Giving Up Smoking Now

Harmful effects of smoking have been well publicized for many years. We all know what smoking can do to the body, and yet until it comes time to give up the smoking habit, we ignore the damage and focus only on the “good” we feel from feeding the nicotine addiction.

The health risks associated with smoking include lung cancer, heart attacks and coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, stroke, mouth cancer, throat cancer, and even erectile dysfunction in men. For many people, just thinking about all of these health risks is enough to make them decide to quit smoking, or not even start in the first place.

Besides all the risks to your health, another of the harmful effects of smoking that is not talked about a lot is the damage that smoking can do to your relationships with family and friends. For example, you can do a lot of damage to your relationship with your children when you smoke.

For example, when I was a smoker, I was always saying things like “It’s my body, I’ll smoke if I want to” when my son would ask me not to smoke. After I had my first heart attack, I realized how selfish that was of me, and I could have left him an orphan. I’m not sure he’s forgiven me for that yet, even though I have been smoke-free for almost six years now.

You can also do physical damage to others with your second-hand smoke. In fact, experts have found that exposure to second-hand smoke can cause the same health risks to non-smokers as the act itself does in smokers.

One report released by the U.S. Surgeon General in 2006 even noted that the harmful effects of smoking can include death from SIDS. The report stated that there is enough evidence “to infer a causal relationship between exposure to secondhand smoke and sudden infant death syndrome.”

Unfortunately, too many people decide to pay attention to these effects when it’s too late and serious health conditions are already a reality for either them or their loved ones. Even when smokers know what damage they are doing to themselves and others, it’s hard to make that decision to quit.

There is some good news though. When you make the decision and actually do give up smoking, you can reverse some of the damage done to your body. If you have given up the habit before the harmful effects of smoking have done serious damage, you should start seeing some improvement in as little as twenty-four hours. And, if you can stay quit then by the time 15 years have passed, your body should be as healthy as that of a person who has never smoked.

Recognizing the harmful effects of smoking on both your own body and mind, and on your environment often plays an important role in making the decision to quit smoking. Making the decision is only the first step. Actually physically quitting will go a long way to reversing these effects and putting you on the path toward better health.