The amount of information, help and advice on offer for anyone trying to give up smoking is staggering.
Type “help giving up smoking” into Google (as I just did) and practically two-million hits are returned, all there to assist you in your daunting mission to give up tobacco.
They include websites such as www.seriousquitters.co.uk, a free service from a pharmaceuticals company, and www.anti-smoking.org, which opens with the typically American slogan “Most important, know this – You Can Do It”.
However, the NHS offering for people trying to go smoke free, ingeniously entitled www.gosmokefree.co.uk, has to be the best.
This well-designed, clear and colourful site has everything the quitter could possibly need – information about support groups, access to a helpline and plenty of impressive figures about the advantages of kicking the habit.
It doesn’t take the same approach as those horrific scare-tactics adverts shown on the TV, which attempt to shock you into giving up, but rather encourages you to give up in a persuasive yet supportive way.
Being shown the carrot, rather than a big cancerous stick, certainly makes me feel more positive about quitting.
The site’s not full of images of emphysema-ridden tobacco die-hards, breathing their final breaths with the help of a machine, but instead shows photos of happy, smiling people, living their newly found smoke-free lives to the full and implicitly enjoying a quality of life that is simply out of reach for the smoker.
Never mind the fact that these blissfully content people are almost certainly models whose pearly white teeth have never been anywhere near a cigarette, the message is clear: giving up smoking is a milestone on The Path to Happiness.
Seriously though – however much stick the NHS takes, us would-be ex-smokers are lucky to have access to such a comprehensive service.
Head to your GP and you can pick up a substantial supply of patches for the price of a single prescription – far, far cheaper than buying them yourself from a pharmacy.
If that doesn’t work, one of the myriad other methods almost certainly will.
There’s group therapy, where you can share your experiences and receive encouragement from people in the same situation as you.
If looking other smokers in the eye sounds like too much stress, one-to-one advice is available and, failing that, if the thought of any form of face-to-face human contact whatsoever leaves you reaching for the smokes, you can even get help in the form of phone calls, emails and text messages!
Seriously, if you can’t find something on www.gosmokefree.co.uk that helps you quit, you are a lost cause.
I read a statistic that suggested that the probability of a smoker giving up using will power alone was just two per cent.
Although Disraeli’s famed quote on the validity of statistics almost certainly applies to this particular nugget, and it is exactly the sort of quote that is used in nicotine-substitute products’ advertising, hearing it was enough to make me think that perhaps I would need some help kicking the habit.
It’s not like I was on 40-a-day before I decided to quit – more like 10 – so my body should be able to handle the nicotine withdrawal, but the physical addiction to the drug isn’t what I’m worried about overcoming.
It’s breaking the habit that I think is going to be really difficult – conquering the deep-rooted associations that have formed over the years. Managing to go without smoking the kind of cigarettes that I smoke even when I don’t have a craving for one, that are smoked entirely out of habit.
The smokes which are going to be hardest to pack in are the one that accompanies a pint, the one had after dinner and the one enjoyed while driving (I have always thought the clichéd post-coital puff was overrated).
So rather than heading down to my local pharmacy to pick up some gum or patches, I thought the best thing that I could do was to break these associations – if I could eliminate these most enjoyable cigarettes, I would be well on my way to stopping altogether.
It’s tough though. When caught up in a traffic jam, it is hard to resist the urge to light up. Likewise when my friends smoke after eating, the desire to join them is almost overwhelming.
At least the State has made it harder to have a ciggy with a pint – although of course the act of reuniting the blissful pairing of beer and tobacco is only ever as far away as the door to the pub garden.
I worry that even when (when, not if) I do successfully quit, it’s still going to be extremely hard to stay off the smokes.
An ex-smoker relative of mine told me that, ever since she’d stopped 15 years ago, she had only ever been “one cigarette away from becoming a smoker again”.
Makes me wish I’d never started. And wonder whether I’ll be able to stop.