How to Help People Quit Smoking
- 1). Offer to exercise with the individual. Exercise can take the person's mind off of smoking and can even decrease the need for a cigarette. You can do anything from weight lifting to going for a 30-minute walk with the smoker.
- 2). Ask the smoker how he is doing on a daily basis. You don't want to nag, so you shouldn't do this four times a day. Calling the person up on the phone once a day and asking how she is feeling is a nice gesture and also gives that person an opportunity to inform you if she is struggling.
- 3). Give the smoker something he can chew on from time to time. Many people who try to quit smoking have difficulty doing so because they are so used to having a cigarette their mouths. Offer hard candy, toothpicks, gum and other similar items to the smoker.
- 4). Try to ease the stress the smoker feels while she is attempting to quit smoking. Many smokers will light up a cigarette when they begin to get stressed out. To keep this from happening, you could offer to babysit the person's children for an afternoon, cook dinner for the smoker's family or do her laundry.
- 5). Take the person out to non-smoking destinations. Many bars around the country still allow customers to smoke while inside the bar. By keeping the person away from the smell of cigarette smoke, you can help prevent the person from wanting to smoke.
- 6). Be supportive if the person does have a cigarette. It does no good to scold someone who is trying to quit smoking if he has one cigarette. If this happens, ask the smoker if anything happened in particular to cause him to have a cigarette. Finding out this information may keep him from having a cigarette at a later time. You should also remind the person that it takes time and patience to stop smoking. There may be bumps in the road along the way, but that doesn't mean he should give up.
- 7). Reward her if she makes non-smoking milestones. While you don't need to give the person a present every day, you could take her out to dinner or buy her a little treat when she goes a week without having a cigarette. The point of this is to make the person realize how big a deal it is that she is trying to quit smoking.
Source...