If you or a loved one are thinking of quitting smoking this summer, and you’ve got a basic handle on Turkish (or want to improve), we have great news for you. The Ministry of Health has a support line for smokers having a hard time giving up their addiction. Alo 171 aims to help you quit smoking without falling off the bandwagon, by giving you routine calls, mails and SMS messages to check up on you. They have helped more than 40,000 people so far. You can benefit as well 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by simply dialing 171. You can also connect to live chat, Monday to Friday from 08:00 to 17:00, or reach them by e-mail.
Many smokers go through numerous attempts to quit, before actually succeeding. If you have been struggling by yourself, you can give this support line a try and change your life for the better in 5 easy steps.
Step 1: Choose a Date
First of all, go to the official website of Alo 171 and choose a date that you would like to stop smoking. Below the calendar, you will see two buttons to announce this amazing decision to your friends and family over Facebook and Twitter. When you click on the button to continue, a pop-up window will appear asking for a username and an e-mail address. Once you fill these sections, a confirmation code will be sent to your inbox. (Make sure to check your spam box if you didn’t receive it.) Copy and paste the code into the pop-up window and you are set.
Step 2: Decisiveness Test
In this step, you are required to answer 8 yes/no questions to test how decisive you actually are. Questions range from if you’ve tried quitting before to whether or not you’d try again if you failed. Once you reply to all the questions, you can check your test results. If you replied mostly in the affirmative, you will receive your result as “Congratulations, you are ready to quit smoking”. If you mostly replied in the negative, you will receive the support message, “Each time you smoke your health deteriorates. You can have a better life, look better, feel better and be a good example for your kids if you decide to quit”. Either way, you can continue to the program by clicking the next button at the end of the page.
Step 3: Addiction Test
Then comes the addiction test. This part consists of 6 multiple choice questions to determine how many cigarettes you smoke a day, what time you smoke the most, and other conditional questions on your habit.
According to your replies, you get a result that shows how much of an addict you are. There are three bars: Low, Mild, High. Each bar consists of 7 levels. At the end of the addiction test, you can see where you stand.
Step 4: Cost Test
This section is the real deal. We always talk about how expensive it is to smoke and how we could have used that money for something else. But we never realize how much it actually costs us in total over the years.
So in this section, there are two questions to answer: How many packages of cigarettes do you smoke daily and how many months / years has it been since you first started. As you reply, you see the exact amount of money you have spent overall. For example, if you smoke half a pack a day for 10 years, the money you spent on smoking is a whopping 16,425 TL. To add insult to injury, the site shows you what else you could have done with that money. In the example above, you could have gone on a world tour or purchased a motorcycle.
Step 5: Result
In the last section, you get an overall summary of your profile. For example:
Decided Date to Quit: 25 May 2018
Your Level of Decisiveness: Ready to Quit
Your Level of Addiction: Mild
Overall Cost of Smoking Until Now: 16,425.00 TL
Below your profile, there are three options that you can choose from in terms of support. These consist of receiving regular check ups via e-mail, SMS or phone. Don’t forget to click save before you exit the page!
And that is it really, quick and simple. After all, addictions are nothing but bad habits and they are easy to break if only you believe in yourself and make the decision to quit in your head. Good luck!
