Smoking is becoming one of the most popular and yet most deadly social vices in America today. Regardless of the success of many activist groups banning smoking in all the favorite social spots such as restaurants and public buildings, smokers continue to light up without much fear of how this is affecting their health or the repercussions of those affected around them. The price of smoking is up both in cost per pack of smokes and in how much it affects the smokers health. Smoking is more and more becoming socially unacceptable. The irony here is that smoking was mainly a social activity for many years, and often peer pressure is responsible for pushing people into this activity in the first place.
In the old days smoking was still bad but not as bad as it is today. The air around us is poisoned, the foods we eat are mostly packaged and cause health to deteriorate as well, but add smoking to the equation and the body, which is already struggling to maintain health, is impacted a hundred times more violently than just 50 years ago. As the body deteriorates smoking becomes exponentially more dangerous- mainly because it deteriorates the immune function which is the only shield your body has against cancer. More people than ever are dying from smoking!
Simply stating that smoking causes cancer is putting it mildly. Smoking essentially lowers the immune function and can actually feed the cancer cells. By feeding them and essentially injuring the body’s defense system, you’re helping cancer cells to win. Other parts of the body can be affected simultaneously causing emphysema, high blood pressure, stroke, irregular breathing (which means oxygen is not making it to the body/brain effectively), and more. Smoking does essentially for the body what water does to an engine block. It slowly starts to make things stop working and wear down. As synergistic as the body is, every part depends fully on every other part and as a collective bio-system so when one or more systems become corrupt health problems arise and the deterioration of the collective whole body follows. Many parts are affected directly (the lungs, blood stream, brain) and many others are affected indirectly by way of the body’s systems not pulling their weight and causing internal problems in other systems (i.e. the liver, heart, nerves and more).
The effects of tobacco are both mental and physical, but the mental problems that arise are the hardest to fix later. Ironically, we tend to think, when we want to quit smoking, that it is the physical discomfort or withdraws, that stop us from doing it. The reality is that smoking, although it starts out as a social activity, becomes ingrained and affects every part of your life eventually. It consumes you at every level. Some examples are how smokers and non smokers tend to segregate themselves from one another. Smokers have to have a smoke throughout the day and enjoy movies less because they miss a part of it to feed the addiction (since you cannot smoke indoors anywhere), and entire habits are formed around smoking. Wanting to quit smoking is hard because you don’t just quit the act, but you have to change your life around you. You will have a hard time if you hang out with your smoking friends too much, you have to figure out how to fill in that extra time you will have after quitting (which can be hard), and more.
Mentally, smokers start changing how they do things in their life. They plan for that smoking break throughout the day, they won’t take as many trips if where they’re going bans smoking. Smokers tend to hang out with other smokers, and there are a million little things that change as a result of this habit. The mental addiction is harsh, especially if you try to quit cold turkey, but the hardest part is renovating your routine and daily life to disclude smoking. With more time on their hands when they quit, they have, at least at first, too much time to think about how much they miss smoking, which can cause you to go back to smoking out of boredom!
The first step is admitting you do have a problem and that it is consuming the entire spectrum of your life. Quitting smoking is not easy, but it is possible. It is much easier now due to the enormous support from both society as a whole and programs that take the guess work out. Much research has been done in this area and if there ever was a time to want to quit it is now! Science has figured out exactly what happens when you become addicted to smoking and exactly what needs to be done to renovate your life back to health. You only have to go as far as your computer, a search engine, and a website to get the ball rolling!
©2008 QuitSmoking411.com
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