Enhancing the quality and length of your life by quitting smoking is a worthwhile effort. It is definitely not an easy task, but it can be accomplished with time and patience. To quit smoking successfully, finding out what your options are. Knowing where to go for help is a wise first step. Quitting smoking is the best move that you can make for your health and the health of all of those around you.
Just about everyone knows by now that smoking causes diseases that shorten your life or those that may even end it. Diseases such as lung cancer, throat, esophagus, bladder, and kidney, and pancreas cancers are some horrible things caused by smoking for a start. Not to mention some leukemia, stomach, and cervix cancers, and newly added by the Surgeon General is pneumonia.
People who smoke are more than three times as likely to die due to heart attack as non smokers. Smoking is a major risk factor for a disease that narrows the blood vessels that transport blood to the limbs and muscles called peripheral vascular disease as well as the disease that causes some strokes.
If that‘s not enough to convince you to stop smoking, let’s look at your appearance. Premature wrinkling of skin, chronic bad breath, discolored fingernails and hair, and an increase risk of macular degeneration a leading cause of blindness in the elderly. Smoking over the age of thirty-five if you are a woman can put you in a high risk group for stroke, heart attack, and blood clots of the legs, low birth weight of babies and miscarriages. But the hopeful portion of this message is that if you decide to quite regardless of how long you’ve smoked or how much, quitting will help you to live longer.
In as little as twenty minutes after quitting smoking the heart rate and blood pressure drops and in one to nine months following quitting smoking, circulation in your hands extremities and lung function increases. Shortness of breath decreases and your lungs begin to function properly, cleaning the lungs and removing mucus that causes infection. Fifteen years of non smoking and your risk of heart disease is that of non smoking persons. These benefits can be obtained from quitting smoking even if you are suffering from a smoking related illness already.
Smoking is less socially accepted now more than ever. Smoking bans have been placed in just about every workplace in the nation along with airports, public buildings. Even friends may insist that you not smoke in their houses or cars. Some people may even find dating more difficult because of a bad smoking habit. So the social impacts of not smoking will probably change your life for the better if you quit.
If you have a family, that is another great motivation to quit smoking. The main reason is that the secondhand smoke could pose serious health problems for others who do not deserve such things. You should also consider what kind of role model you are being to any small children that you live with, whether they are your own kids, siblings, nieces and nephews, or any other relation. You may be living with kids who look up to you as an authority figure, and if you teach them that smoking is alright you will feel very guilty later in life.
Some of the many new products used to help an individual to stop smoking are really very effective. Counseling services, reading materials, medicines, and patches are all widely available and have produced some amazing results. Educational materials alone may be the best beginning start to an attempt to quit because once you know what kind of damage you are doing to your body the prudent and reasonable person will definitely see that it is the very best thing to do. However, it has been documented and researched that the highest success rates occur when a combination of methods are used simultaneously. Take the time and do it for yourself and your loved ones, quit for life.