It’s not even Christmas Day yet, but before you know it it will be New Year’s Eve and once again you’ll be making promises you can’t keep about how you’re going to change your life in the new year. Top of many people’s list of resolutions they want to keep is to stop smoking.

Unless they’ve been living under a rock, everyone knows about the risks and dangers of smoking. The government has seemingly reduced the number of smokers in the UK (and for the first time, the number of young smokers has declined), by making it socially unacceptable to smoke in public. Smoking has become the social equivalent of passing wind.

If you want to stop smoking and are aiming to quit for New Year, here are some tips on how best to manage it:

1. Get motivated. A New Year’s Resolution isn’t going to help much in the long-run (you might have lit up on 1st January in a hung-over daze before you’ve even remembered that you’d promised to quit). You need something bigger to aim for: perhaps you want to make sure you’re there for your grandchild’s graduation. Or maybe you want to decorate the lounge but there’s no point doing so if you’re just going to turn it yellow again by February.

2. Get advice and support. You could go ‘cold-turkey’ but it doesn’t work for most people, the craving is just too hard. Cigarette addiction is a chemical addiction in your brain, it’s not something you can easily will-away. Look into nicotine-replacement therapy, which can help reduce the withdrawal symptoms of depression, anxiety and irritability. Gum, patches and lozenges are all available, as are fake cigarettes that also give you the sensation of smoking, and these can make you twice as likely to successfully quit as if you were trying on your own.

3. Tell people. Tell your friends, work colleagues, family, that you are trying to quit. They’ll be more understanding if you bite their head off for not holding a door open for you or breathing too loudly. Support groups are available if you need to vent or want to talk to others going through the same thing. Or you can try cognitive-behavioural therapy plus nicotine-replacement therapy, which will offer the best chance of success.

4. Avoid triggers. If you normally smoke when you have a drink, then give drinking a rest socially for a while, just until your cravings have gone. Or if you smoke when stressed, manage your stress-levels better.

5. When you’ve quit, decorate the house. You’ll be less likely to want to wreck your beautiful, clean-smelling walls, ceilings and soft furnishings if you’ve spent days working on them. Get rid of your smoking paraphernalia too (ashtrays and the like) so you have fewer reminders around the house of your habit.

Whatever motivates you, however many attempts it takes to kick the habit, you will manage it in the end and you will feel so much better for it.