We groan inwardly when someone arrives at our office for her first appointment, twitching visibly and munching a lolly, to announce that she has quit smoking last week and is finding it difficult. Plenty of people do just quit and tough it out and we applaud them. Plenty of other people try to go cold turkey with no preparation and fail, which does no good for their self efficacy or future attempts to quit. Our strong advice is first to prepare to quit. Then you will find quitting less difficult and staying quit more likely. The length of this preparatory stage will depend mostly on how heavy your smoking habit is. Most people need at least a week or two. You may well find you need longer to reduce your dependence on nicotine. That’s okay; take your time and do it properly.

Smokers often say and probably believe they know all about the effects of smoking. But when you quiz them, they have big gaps and mistakes in their knowledge. This isn’t surprising, because smokers are human. Humans feel uncomfortable when their behavior is out of step with their attitudes or knowledge, a situation psychologist call ‘cognitive dissonance’. Never mind the jargon, it just means we mostly like to feel we are doing the right thing and not doing the wrong thing. When we come across some information that is out of step with our behavior, we are inclined to disbelieve or ignore that information. To avoid feeling uncomfortable about their smoking, smokers tend to avoid or disbelieve information about its harmful effects.

A 1984 survey for the Victorian Anti-Cancer Council found that a quarter of smokers, meaning about one million in Australia, believed that no illnesses were caused by smoking. While nearly 60 per cent knew that smoking could caused lung cancer, less than 25 per cent knew that it caused heart disease, bronchitism emphysema and stroke, even though these illnesses are more likely and occur more quickly than lung cancer. Only 3 per cent knew that smoking could cause complications in pregnancy. While there is no doubt that the propaganda of the tobacco industry contributes to this alarming degree of ignorance in those people most at risk to tobacco related disease, it is also true that it reflects the fact that smokers tend to avoid correct information about the health effects of smoking.

If you are a smoker and wants to quit smoking, you are going to need all the help you can give yourself, especially to stay quit. That means building up your motivation. You can do this by knowing accurately all of the harmful effects of smoking that you will be saving yourself from and by identifying the benefits you will gain from not smoking. That means learning about smoking. If you would like to know about aspects of quitting smoking, the Anti Cancer Councils and the National Heatr Foundation and possibly your state health department publish pamphlets and booklets on the topic which they will happily give you. You can find them through your state capital telephone book.