| 06.09.08: Quitting in packs |
 A new study by the New England Journal of Medicine has found that smokers tend to quit with social networks. It makes sense, if those around you – in your family, at work, in your social circle – stop smoking, it becomes less fun and less acceptable to continue smoking. And if you quit with a group then you’ll have more support in the quitting process. You’ll have more motivation to quit successfully and less temptation to smoke at your trigger times.What does this mean for public education campaigns and cessation programs that encourage smokers to quit? For us, it provides some key insights that will be helpful in evolving our smoking cessation programs and campaigns for the State Tobacco Education & Prevention Partnership. It tells us that the FixNixer , an online and text messaging quitting tool that we invented, is ahead of the curve regarding social networking and smoking cessation. It has an online forum and blogging component that allows participants to communicate with and support each other in the quitting process. It also has an optional feature allowing participants to involve family and friends in the quitting process for additional support. The FixNixer will actually send emails or texts to identified friends and family to notify them of the participants quit attempt. These insights also point to great opportunity to incorporate social components in other areas of our cessation campaigns and programs. Perhaps it can be addressed in messaging, events and even on social networking sites. It will be interesting to see if future studies find the same to be true with other health behaviors such as exercising, losing weight, eating right and getting medical check-ups. A few articles about the study: New York Times ABC News Harvard Blog  Quote this article on your site
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