Introduction

My friend has been a smoker for five years. She is a pack-a-day smoker. Not only is this habit expensive (she may spend upwards of $50 a week on this habit), but it is also not very good for health, as numerous studies have shown (Agaku, King, Dube et al., 2014). I would like to help her quit smoking so that she can save her health, save money, and just be an altogether more enjoyable person to be around. (It is not that much fun being around a person who smokes all the time). To solve this problem, I have applied the six-step problem solving process. This paper will review the steps and explain what I did step-by-step to help my friend quit smoking.

Step One: Define the Problem

The problem my friend was having was that she was smoking a pack a day and did not know how to stop. If she went a short time without a cigarette, she became antsy and annoyed, and became intolerable to be around. After a cigarette, she felt calm again. However, she usually needed to take a cigarette break every half hour or so. She didn’t really like being known as a smoker and she had started around a different set of friends, but since she was no longer with that set and instead was around a bunch of non-smokers she wanted to change her habit. Also, she was at a new job where she could not get away every half hour to go smoke and she was beginning to sneak them at work wherever she could get away with it. She knew she had to stop. The problem was she couldn’t. She had tried to quit cold turkey, but that did not work. She tried the nicotine patch but that did not work. She tried gum, but that did not work. How to help her quit: that was the question.

Step Two: Analyze the Problem

I asked her what the benefits of smoking were. She said it gave her a few minutes... It helped her keep her stress down. She also liked the motions of taking continuous deep breaths. That was why she did not like the patch or the gum: she missed the breathing activity that went with smoking. I asked her if she had experienced some trauma in her childhood to see if there was an underlying reason that needed to be addressed using therapy. She said she had not, that her childhood was happy and that she had just started smoking around a group of friends that she no longer saw much since she moved away. However, she was hooked and now it was a problem.

Step Three: Generate Options

It sounded to me like my friend had issues dealing with stress. I offered the following options: 1) get stress therapy to address what I perceived to be her underlying stress issues, or 2) try e-cigarettes or vaping to get her smoking “fix” without the harm of actually smoking cigarettes or having to rush out of work every half hour to do it. She could vape right at work, since it was just water vapor that was being inhaled. We decided to evaluate these two options.

Step Four: Evaluate the Options

The first option sounded good on paper. We looked online and saw that she could get cognitive behavioral therapy to help her transition from negative thought patterns to more positive ones to help her cope with stress (Good Therapy, n.d.). The idea of therapy was one that she liked but she did not feel she had the time or money for it right now. She wanted a more convenient solution. We examined the idea of vaping or using e-cigarettes. There were two studies that we looked at that reported that e-cigarettes were not likely to help one quit smoking (Grana, Popova & Ling, 2014; Lee, Grana & Glantz, 2014). We noticed that…