Beyond meditation, breathing exercises and emotional balancing, there are more physical activities that can help reduce your discomfort when you quit smoking.

Here are a few more ideas:

- Exercise

Since most people don’t smoke while they exercise, getting active is a great way to distract yourself from your desire to smoke.

How to do it:  First speak to your doctor to be sure physical activity is safe for you.  Once you’ve gotten the green light, consider the types of exercise that would be most appealing to you.  For the first few weeks of being a non-smoker, you may want to avoid very intense exercise unless you are already in great shape, because overdoing it will only make you more miserable.  Instead, consider lighter forms of exercise that will get you moving but not tax your body too much, like walking, swimming, golfing, or dancing.

Exercise helps in several ways.  First, it helps you burn off feelings of irritability and tension through physical movement, plus induces feelings of peacefulness and well-being when those endorphins start to flow.  Plus it helps you expand your lung capacity again, which is likely diminished if you have been smoking for a long time. Read the rest of this entry

Quitting smoking “cold turkey” can be a daunting idea for many people.  They dread the thought of dealing with physical, mental and emotional cravings while at the same time trying to overcome the mindless habit that smoking has become during so many of their activities.

However, there is an easier way to give up smoking that works well for many people; gradually cutting down the frequency of smoking before quitting altogether.

There are many ways to do this, and all of them can be equally effective:

- Keep track.

Sometimes just being aware of how much you are smoking each day can help you to smoke less.  Because smoking is often a “mindless habit,” you may not realize that you are smoking more than you think.  There are a couple of ways to use this method.  If you tend to smoke in only one place, like at home for example, try emptying all of your ashtrays each morning before you smoke your first cigarette.  At the end of the day, count how many butts have accumulated in the ashtrays and write the figure in a notebook.  Each day as you smoke, keep in mind that you’ll have to count every single butt and write it down later; that alone may help you to smoke less.

Another technique is to tape a small piece of paper to your cigarette pack and make a mark every time you smoke a cigarette.  If you finish one pack and open another, simply move the paper to the new pack and continue making a mark every time you light up.  At the end of each day, tally up your marks and write the total in a notebook.

The goal with this method is to gradually reduce the amount of cigarettes you smoke each day until you are down to just a few, then quit completely. Read the rest of this entry