Find a place (your backpack, purse, home, car, etc.) where you can easily access a supply of gum, mints, toothpicks, fidget toys, and whatever else can keep your hands and mouth busy to distract you from the urge to smoke as well as fulfill the hand-to-mouth routine that your body has become used to from months to years of smoking. If you are interested in quitting or reducing your tobacco use, call (313)446-9817 to schedule an appointment with Amber Jager, Tobacco Treatment Reduction Program Specialist at the Detroit location, or (734)961-1077 to schedule an appointment with Erin Suprunuk, Tobacco Treatment Reduction Program Specialist at the Ypsilanti office. During your visit you can create a quit plan that includes individual tobacco counseling sessions with one of our specialists, or you can just stop by to pick up a quit kit that includes a variety of the above supplies listed to help you reduce and cope with smoking cravings! Below I have outlined a few more helpful things to keep with you for withdrawal symptoms and the quit-smoking-journey.

Your Quitting Tool-Kit

The Power of Cinnamon Sticks: You can purchase whole cinnamon sticks and literally replace them with your cigarettes. Of course you won’t light these up, but you can use cinnamon sticks to mimic the motion of how you use a cigarette: inhale with the cinnamon stick when you feel a craving, until this feeling subsides. This helps by adding the deep breathing that your body gets when smoking a cigarette and the motion can even help trick your body into thinking that you are smoking and calm the urge a bit. This does not work for everyone, but is worth a shot. An added bonus is that even just using cinnamon mints or cinnamon containing gums, oils, etc. help to drastically reduce sugar cravings! So if you’re concerned about weight gain and the craving for unhealthy food, try some cinnamon to combat this.

Journal The Process: Keeping a journal on you can be very beneficial for you in order to understand your habits and help prevent relapse in the future. It can also be helpful to prevent boredom when used as a creative outlet. Something that I have most of my clients do, depending on their stage in the quitting process, is fill out a Pack Wrap. A Pack Wrap is where you record the feelings/triggers/actions that are occurring during the times when you smoke. The goal is for you and myself to understand what the most triggering situations/feelings are, and create an individualized and successful quit plan with the help of this information. How you do it: this is to be done before you actually quit smoking. Over the course of a few days to a week (I encourage recording a couple days during the week and one day on the weekend to get a full view of your habits) keep your journal on you throughout the entire day. Right before you smoke a cigarette, record the time of day, what you just did/are about to do, and what feelings you have. Even as adults, it can be hard to identify what exactly you are feeling, and this list of 57 different emotions can come in handy to give a name to what you feel.

Stay Hydrated: The first 3-4 days are the most important when it comes to helping your body detox from nicotine and the many other substances that your body has absorbed from smoking. Try to drink half your body weight in ounces each days (if you weigh 150lbs, then you should be drinking about 75 ounces of water daily). Keeping a water bottle handy at all times, though, will help you with hunger cravings (a lot of the time we think we are hungry when we are just dehydrated), tiredness, headaches and coughing that all can occur at increased rates during the withdrawal stage.