If you are reading this, you or someone you know needs to quit smoking. This is good. My father smoked for 62 years before lung cancer took his life.  If you have ever watched someone die of lung cancer you will understand why I have entered this blog post.

First, understand that there are no magic pills or other devices that will make you quit smoking.  Only you and you own personal drive can do that. Actually, you do have two very effective tools available that cost nothing.  Your intellect and your desire are all you need.

From an intellectual point of view, you have to be able to know that you have an addiction and you have to understand the nature of your addiction. From a desire point of view, you have to want to break the addiction. There can be no excuses.

Here are a few things to understand about addiction to smoking. First, even the heaviest smokers only need about a third of a cigarette to get their addictive fix.  The other two thirds of the cigarette does nothing more than deepen your addiction. The only reason the other two thirds gets consumed is because it is there and because the tobacco companies want your addiction to stick. In other words, if cigarettes on the market were only one half of their current length, no one would miss the other half from an addiction point of view.

This leads you to a way to weaken your addiction. Simply cut each cigarette in half. This reduces the addictive force of the tobacco and reduces the harmful effects by half. Even if you smoke the same number of times per day, the effect will be a 50% reduction in your smoking habit. Don’t start telling yourself that you are wasting half of your money by doing this. You have already wasted the entire investment in the cigarettes the moment you bought them. If you don’t understand this, you are probably not serious about quitting.

Another thing to understand is that your addiction has triggers. These are events or circumstances that trigger your awareness to a need to smoke. Part of quitting smoking involves identifying these triggers and removing them. This is not that hard to do once you have weakened your addiction.

A log book will be handy for identifying triggers. Every time you have the desire to light up, document the circumstances at the time, how you feel, and what you are thinking. Be detailed. The better you understand why you want to smoke, the easier it will be to eliminate the trigger.  For example, I had a friend that quit smoking, but had an urge to smoke every time he smelled the burning brickets in his BBQ grille. His solution was to buy a gas grille. It worked.

Reducing your addiction and eliminating triggers will take a couple of weeks. Once accomplished though, quitting will be a manageable affair. Don’t get me wrong. Quitting will not be the easiest thing you have ever done, but it will be the most rewarding. Surround yourself with people that know you are quitting and will provide a degree of peer pressure against smoking.  It will not be easy to light up in front of someone who will chastise you for smoking.

As a recap, the method I am proposing for kicking the smoking habit involves 4 steps. These are:

• Reduce each smoking event to ½ cigarette.
• Identify the triggers to smoking events.
• Reduce smoking events by eliminating the triggers identified above.
• Once your addiction is manageable, stop smoking.

Before you pass judgment, let me share the facts with you. I have helped many people quit smoking using this strategy, with few dropouts. The plain fact is that if you are not committed to quitting, you won’t. If you are committed to quitting, you will, no matter what program you use.

I am inviting anyone who wants to help someone quit smoking to comment. I will not pester you with email. I just want to make a difference.