Scientists examined the extent of the person-to-person spread of smoking behavior and the extent to which groups of widely connected people quit together.
Despite the decrease in smoking in the overall population, the size of the clusters of smokers remained the same across time, suggesting that whole groups of people were quitting in concert. Smokers were also progressively found in the periphery of the social network. (The full article can be found here) I started this project when I realized how many of my friends and acquaintances had been lately talking about their wish to quit smoking. They all expressed a fear, that they social life will never be the same again because smoking became a part of social life – going for a meal, for a drink or to a party you always meet people who offer you a cigarette. People are not confident whether they would be able to quit, because people around them always smoke and this can lead them to a temptation to start again. “Why should I bother to stop smoking, if all of my friends are smoking anyway and I would be inhaling their fumes even if I quit smoking cigarettes!” - says my friend who was only a social smoker before, but now smokes almost 20 cigarettes a day. Only if we were doing this together, only then we can expect a great success! We dont need government and our health institutions constantly to remind us about the harm we are doing to ourselves - by now we know this very well and without warnings! All people who were interviewed for this project agreed that it can only be your own conscious individual decision and none else can do it for you. But the facts and evidences from the latest researches, proves that people tend to follow good examples and much as bad ones. If you are involved into one or another social group (friends, colleagues, study mates and etc.) and someone starts setting up an example of quitting smoking and epecially if he or she succeeds, in most of the cases we can witnes a chain reaction. I was very eager to start this project and take all of my smoking freinds on board. As I expected from the beginning, most of my voluenteers dropped out even before we started our filming sessions. I was very happy to have at least 3 of them, who were determined to quit this nasty habit. If you wan to see their stories and follow the process of how they were doing it, follow their personal SmokeFree blogs. |
Join us:
If you feel that you are ready to quit smoking, but you are scared to fail or don't know how to start, join our venture and we will be your support.
Just simply fill out a contact form and we will get back to you! |