Dinah and Martyn are a couple who have made the best decision they’ll ever make and quit smoking for good.
Dinah started smoking when she was 15 years old and, before she became smoke free, would smoke around 10 – 12 cigarettes a day. Martyn started when he was 18 years old and used to smoke 12 – 14 cigarettes a day costing the couple around £140 a week!
Now retired, they felt they needed to shift their mindset from saving to a sustainable spending plan. With the cost of their smoking habit totalling well over £100 a week, which is more than £5,200 a year, they felt this was unsustainable for living on a pension and the price of tobacco is only likely to increase further.
As well as the financial benefits of quitting, they both feel they are at an age where they need to focus on their health. Naturally, while attending a lung screening appointment, when the practitioner asked if they would like our stop smoking support services to give them a call, they replied “yes!”
Dinah and Martyn were promptly put in contact with Anne, one of our expert health improvement practitioners. Anne provided the couple with specialised, one-to-one ongoing support, offering encouragement and understanding of the nicotine addiction process. Together they developed a personalised quit plan that included a quit date, strategies to cope with cravings, withdrawal symptoms, how to manage triggers, and much, much more…
To further assist them with their quit attempt, Anne talked through all the nicotine replacement products available. Of all the options Dinah decided to use nicotine patches and lozenges, saying: “They really worked for me. I put the patch on during the day for support and I used the lozenges for instant relief from cravings as and when I needed to.”
Martyn decided to use the nicotine patches and spray to help curb the cravings, saying: “The spray did do away with the cravings but I only used it at the start because I found the flavour too strong.”
Even more than the physical nicotine addiction, Martyn found the behavioural, daily rituals and routines associated with smoking more deeply ingrained and harder to overcome, saying: “The biggest problem is breaking the habit. I overcame this by getting to know my triggers. My biggest trigger was phone calls. I would always smoke when on the phone. What helped me was knowing that we wanted to give up, we wanted to stop, it was time. It’s a dirty, horrible habit!”
Now that £140 a week is no longer going up in smoke, they can afford to treat themselves a little more, Dinah said: “We used the money we would have spent on cigarettes to see a lovely concert down in Cornwall.”
In a final statement, Dinah and Martyn expressed how much they valued Anne’s support, saying: “We reported to Anne every two weeks. She did a great job. We felt like we would be letting her down if we continued to smoke. She’s done nothing but help us and we didn’t want to disappoint her.”