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Can A Financial Incentive Help Smokers Quit Smoking Cigarettes?

As we learn more about the hazardous effect smoking has on us, quit smoking campaigners become more and more desperate to reach smokers. Will a financial incentive to stop smoking make this idea a reality?

To a nonsmoker it almost seems too easy; if you quit smoking, you save money. It’s as simple as that. Unfortunately, savings thousands of dollars a year isn’t enough for some smokers. Apparently, the bigger incentive involves getting paid to quit smoking.

$750 helped a number of GE employees kick the nicotine habit

A recent study showed that when presented with the option to earn financial incentives in order to quit smoking, smokers jumped at the opportunity. Smokers who have a financial incentive to quit smoking are three times more likely to quit.

An experiment was done with 900 smokers who were all employed by General Electric. 15% of the people who participated in the experiment stayed smoke-free for a year or longer, in comparison to the 5% who were not eligible for the cash incentive.

The way the study worked was that participants would get a cash incentive for each quit smoking milestone. Each person would receive $100 for completing a smoking cessation class, another $250 for being smoke-free after six months and $400 for being smoke-free for 12 months.

In this day and age of economic struggles and penny pinching, something as simple as a few extra bucks is very appealing, especially to young people today.

Keep in mind that you don’t have wait for an experimental study. You can set up your own quit smoking pool. Now is the perfect time to gather up friends and family members who smoke and throw money into the pot. Have weekly meetings or get-togethers and come up with a game plan and goal for everyone.

Keep track of everyone’s progress in a notebook and have some “donate” a “reward” each week. Participants in your group can earn gift certificates to restaurants, candles, IOU’s or anything you can think of. Each week, group participants can put a few dollars in the “pot” and whoever makes the most progress at the end collects the money pot. If everyone does well, split the money equally or draw names.

You can make the group your own; whatever works for you. It doesn’t have to be a group. It can be just one friend or family member. Be creative, be positive and make sure you keep the incentives rolling. It might be fun to start something like this at work too and you might be able to get your superiors to join in on the support and who knows, maybe you’ll end up in a completely smoke-free workplace after all.

Tags: cigarettes, nicotine addiction, nicotine withdrawal, quit smoking, quitting, smoking cessation, stop smoking

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