People quit smoking in groups

This is a story that just supports the way that we live as a society and it is not just about quitting smoking but also about drinking, losing weight, doing drugs and buying new cars. The fact is that when people that we are around and share values with make a change in their lives then we do too.

You may have heard sometime in the past that if you want to make more money then hang around people that make more money. The same is true if you want to get in shape, hang out with people that are in shape. We all pick up on the habits of those around us and reading about the following study helps us to understand that changes do in fact come in a large part due to those around us.

A team of researchers who showed that obesity can spread person-to-person has found a similar pattern with smoking cessation: A smoker is more likely to kick the habit if a spouse, friend, co-worker or sibling did.

What’s more, smokers tend to quit in groups, and those who don’t stop puffing increasingly find themselves pushed to the edge of their social circles, the researchers found.

“Your smoking behavior depends upon not just the smoking behavior of the people you know but also the people who they know,” and so on, said Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the report.

The findings back up studies showing that peer influence plays a key role in people’s decision to stop lighting up and provide evidence that the “buddy system” used by smoking cessation, weight loss and alcoholism programs to change addictive behavior works.

“Anecdotally, we hear people say they quit smoking because their spouse or friend quit,” said Jennifer Unger, a smoking prevention expert at the University of Southern California who had no role in the study. “If you influence a few people, those people might go on to help others to quit.”

Last year, Christakis and his colleague James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, published a study suggesting that obesity can spread among friends, much like an infectious disease. The duo mined data from a large social network of people who had been followed for three decades and found that when one person gained weight, close friends tended to pack on the pounds, too.

Their latest study, which appears in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine and is funded by the National Institute on Aging, focused on people’s smoking habits in the same social network.

If you are in fact trying to quit smoking then you can register for a free stop smoking plan by email program.

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Tags: alcoholism, California, co-worker, Harvard Medical School, infectious disease, James Fowler, Jennifer Unger, large social network, lead author, medical sociologist, National Institute on Aging, New England Journal of Medicine, Nicholas Christakis, obesity, San Diego, social network, University of California, University of Southern California

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