Use Your Smoking Cluster to Quit

Some time back I reported on the ‘clusters’ of overweight in the community – overweight people tend to have friends who are overweight, too. The mapping techniques used for that study have been applied to smokers, and the findings reported recently in the New England Journal of Medicine.

As before, data from the Framingham Heart Study were used to determine the location of smokers within this close community over the last 30 years when smoking has diminished enormously. Clusters of smokers and non-smokers were present in the network analysis, with the clusters extending to 3 degrees of separation, (e.g. a friend’s friend’s friend). During the overall decrease in the numbers of smokers, the size of the clusters remained the same, suggesting that whole groups of people quit roughly at the same time.

Quitting smoking by a spouse decreased someone’s chance of smoking by 37%, quitting by a brother or sister decreased smoking by 25%, and quitting by a friend by 36%. Friends with more education influenced one another more than those less-educated.

Let me tell you how I quit smoking after several attempts. A friend, who was also a work colleague, was promised a bottle of Scotch by his department head if he quit smoking. When I heard he had accepted the challenge, I was fired up. “If he can give up smoking, I’m sure I can” I told my wife. Three months later I had quit while my friend, after claiming his bottle of Scotch, had started again. The lesson? Individuals have to find their own way to be sufficiently motivated to quit; sometimes ‘help’ from a fellow-quitter can provide the incentive.

Comments

[paulsmoke1]

Yes, you are right every person motivated their self. so many persons overcome their smoking through the wine. It is also dangerous to the health. Thank you for giving this blog.

[roberttips]

Friends are motivated much more than family members why because they spent more time with friends only in competitive world. Thank you for giving good ideas of quit smoking.