It is important for a smoker to know what happens when he or she stops smoking. This article is a chronology of the events that takes place from the time the smoker stubs out the final cigarette.
One of the best motivating factors to help quit smoking, is knowledge of the things that happen to your body once you quit smoking. You are bound notice the positive effects of stopping smoking as soon as you have taken your last puff. The following shows the chronological sequence of events.
The benefits will manifest themselves in just twenty minutes after you have quit smoking. Your heartbeat and pulse come back to their normal levels. As a result, you will find breathing a lot easier. Actually, a high blood pressure greatly increases the chances of you suffering a seizure. Hence within just twenty minutes of quitting, your chances of suffering a heart attack reduce significantly.
After about eight hours, the amount of two of the deadliest components that cigarettes introduce into your body - nicotine and carbon monoxide - will almost reduce by half. Carbon monoxide is a highly toxic gas. It greatly affects the body as it interferes with the ability of the body to absorb oxygen. With this deadly gas out of your system, your breathing will improve by leaps and bounds. Nicotine is the addictive drug in cigarettes. As it is removed from the body, you can expect to suffer from withdrawal symptoms. This is the time when your defences have to be at their strongest to prevent you from succumbing to the craving.
When the first day is over, carbon monoxide and nicotine will be completely eliminated from the body. This will make two significant things happen. First, your breathing will have almost returned to normal. Second, the cold turkey will have set in completely. You might even get depressed and have hallucinations, especially if you were a chain smoker until one day ago. But the golden lining to this dark cloud is that if you pass through this phase, you will have got rid of your smoking habit for ever. You may even face vomiting and stomach upsets during this period. However, that is simply a sign that the nicotine is gone out from your body.
Within a few weeks, your cold turkey will be over, and you will no longer feel the urge for smoking again. But that depends on your resilience actually. Your circulation will be almost back to normal and risks of all circulatory diseases will be mostly gone.
It will take a little more while for your heart to return back to its normal functioning. Within one year, your heart will have almost repaired to the halfway point, which means the risk of heart attacks would become half of that of a smoker. However, it will take fifteen years for your heart to become as healthy as a nonsmoker’s heart.
But still, the chances of being attacked by lung cancer is still not eliminated. The tar that has settled down in your lungs are pretty hard to get off. But, it is good to know that the chances of falling a victim to lung cancer is halved within ten years. Herbal therapies will decrease that possibility also!
So, it takes a minimum of ten to fifteen years for a person to get back to the normal healthy life that others are leading. Cutting down on the fag will increase your interest to stick around in the world. So, why not feel good after getting rid of this addiction?
