All the studies prove it: quitting smoking is beneficial for your health, and often prevents you from dying young. However, quitting tobacco use remains extremely difficult.
- Smoking tobacco triggers three types of addiction.
- Getting support from health professionals can help quit smoking.
Conscious of endangering their health, many smokers are unable to quit. Because contrary to certain received ideas, smoking is not just a bad habit dependent on our sole will, but a real addiction, based on three types of mechanisms:
– Physical dependence, maintained by the need for nicotine, a molecule present in tobacco. When a person is craving nicotine, the urge to smoke appears and can lead to various symptoms, such as irritability or mood disorders.
– Behavioral dependence via habits, automatisms and rituals around cigarettes.
– Psychological dependence linked to difficulties in managing emotions and craving (or irrepressible need to consume a psychoactive product, editor’s note).
Be accompanied by health professionals
To overcome these addictions, the addictology team of the CHP of Saint Grégoire advises to be accompanied by health professionals, even if it is possible to quit smoking on your own. “Specialized medical care makes it possible to take care of the patient as a whole. Also, the care plan and the therapeutic proposals for each patient will be personalized, and will work around several axes”, details the addiction unit.
Motivational and behavioral work can be proposed, as well as drug treatment with nicotine substitutes, treatment reimbursed on medical prescription. On the other hand, there exists “a therapeutic day care in addictology, where group care can be offered in order to support patients in working around emotions through relaxation workshops, talking spaces and a resumption of physical activity”, explains in a press release the addictology team of the CHP of Saint Grégoire.
Tobacco kills around 75,000 people in France every year
In France, the year 2020 was that of the resumption of bad habits in terms of cigarette consumption, the fault mainly of confinement. About a quarter of smokers (27%) say they have increased their tobacco consumption. On average, the increase was five cigarettes per day among daily smokers.
Each year, tobacco kills approximately 75,000 people in France, due to various pathologies caused by this industry (cancers, heart attacks, etc.).
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