in the smoking of another cigarette. Nicotine is just as addictive as marijuana or cocaine.

Benefits of stopping

Within a day of quitting, the heart, blood pressure and blood show signs of improvement. After a few months, breathing becomes easier and tiredness decreases. In a year, the risk of a heart attack is half that of a continuous smoker. In 10 years, the risk of lung cancer is half that of a regular smoker. In 15 years, the risk of stroke and heart attack is almost that of someone who never smoked.

Quitting

Smokers move through a cycle of precontemplation (not interested in quitting), contemplation (thinking of quitting), readiness (willing to quit), action (quits smoking), maintenance (no smoking) and relapse (resumes smoking). These stages are influenced by increased cost of tobacco products, illness of the smoker, family or friends dying from tobacco, creation of smoke-free areas, the media and health professionsals.

Ways to quit

Methods of quitting include 'cold turkey', tapering and postponing. In cold turkey, you just stop smoking without ever touching another cigarette. In tapering, you gradually decrease the number of cigarettes you smoke daily until you reach 10 per day. At 10 cigarettes per day, you go cold turkey. In postponing, each day you delay the time you smoke the first cigarette, until no smoking occurs.

Help is available

When you quit, you will be assailed by cravings and urges to smoke again. Help is available from the Jamaica Cancer Society - 927 4265 and the Jamaica Coalition on Tobacco Control - 926 4378. There are physicians who are trained to help you stop smoking, like Dr Aldyth Buckland who provided much of the information for this article. She can be contacted at aldyth_buckland@yahoo.com. More help can be found at www.whyquit.com.

Dr Pauline Williams-Green is a family physician and president of the Caribbean College of Family Physicians; email: yourhealth@gleanerjm.com.