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How Your Social Network Often Determines Your Smoking Status
Whether or not an individual is successful in quitting cigarettes can depend on whether or not their spouse and friends can also let go of their smoking habit.
Smokers are more likely to be on the outskirts of social networks, clustering together. In earlier years, whether or not anyone smoked made no difference to any social network, however, over the last 20 years smoking has become looked upon negatively, leaving smokers popular only within their own smoking social group.
Do social pressures really decide whether or not you quit or continue smoking?
Statistics show that people tend to quit smoking in groups, meaning that if your friends start to quit, you’re more likely to follow in their footsteps. If an individual’s spouse stops smoking, that individual is 67% more likely to quit smoking as well. If only one friend quits smoking, you are still 36% more likely to quit too. Siblings of smokers who quit are 25% less likely to continue smoking after a brother or sister quits.
One interesting statistic shows people who smoke are typically less educated than those who don’t. What it comes down to is social relationships have a significant impact on health behaviors and decisions.
Over the past few decades, smokers have become a more marginalized group, making it increasingly more difficult to get cessation messages out to smokers.
The above statistics have proven that we need to find new ways to reach out to groups of smokers rather than trying to reach one individual smoker at a time. Many people who still smoke have not been pushed out socially for varying reasons and have not experienced the effects of what being a smoker may mean for them in terms their success in life.
Very rarely do you meet a smoker who didn’t start smoking at age 20 or younger. People who begin smoking at an early age typically do it because they either have misconceptions regarding the benefits of smoking or because they want to be “cool” and fit in with the “in crowd”, or at the very least, the people they view as their friends.
By the time most people realize that starting to smoke probably wasn’t the best idea, it’s too late to just up and quit. They are highly addicted and now struggle with the nicotine addiction.
Most of the adults I know who are smokers do it for a few reasons. The first reason is that they’ve done it for a very long time and even if they want to quit, they don’t believe they can quit. The second reason is because they’re under the impression that a significant other is bound to accept them for who they are exactly the way they are. Third, many of the adult smokers I know who wouldn’t even consider quitting are the pretend wannabe rebels who feel like they’re breaking some colossal rule by continuing to be a smoker.
These are also the same people who when everyone around them quits, they will be the first to jump on the band wagon and quit too. People cluster together. The only people who are more difficult to get through to are the people who smoke for different reasons, which have nothing to do with what their friends and family are doing.
Tags: cigarette habit, nicotine addiction, quit smoking, quitting, smokers, smoking, social status, stop smoking
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