

“It was so ridiculous-they had the commercials for cancer and all this other stuff, and none of that affected me.
Good ways to quit smoking skin#
“I worried about getting wrinkles and my skin turning gray,” she says. When she began her career in the fashion industry, she found that virtually everyone around her also smoked. me that I could persevere, and it made me realize that maybe I was a bit tougher than I thought.” “I owned the reasons why I wanted to quit-and that I was quitting just for me.”Īpril Cargill, 58, started smoking as a teenager in junior high school and continued for decades. “Nicotine is a powerful drug, and I really needed something to get me over the hurdle of not being able to function without it,” Cherington says.
Good ways to quit smoking free#
If your employer doesn’t offer that resource, free or low-cost group programs are available, such as the American Lung Association’s Freedom From Smoking Group Programs, as well as personalized quit programs and coaching, like what’s offered by QuitNow. I strongly recommend that anybody trying to quit to find a program,” Cherington says. “ was definitely the biggest game changer for me, along with the combination of the Wellbutrin and the patch. Cherington began taking Wellbutrin (known generically as bupropion SR), which is most commonly known as an antidepressant, but is also approved by the FDA for smoking cessation. The program also provided subsidized nicotine patches and prescription medications if a physician determined someone needed them. The six-week program was led by a nurse educator who taught participants about the pharmacological and psychological effects of smoking. “I couldn’t manage my emotions, I was super irritable, and I had a hard time organizing my thoughts.”Ĭherington learned about a smoking-cessation group program offered by her workplace. “I just felt like I had brain fog, and whenever I tried to cut down and go cold turkey, I couldn’t handle work,” she says. She tried to quit on her own, but found the withdrawals difficult to deal with. “I also knew I wanted to have kids, and that was my biggest motivation, because I wasn’t going to smoke and have kids.”Īt the time, Cherington was working at a high-pressure job as an exercise physiology-and-physical-therapy assistant in the intensive care unit at a Boston hospital. “I’d started going to the gym and enjoyed exercise, but I felt like crap,” Cherington tells SELF. While she considered quitting in college, she never put serious effort into it until her mid-20s, when she felt like the physical effects of smoking were catching up with her. Sarah King Cherington, 43, started smoking when she was 13 and kept it up until she was 27. “I leaned on my workplace smoking-cessation program.” Reframing the role cigarettes played in her life helped Nolan too: “I had to turn the addiction to it into a monster that I had to defeat, and once I saw it as that, as an ‘other’ and not so inherently a part of me, that made it a little bit easier to battle against,” she says.
