Stoptober 2021 | Kicking the Habit

Stoptober 2021 | Quit Smoking

Every October, and in conjunction with Public Health England, the NHS promotes Stoptober as an ideal opportunity for smokers to unite in an effort to quit the smoking habit.

The NHS offers free support for those willing to participate throughout the 28 day period – and anyone considering taking the challenge should certainly register and take advantage of the professional help available.

Four year’s on since the Stoptober Campaign officially backed e-cigarettes for the first time, its popularity and power as a cessation tool continues to grow.

Stoptober | Free Quit Smoking Pack

We all know the difficulty of quitting smoking, but just with a concerted effort and a desire to help yourself, the first step is already taken. The help offered by the NHS is freely available and you should take full advantage by registering on-line at the NHS smokefree web site. It is simple and straight forward, and the support offered will help you through the 28 days. With a wealth of resources, which are evaluated and re-energised each year to find new ways of tackling the issue of smoking cigarettes, Public Health England and the NHS combine to make a difference.

Free Professional Help

There’s more available than the personal help pack – you can also use your local “Smoke Free” Quit Smoking Service to support your Stoptober effort – the service is FREE. The ideal situation would be to carry on as a non-smoker after Stoptober… and for the rest of your life – creating a new sense of freedom and looser purse strings!

Your local ‘Stop Smoking’ service is there to offer support, advice and encouragement. Not only are you five times more likely to quit smoking if you get to the end of the 28 day challenge, you are in the hands of trained advisers who through group sessions and one-to-one help can offer much needed encouragement especially through the tougher times.

Advice on all aspects of cessation is available including advice on nicotine replacement products and other stop smoking medicines.

Thousands of people have quit using the available free NHS help – why shouldn’t you?

Five Times More Likely to Quit with Help

Through years of experience, the advice available has been fine tuned to maximise your chances of quitting – you don’t have to do it on your own and you have a significantly better chance if you use the support available to you. The NHS reports that 2 out of 3 people who used e-cigarettes in combination with the NHS stop smoking service quit smoking successfully, so there’s some food for thought!

Why Quit Smoking?

Most of us know the reasons! As a reminder, here are a few of the main reasons for putting the cigarettes out for good:

Saving Money

The price of cigarettes is a heavy price to pay and is a burden on your overall finances. The average 20-a-day smoker is burning around £3000 per year – on an income of £25,000 that is like an additional tax of well over 10% just going up in smoke…

Let’s look at this again – £3000 per year – every year! That is a very nice holiday in the sun, or even £9000 every three years towards a car. What would you do with an extra £3000 each year?

Your Family

Second hand smoke harms those around you – fact. Whilst our families mean everything to us it is easy for us, as addicts to turn a blind eye and ignore these effects – see here if you need evidence

Children are More Likely to Smoke if Their Parents Smoke

Your Own Life – Health and Fitness

We know, no doubt here, that every cigarette we smoke will cause us real harm – short term we may not feel the immediate effect (which is convenient – but we all know that sometime in the future chances are we are going to pay the price). Below are a few risks caused by smoking, whether one cigarette or a lifetime’s worth:

Lung cancer
Second hand smoke
Smoking and stroke risk
Cardiovascular disease
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
Emphysema
Smoker’s cough

We all know that when we get there and look back, it’s not worth it! Our body can recover – give it a chance by stopping!

Take a first step:

Register today for Stoptober – nothing to lose and everything to gain! Sign up with the easy to use updated App by downloading through your Playstore or Apple store on an Android or iPhone respectively.

Smoking Facts to Consider

Hospital admissions:
• There were estimated to be around 474 thousand hospital admissions attributable to smoking in 2015/16, which was an increase from 458 thousand in 2005/06.
• As a proportion of all admissions, this has fallen to 4 per cent from 6 per cent in 2005/06.

Deaths:
• There were estimated to be around 79 thousand deaths attributable to smoking in 2015. This represents 16 per cent of all deaths.