Ashe about Your Health: How to drop the smoking habit

Have you noticed all the outdoor ash cans around campus that have been wrapped with a poster offering smoking/tobacco cessation support services at the Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center (and through the Occupational Health Facility for staff and faculty)?

Blame me (or give me the credit), depending on your opinion of the tobacco-free campus launch that is scheduled to take place at UCLA on Monday.

Personally, I’m pretty excited about it. If we are truly going to “put our money where our mouths are” as far as the Healthy Campus Initiative is concerned and strive to be the healthiest campus in the nation, then this is a pretty obvious, bold and necessary step for us to take as a community. There are already college campuses around the country that have banned tobacco use, and the University of California has mandated that all of its campuses be smoke-free by January 2014. We’ll be the first one in the system to get there. You can visit the UCLA Tobacco-Free Task Force website for more information.

Whether or not you see this as “paternalistic,” or a “restriction of personal liberty,” as a recent submission in the Daily Bruin suggested, it’s happening. It was also correctly pointed out that it’s the campus’s responsibility not simply to mandate no smoking, but to support those who want to quit. We will, and I’ll get to that.

UCLA students are a highly intelligent lot. So I’ll try not to insult you by telling you one more time about all the dangers of smoking. If you do need a reminder, look up my previous column.

Because you’re so well-informed, you’d probably rather not be a smoker (if you are one). But it’s just not that simple.

Once you’ve become a regular smoker, the nicotine in tobacco has hijacked a very powerful (and extremely primitive) part of your brain often referred to as “the reward center.” It wants what it wants and it wants it now. It also happens to be responsible for some pretty mission-critical functions like breathing, eating, sex and survival. So it drives you to keep smoking, forces your more highly evolved (but essentially weaker) cerebral cortex to make up endless excuses why you should, or must, and fights like hell to get you to smoke again when you try to stop.

You need help.

Fortunately, there are a number of specific resources available on campus, at no or low cost, at the Ashe Center, Counseling and Psychological Services, online or on the phone. You can also call Tobacco Free California’s smoking cessation support hotline at 1-800-NO-BUTTS.

Finally, let me give you the condensed version of my advice about how you may be able to quit successfully that I believe has helped many of my patients over the years: Don’t quit.

Instead, become a nonsmoker. Pick a date that’s not so far off that it’s a sham, and not so soon that it freaks you out, then put it on your calendar. On that date, you change your identity. I don’t mean your name. We each have multiple identities, some of which we’re born with (e.g., man, woman), some of which we earn (e.g., physician, attorney) and some of which we assume either by choice, declaration or our actions (e.g., husband, wife, athlete).

If you are a “smoker,” you pretty much earn that identity by smoking. We go from single to married or student to graduate in a nanosecond, with a simple declaration, having met certain requirements. In this case, for the change to be legitimate, you simply, though not easily, have to not smoke. So understand and accept that you will want to smoke for a long time after you change the behavior. Figure out some other ways you can manage those feelings; talk about them, complain about them, write about them, dance, exercise or chew gum. But don’t be hijacked by them.

And don’t tell people you “quit smoking” or are “trying to quit.” Tell them you don’t smoke anymore. You can be dying for a cigarette. But as long as you don’t smoke, you’re a lot less likely to die of lung cancer. So are those around you.

Dr. David Baron is the executive director of the Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center.

Submit questions for Dr. Baron to answer in future columns at [email protected], or tweet us @dailybruin using the hashtag #AsheAboutYourHealth.