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Welcome to the largest collection of free quitting tools anywhere. WhyQuit is a commercial-free, all-volunteer labor of love that doesn't want any of your money. In fact, we decline donations. What we want is to assist you in permanently arresting your brain's nicotine "wanting" disorder.
As smokers, it wasn't that we couldn't hear the entire world screaming the insanity of us smoking pack after pack. It was that our chemically enslaved brain was screaming even louder that smoking was as important as eating, that quitting would be like starvation.
The beauty of this temporary journey of re-adjustment called quitting is that within 2 to 3 weeks we awaken to the fact that nicotine addiction was about living a massive lie, that everything we did while smoking nicotine can be done as well as or better without it.
Imagine your brain's constant cycle of wanting, needing, and begging for more at last coming to an end. Imagine your journey of re-adjustment leading to entire days where you never once think about wanting to smoke, to a calm and quiet mind, to the comforts of home. Would that be a good thing or bad? Then why listen to your addiction's lies? Why fear freedom?
The brain needs up to 72 hours to rid itself of all nicotine, to resensitize once saturated receptors, and to move beyond peak withdrawal. It also needs time to down-regulate and rid itself of the millions of extra nicotinic receptors nicotine caused it to grow (up-regulation).
The subconscious mind needs time to encounter, break and extinguish all the nicotine feeding cues it established. The conscious thinking mind (the prefrontal cortex) needs time to sort through and discard the long list of lies it invented to explain why that next cigarette was so important, to try and make sense of the deep inner "wanting" it didn't understand.
Flavor, stress, pleasure, boredom, friendship, taste, there was really only one reason we smoked, because we had to, because a rising tide of anxieties would begin building when we didn't. Flavor, taste? There are no taste buds inside our lungs, the place we sucked and briefly held all smoke. Like, love? By now you hopefully realize that love and "want" are two different things. It wasn't that I liked smoking but that I didn't like what happened when I didn't.
Nicotine addiction is a brain "wanting" disease that can be fully arrested but not cured. As permanent as alcoholism, it enslaves the same brain dopamine pathways as illegal drugs, including heroin and meth. Our brain's "pay attention" dopamine circuitry (the mind's priorities teacher) was hacked, taken hostage and forced to falsely teach us that smoking nicotine was as important as pre-programmed survival activities such as eating food and drinking liquids. Contrary to store tobacco marketing signs, we didn't continue smoking for pleasure but for relief from want and need.
Welcome to WhyQuit, home to thousands of the most knowledgeable ex-users on earth. Here you'll discover that knowledge isn't just power. It's the one quitting method that most users have never, ever tried. WhyQuit's goal is to make you dependency recovery smarter than your addiction is strong.
While we cannot promise that your journey will be easy, we do promise our best in keeping our web pages and sites up, running, and a mouse click away. We hope you'll explore the large array of motivation, education, and support tools we assembled in anticipation of your arrival. They are our gift to you.
What do we want? Although not necessary, once comfortably residing here on "Easy Street" with us, it's our hope that you'll consider sharing some of what you've learned with smoking friends and loved ones, as not discovering or being taught the Law of Addiction is a horrible, horrible reason to die.
We're glad you found us! Yes you can!
WhyQuit.com - Our site's main entry page and your guide to three key cessation ingredients - motivation, education and support. Bookmark this link in your favorites folder as it's the gateway to all of our materials.
Joel's Library
- Joel's Library is home to the core curriculum taught here at WhyQuit. It's a collection of more than 100 short quit smoking articles, to 87 video and audio quit smoking lessons, to "Never Take Another Puff," Joel's popular free quit smoking ebook that's had more than 2 million downloads, and to Joel's Jukebox, where you can play MP3 lessons on a fast loading online player. All of these materials were written and produced by Joel Spitzer of Chicago, one of the world's leading quitting on counselors. A good starting point is Joel's Daily Quitting Lesson Guide.
Freedom - Highly focused,
Freedom is believed to be the world's only 100% nicotine-free peer support forum. A cold turkey quitting forum, the price of group admission is a nicotine-free body (72 hours) and any relapse - even one puff of nicotine - permanently revokes group posting privileges.
Topic Index - This is an alphabetical topic index to over 400 key messages among Freedom's more than 300,000 member posts.
Navigating the First 72 Hours - Nicotine's half-life inside your body is about two-hours. Within 72 hours your blood will test nicotine-free and 90% of nicotine's metabolites will have passed through your urine. It is here where withdrawal normally peaks in intensity and then begins to gradually decline. This link is a roadmap to help you navigate early withdrawal, the most demanding phase of recovery.
How Long Does Recovery Last? - This article shares the timing, sequencing, phases and symptoms associated with the amazing temporary period of adjustment and healing that will transport you to a rich sense of calmness and new expectations of going your entire day without wanting to put nicotine back into your bloodstream.
Let World No Tobacco Day 2012 be when you discovered that the most empowering tool of all, toward permanently arresting your addiction to smoking or chewing nicotine, is an educated mind. The next few minutes are all that matter and each is entirely doable. There was always only one rule ... no nicotine just one day at a time, Never Take Another Puff, Dip or Chew!
