Revealed – why quitting smoking is harder for some people

Have you been trying to quit smoking for a while and been unsuccessful in doing so? Even after you know how bad it is for your health, how badly your family wants you to quit and how much money you ar

Editorial Team | Published: June 13, 2014 6:04 pm

Have you been trying to quit smoking for a while and been unsuccessful in doing so? Even after you know how bad it is for your health, how badly your family wants you to quit and how much money you are burning on the cancer stick?

Researchers believe they now know why. During the research, those who exhibited the weakest response to rewards like prospect of saving money or improving health were the least willing to refrain from smoking, even when offered money to do so.

The findings could predict the effectiveness of a reward-based strategy as motivation to quit smoking. ‘We believe that our findings may help to explain why some smokers find it so difficult to quit smoking,’ said Stephen Wilson, an assistant professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University in the US. Potential sources of reinforcement for giving up smoking may hold less value for some individuals and, accordingly, have less impact on their behaviour, Wilson explained. (Read: 10 reasons smoking is bad for you)

For the study, researchers recruited 44 smokers between ages 18 and 45. All reported that they smoked at least 10 cigarettes a day for the past 12 months. Smokers who could not resist the temptation to smoke also showed weaker responses in the ventral striatum when offered monetary rewards while in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the findings showed. ‘The striatum is part of the so-called reward system in the brain,’ Wilson noted. It is the area of the brain that is important for motivation and goal-directed behaviour – functions highly relevant to addiction. (Read: 7 thoughts that can make quitting smoking tough)

The study appeared in the journal Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience.

What are the different ways to quit smoking?

New Year’s Eve is around the corner which means that resolutions are going to be made and broken. The decision to quit smoking is by far the most popular New Year’s Resolution, but one out of every five smoker who tries to quit relapses within a day! So why is quitting so hard? Tobacco addiction is like drug addiction or alcoholism and comprises of a cluster of cognitive, behavioural and psychological phenomena which makes it hard to quit. One has to remember that very few people manage to quit in their first attempt. So here are the various smoking cessation techniques:

Cold Turkey – The oldest and most successful method is going ‘cold turkey’ that is quitting smoking without taking any substitute for nicotine. 75% people who’ve quit smoking claim to have done so without the aid of any aid or supplement. Coupled with therapy and intervention cold turkey is supposed to be the best way to quit. There are various websites and helplines which help people quit without the aid of any medicines. Most replacement therapies look to chemically substitute the nicotine hit of smoking but it just means switching from one addiction to another. One of the champions of cold turkey was Allen Carr, a chain smoker who quit smoking and went on to write a book entitled The Easy Way to Quit Smoking which is the most popular book on quitting smoking in the world. Many people have quit smoking after reading his book and this list include celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears, Richard Branson, Anthony Hopkins and closer home Mahesh Babu and Hrithik Roshan. Allen Carr’s basic principle was despite overwhelming evidence which points out the hazards of smoking people don’t quit because they think of quitting as ‘giving in’ or giving up. (Read more about Different ways to quit smoking)

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With inputs from IANS

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Published: June 13, 2014 6:04 pm

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