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If you smoke, you probably want to quit. Even if you wish you could smoke forever, you realize that if you want to have a good life and you want to have quality at the end of your life, you have to find help to quit smoking. Smokers have shorter lives, even if they never get cancer, and many have trouble drawing breath in the later years of their life. This hardly makes for a fun retirement. There is help out there and there are also things that you can do on your own to ensure that you are giving yourself every chance to quit so that you can be around to meet your grandchildren and even your great-grandchildren.

There are plenty of over-the-counter aids that you can use to help quit smoking. There are gums, which you do not chew so much as crush between your teeth, patches, and electronic cigarettes. The gums are easy to use to stop a craving in the moment. The patch tries to hold you back from smoking while weaning your system from the nicotine over the course of a few weeks or longer if you need it. The electronic cigarette delivers nicotine without the chemicals from the smoke. All of these can help if you use them as directed.

You might think that most people that smoke have no qualms about it and want to continue. The truth is that most people who smoke wish that they did not. Nicotine is a drug and it is one that is incredibly hard to get over. Smokers try time and time again before they finally quit. One of the biggest reasons why people have such a hard time quitting is because of cigarette withdrawal symptoms. These are very powerful and they can break even the most determined. Will power alone is not always the answer because these symptoms are so strong.

Those that quit will notice problems within a half an hour. The average craving for nicotine lasts about thirty seconds to three minutes. If a smoker can get through that time without lighting up, they will feel better, at least until the next craving. This seems like a short amount of time, but to the smoker it feels like hours. This is when cigarette withdrawal symptoms are at their worst and is when many cave. Even those that get past a few of these end up craving the next time one hits. The craving is stronger – much stronger than one who has never smoked could imagine.

Before you even think about making it your birthday resolution or your New Year’s resolution that you should quit smoking, here's a depressing fact for you – any given year, of all the millions around the world who actually try to quit, only three out of every hundred actually succeed. America has 50 million smokers. 35 million of those are trying quit at any given time. Less than a million actually succeed. In other words, if you're looking for the best way to quit smoking, you have to understand that there are practically none.

As such, as a substance to kick, tobacco is 1000 times more addictive than alcohol and 10 times more addictive than cocaine. All of which isn’t meant to tell you that you need to give up on the very thought of quitting. It's just to show you how hard you need to try. The best way to quit smoking is to first realize how well you have to steel yourself.

Really! You're saying. Is steeling yourself really the biggest part of quitting successfully?