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    A Practical Guide to Becoming a Nonsmoker
    A Practical Guide to Becoming a Nonsmoker
    A Practical Guide to Becoming a Nonsmoker
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    A Practical Guide to Becoming a Nonsmoker

    By Joseph Burke

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    About this ebook

    About the Book

    This book is a guide on how to quit smoking and more than that. First of all a guide is meant to illuminate a path to follow. It is not a treatise or dissertation, but a simple guide. Follow the path and it will lead you where you want to go. It teaches you to understand how and why you smoke and what holds you in this habit. New insights are presented and a new method, The Reasoned Approach, is developed. The seven-step method is set off as a compact separate section for the reader to come back and go over whenever they need guidance, understanding or encouragement. Statements as to what you should know with conviction are written in each step to allow the reader to see what the lesson is intended to accomplish. It, of course, is not necessary that the reader agree with every single point. These, after all, are only meant to be guidelines. Anyone can and millions do give up smoking on their own and more power to them. The steps are meant to show an easy way to follow.
    As a parent, coach, and grandparent I have observed that simple instruction with personal encouragement allows the student to focus, understand, and know with certainty they have command of the lesson. A Practical Guide to Becoming a Non-Smoker was written in this vein.
    No matter how long you have been smoking or how many times you have tried to quit, it is still possible to become a non-smoker.
    But if quitting is not working, then you must seek out new ways to kick the habit. This resource guide helps you develop a plan to stop smoking once and for all. The knowledge and insights in this book will help you form the best attitude, and the encouragement offered will hopefully convince you that you want to get started. The seven-step method will teach you a path to follow. The final section presents a novel idea that you can develop tools to be used to help you quit smoking. Of course if you can do this there are probably many other endeavors that you can develop tools for. That is an added bonus.
    Written by a former smoker who has helped others become non-smokers. This guidebook enables you to overcome the obstacles standing in your way to a smoke-free lifestyle. Find new ways to beat a bad habit that is hurting yourself and your loved ones with A Practical Guide for Becoming a Non-Smoker.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateAug 9, 2011
    ISBN9781462030323
    A Practical Guide to Becoming a Nonsmoker
    Author

    Joseph Burke

    Authors bio: Joseph S. Burke As a development chemist I spent a career investigating the critical chemical and mechanical properties that a coating or plastic needed to fulfill a new application. It is a how to rather than a what if discipline. In this field you work with available materials and processes. You learn to figure out how things work and how to make them better. It was good training for writing a book on how to improve existing lifestyles encompassed by strong habits. In my young life I was a heavy smoker living in a world of smokers. Many of us tried to quit; some were successful. I tried many times and finally conquered the habit after my son was born. I did not want him to see me smoking. It was one thing I did not want to teach him. When I did get completely free of the habit I experienced peace of mind and comfort in the knowledge that I had succeeded and would never be tempted again. This is a great feeling and one I would like to pass on to others. My wife, Eileen, and I have lived 43 good years of married life. Our son, his wife and three daughters live nearby. We see them almost every day. The girls are beautiful and they bring smiles and joy to us every time we are with them.

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      Book preview

      A Practical Guide to Becoming a Nonsmoker - Joseph Burke

      Contents

      PART ONE: PRESENTATION

      PART TWO: WORKSHOP

      PART THREE: TOOLS AND SKILLS

      Preface

      I am a nonsmoker who, nevertheless, according to Neil Schachter MD in his book Life and Breath: The Breakthrough Guide to the Latest Strategies for Fighting Asthma and Other Respiratory Problems—At Any Age (Broadway Books, 2003), still has a twenty-pack-a-year burden on my respiratory system, which is the number of packs per day multiplied by the number of years I smoked. I read Dr. Schachter’s book long after quitting my smoking habit, when I was looking for hints to help my wife, who suffers from asthma. In the book, Dr. Schachter outlines some of the assaults and damage caused by smoking, but he also delineates the recovery of organs when smoking has stopped. There is significant recovery, which, of course, is good news.

      I started smoking at home about the age of sixteen. Both of my parents had been smokers, although they had given it up at the time. In the late 1950s at the Catholic all-boys high school I attended, one of the privileges that seniors had was the permission to use the smoking lounge during the lunch hour. The lounge was not outfitted with overstuffed chairs, but was rather the top of the concrete stairwell, which had a landing under the roof. On this twenty-five-foot square cement floor, about thirty to fifty students would gather and light up cigarettes. There was no assisted ventilation and it is a wonder that none of us passed out or even that there was enough oxygen concentration to keep the cigarettes burning. We and our smoking habits survived.

      Revelation of that privilege for seniors seems very strange by today’s standards, but that’s what it was. I’m sure that privilege was taken away soon after I graduated, but this and others, such as giving away free cigarettes by the tobacco companies to military personnel and to airline customers, show how people were encouraged to continue smoking. Everyone knew that smoking was not good, and we even referred to a cigarette as a coffin nail. But the push to give up cigarettes was usually a temporary exercise to improve your wind, which is your endurance during heavy physical activity. Athletes gave up smoking during their seasons and recruits in military service were required to give it up during basic training.

      It was in the 1960s that the Surgeon General of the United States declared that smoking was a causative factor in diseases, including cancer. Gradually the push to keep young people from smoking and to get active smokers to quit took hold. This book is a continuation of that push. The hope is that we can turn the tide and help drive a nail into cigarettes’ coffin.

      I started out writing a nonsmoking workshop, which I intended to present to smokers who had tried to quit before and then returned to smoking. Perhaps after a few cycles of stopping and starting they might have been discouraged about their ability to break free completely. So I wrote with the idea of encouraging them by carving out a path to follow to become a nonsmoker and including what to do if they started smoking again. The workshop is included in this book. My intention is for you to read through the book and workshop, going back and repeating sections as many times as necessary until you know in your heart that this makes sense and is all you need to give up smoking and substitute a healthier lifestyle of your own choosing. When you decide to give up smoking, you can refer to this book for knowledge and insights that will not only make your task easy and successful but make it a tangible improvement in your life.

      Foreword

      There is a wealth of information about how to quit smoking. Television, magazines, and the Internet have advertisements and articles about quitting. No doubt everyone is familiar with these, and yet many are still smoking. Perhaps they may not have found a way to convince them that they can successfully quit. Part of the problem can be the sheer amount of material available and the counter-claims for the many products.

      The American Cancer Society has a comprehensive, free guide available on the Internet titled Guide to Quitting Smoking. The information in this file is updated every year. Some interesting points are as follows:

      •   It is encouraging to learn that in the year 2010 there were more ex-smokers than smokers in the United States (forty-seven million ex-smokers versus forty-six million smokers).

      •   Typically there is only a 4 to 7 percent chance of being smoke-free after a year for smokers who try to quit by going cold turkey.

      •   There are many ways to quit smoking. The guide presents both good points and the dangers of several of these methods.

      •   Using a combination of methods can increase your chances of being successful.

      The following list of benefits occur over time after you quit smoking:

      a.   After twenty minutes your heart rate and blood pressure drop.

      b.   After twelve hours the carbon monoxide level in your blood drops to normal.

      c.   After two weeks to three months your circulation improves, and your lung function increases.

      d.   One year after quitting, the risk of coronary heart disease is half that of a continuing smoker.

      e.   The risk of stroke can fall to that of a nonsmoker in two to five years.

      f.   Five years after quitting, the risk of cancer of the mouth, throat, esophagus, and bladder are cut in half. The risk of cervical cancer falls to that of a nonsmoker.

      g.   Ten years after quitting the risk of dying from lung cancer is about half that of a person who is still smoking.

      h.   Fifteen years after quitting the risk of coronary heart disease is that of a nonsmoker’s.

      These statistics are among the good reasons to stop smoking. This book explains many other good reasons.

      Introduction

      I intend this book to be a practical guide to help smokers get away from their smoking habits. I quit smoking more than thirty years ago, and I have often thought that my experience could help others. I went cold turkey many times before I finally gave up smoking for good. Over the years, by working these thoughts over in my mind, I worked out and refined a method that I call a reasoned approach to quitting smoking. Using a step-by-step procedure, I try to present simple arguments as I understand them in order to get you to accept them and, most importantly, take them to heart. I then offer suggestions that you can take, memorize, and practice until that step is successfully taken. After doing a few steps I hope you will see where this is going and will know that this method can help you achieve the goal of becoming a nonsmoker. I have tried to make this an easy, simple, common-sense approach in contrast to other methods that I feel are unnecessarily prolonged and difficult.

      I am not a doctor and my presentations about structures in the human brain and their interactions are meant

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