20 Health Benefits When You Quit Smoking

We all know smoking is quite possibly the single most terrible thing one could do to their body! Times have long changed since smoking was advertised on TV as an activity that would make you appear cool and glamorous, and plain packaging laws attempt to make cigarettes and tobacco products appear even more unappealing… not to mention the cost these days!

However, people remain smokers because of the intensely addictive chemical component of nicotine. Nicotine activates all the pleasure signals in your brain to keep you well and truly addicted, and craving more. More complex addiction cues play out in smoking habits too, like associating smoking with certain times of the day, certain scenarios, or people someone smokes with.

The benefits to quitting smoking are innumerable, and instead of seeing smoking as giving something up, many ex-smokers see it as having regained the freedom they didn’t have while they were addicted to smoking. To kick start your quitting smoking journey, we’ve outlined some of the benefits you will experience when you quit, as well as outline some handy tips and resources to get you stuck to it! So, let’s take a look at what happens when you quit smoking.

20 Benefits of Quitting Smoking

1. Better Breath

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This one may be obvious… but what a better place to start than experiencing better, fresher breath. No more worrying about how you smell when you return to the office after a cigarette, or fearing that your friends and family may notice the smell of cigarettes on your breath.

2. Clearer Skin

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Smoking interrupts the healing process of our skin (and many other of our body’s functions), and creates an environment where your skin appears dry and dull. Quitting smoking will make you look brighter, healthier and glowier.

3. Less Wrinkles

Smoking causes blood vessels to constrict, reducing oxygen flow and nutrients to our body’s cells. This is an important bit of science to remember, as it affects all the body systems in this capacity. However, this contributes to our skin, too, and in order for our skin to remain elastic and supple, it must receive all the nutrients it can! Smoking inhibits this and leaves you looking older than you are.

4. Lower Cancer Risk

Smoking interrupts our body’s natural production of cells that recognise and fight against cancer. We have immune cells called Natural Killer (NK) cells that recognise and kill dangerously mutating cells long before they reach the cancer stage. Smokers have less NK cells in their immune systems – so when you quit smoking, your body’s cancer-fighting capacity increases.

5. Lower Risk of Heart Attack

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When your blood vessels are constricted, it leads to an increased risk of something called atherosclerosis. This is when dangerous plaques build up on the walls of blood vessels, occluding the way for blood to properly flow through. Atherosclerosis, combined with various other things including constricted vessels and high blood pressure (which smoking also causes) is the main cause of heart attacks and cardiovascular problems. This is because the blood vessels that deliver blood to the heart muscle to ensure it works properly become blocked. By quitting smoking, your blood vessels dilate to their normal size and your risk of heart attack greatly drops.

6. Lower Risk of Stroke

Just like the science behind heart attacks, smoking increases all the risk factors for strokes. Strokes work the same way as heart attacks – by blood being unable to reach the brain due to occlusion in the vessels. When you quit smoking, your stroke risk drops significantly.

7. Better Sexuality

More on the topic of blood flow – it’s clear that healthy blood flow is imperative to experiencing healthy sexuality, and that impaired blood flow leads to complications like erectile dysfunction. By quitting smoking, you are decreasing your chances of experiencing that.

8. Stronger Immune System

Smoking impacts the immune system and impairs white blood cell activity. Smokers experience more illness, longer illness, and more symptomatic illnesses. They also experience a greater risk of being diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder. Not to mention the chest infections! By quitting smoking, you’re greatly improving your immune function and ability to get through winter without dealing with that dreaded flu.

9. Lessened Anxiety

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Many smokers see their smoke break as relaxing, mindful even. However, it’s widely known that it is not the smoking that contributes to relaxing – it’s the fact that someone is taking 5-10 minutes to take deep, long breaths (even though they’re breaths on a cigarette) and having a break from their busy day. Smoking actually increases anxiety because of the way nicotine affects your body systems. Nicotine increases your heart rate, blood pressure, and activates dopamine pathways in the brain. All these things put your body in an increased state of arousal, which can also be experienced as anxiety. By quitting smoking, you’re giving up that constant yo-yo’ing of your blood pressure and heart rate, and will experience a far more steady mood throughout the day.

10. Lower Cholesterol

Smoking both lowers healthy cholesterol in your body and increases unhealthy cholesterol in your body. Unhealthy levels of cholesterol add to the risk of atherosclerosis – the stuff that contributes to heart attacks and stroke – as well as your risk of type 2 diabetes. Quitting smoking helps restore your cholesterol to healthy levels again.

11. Stop Lung Damage

This one surely must be the most obvious benefit to quitting! Inhaling all those nasty chemicals destroys the cilia (hairs that filter out nasty bacteria) in your lungs, impairs oxygen flow across your lungs, and destroys alveoli (the section of the lungs that oxygen transports across into the blood). Quitting smoking is the best thing you can do to stop all this nasty decay of the lungs.

12. Improve Breathing

As above, when you quit smoking, you will be amazed at how improved your breathing is. You will need less breaths per minute, feel like you can take deep breaths again, and improve your snoring at night, too!

13. Saving Money

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You don’t need to be told how expensive smoking is. Take out a calculator and work out how much you spend on cigarettes yearly, and take some time to consider some other goals or things you would like to spend that money on instead. I’ll bet it’s enough to go on a weekend away, or even a week long holiday somewhere! When you quit smoking, you reap the financial rewards too.

14. Better Smell and Taste

Smoking impairs your ability to smell and taste properly. You will be able to experience the rich and exciting flavours of your meals again, without that residual cigarette taste clouding your enjoyment of food.

15. Better Appetite

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Smoking impairs your appetite by interrupting the hunger signals our body sends us. Yes, you may feel hungrier when you quit smoking – but hunger is an important cue to signal that  our body needs nutrients. When you eat according to your natural appetite instead of a suppressed one, your body begins to thrive.

16. Better Exercise Capacity

When your breathing improves and your heart rate and blood pressure decrease, you become so much more capable of exercising. Good performance at exercise is about maintaining a steady heart rate and breathing rate during it, and without nicotine interrupting that, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in sports.

17. Reduce Risk of Emphysema

Emphysema is a chronic illness that occurs when the alveoli are irreparably damaged. It causes chronic shortness of breath and a myriad of other complications that come with impaired oxygen flow around the body. Smoking is the number one cause of emphysema, and so by quitting, you are doing the best thing to reduce your risk of the disease.

18. Improved Wound Healing

Adequate nutrients being delivered to damaged cells is the most important part of wound healing. Considering the way smoking impairs blood flow, smoking inhibits oxygen and good nutrients to be delivered to wounds and damaged cells. This increases the risk of infections and delays healing time. When you quit smoking, you’ll notice how even paper cuts heal at double speed!

19. Less Wasted Time

If you are replacing your normal cigarette breaks with something productive like mindfulness, reaching out to friends, or going for a walk, you are greatly improving the value and meaning of your day. Imagine all the time you can use more wisely when you’re not smoking, and become inspired as to what you can fill it with instead.

20. Breaking the Addiction Cycle

If you can manage to quit smoking, you have a superpower of resilience and determination. If you can teach your brain to no longer crave nicotine, you’ve accomplished an incredible thing, and you can use that resilience and tenacity in other areas of your life. Tobacco companies only continue to profit off addiction because they have so cleverly designed a product that keeps the consumer hooked. If you manage to beat that, you’ve set your brain up in amazing stead to accomplish other difficult things in life.

How to Quit Smoking

1. Going Cold Turkey

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Going cold turkey is an obvious option – but it’s not for the faint hearted! How do you quit smoking cold turkey? Going cold turkey will involve creating an excellent action plan. It’s about noting what your triggers and routines around smoking are and either planning to avoid them or utilising some other activity instead. You may wish, around trigger time, to chew gum, play a game on your phone, take a walk, take some deep breaths, or eat a lollipop instead. It may be worth avoiding situations or friends where you may feel heavily influenced to smoke for the first few weeks, too. Remember that the withdrawal symptoms can be nasty – but that they only last a few days, and that if you can complete the first few days, you’re well on your way to quitting forever.

2. Gradually Cutting Down

Cutting down is a great place to start if you’re not ready to quit smoking completely. Start by reducing the number of cigarettes you smoke each day, or try delaying your first cigarette of the day by an extended amount of time, as research shows that the longer it is until your first cigarette of the day, the easier it is to quit.

3. Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT)

NRT involves giving your body nicotine through means other than cigarettes so that you don’t experience the intense cravings that come from quitting smoking. It assists in breaking the habit of smoking to give you time to prepare to come off the NRT eventually. NRT is available in pharmacies and comes in the form of sprays, patches you stick on your skin, lozenges, and gum.

4. Prescription Medications

Prescription medications for quitting smoking work by engaging the same neurotransmitters that smoking does, so that the craving to smoke is completely blocked, and that smoking becomes unenjoyable. You can speak with your GP about this option.

5. My QuitBuddy App

The QuitBuddy app is a free app that you can get on your phone to help you track your progress. You can create goals, track the money you’re saving, see how your body is healing in real time, and it provides a place to keep a tab of all your triggers and cravings so you can learn how to continue to manage them in the future.

Withdrawal Symptoms of Quit Smoking

Withdrawing from nicotine can be a pretty horrid experience. Your experience with withdrawal will depend on your route of quitting – whether you’re using nicotine-replacement therapy or going cold turkey – as well as how dependent on cigarettes you were before quitting.

You may suffer the following symptoms: being tense or irritable, feeling low in mood, experiencing changes in appetite, insomnia, coughing and dry mouth, difficulty concentrating, and headaches. However, nicotine is completely out of your system within 3 days and these side effects should abate by then.

Another kind of symptom you may suffer is a change in routine or lifestyle – smoking, for many, is a psychological crutch throughout the day. Many smokers find having cigarettes benchmarks their day in certain ways, gives them time for themselves to regroup and gather their thoughts throughout the day, and see it as dedicated “me-time”. Many smokers feel they are missing out on this when they quit. It’s important to maintain that kind of routine in the quitting process – consider replacing the cigarette break with a different kind of break. Try mindful breathing, playing a 5 minute game on your phone, or taking the time to call a friend instead.

After Quit Smoking: Coping With Relapses

An inevitable part of quitting any kind of addictive substance is relapsing. If you’ve managed to stick to kicking the habit on your first go – congratulations! If you’ve slipped up and smoked a cigarette – don’t stress! Each time you practice quitting, or get back on the horse, so to speak – your inner strength and capacity to quit get stronger each time. Each time you try to quit, you get better at quitting – and feeling guilty for relapsing is a strong indicator that you’re truly ready and committed to kicking the habit once and for all. Give yourself some time to think about what triggered the relapse, and how you can avoid the stimulus in the future, or further coping strategies to use if you do encounter the trigger again. Re-visit all your reasons for quitting and see tomorrow as a fresh start.

Need some assistance with care for yourself or your loved one? Find out how Homage can help!