These are exerps from Joel Spitzer's book on quitting nictotine addiction. Which is a free download floating around the internet.
Spitzer has found that most successful quitters fall into one of three groups: (1) those who awoke one day and were suddenly sick and tired of smoking, who threw their cigarettes over their shoulder and never looked back; (2) those given an ultimatum by their doctor - "quit smoking or drop dead"; and (3) those who became sick with a cold, the flu or some other illness, went a few days without smoking and then decided to try to keep it going.
Amazingly, the websites of Philip Morris (PM USA), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the American Cancer Society (ACS), the American Lung Association (ALA), and the Mayo Clinic (MC) all either expressly or impliedly tell smokers the same message: the key to successful quitting is to not quit smoking today, but instead to pick some future date and then plan around it.
The leading CDC quit smoking page not only tells smokers to "set a quit date." It then tells them that as part of their advance planning that they need to go out and buy "medication and use it correctly," primarily over-the-counter (OTC) nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) products such as the nicotine gum, nicotine patch and nicotine lozenge.
What all of the above websites fail to tell quitters is that during 2006 almost all successful long-term quitters (80 to 90%) will again quit entirely on their own without resort to any product or procedure. None will be told that almost all successful quitters are nicotine-clean within hours, not weeks or months.
On an average, a person is x2.6 more successful to quit for atleast 6 months or more on a spontaneous choice to quit and quit cold turkey. As apposed to those who plan or take NRT's.
