Smoking affects secondhand smokers, nonsmokers who inadvertently breathe in the smoke. Secondhand smoke comes from 2 sources – smoke from the burning end of the cigarette, and smoke exhaled by smokers. Secondhand smoking is as dangerous as smoking itself, as the secondhand smokers inhale more of the smoke than the smokers themselves.

In so many ways smoking is harmful to the body, but it is the most dangerous to the lungs. How does smoking affect your lungs, then?

Know that it is not only your lungs that are affected, but also the airways and your other respiratory organs. When you start smoking cigarettes, chemicals enter the body through the mouth and nose and into the lungs. Burning tobacco produces more than 4,000 chemicals, which include carbon monoxide, nicotine and tar.

The tar from the cigarettes sticks to the cilia, the tiny hair-like structures that line the airways in the lungs. The cilia typically acts as little brooms that sweep out harmful dirt – but when cigarette is smoked, the cilia can’t work properly because the tar sticks to the cilia and is therefore covered. Even a stick is enough to slow down the cilia, and with the cilia not performing its task properly, dirt can stay in lungs and so cause problems. Mucus also gets piled up, and germs don’t get swept out. Overtime, as smoking get heavier and more frequent, the cilia dies and the lungs is exposed to even more dangerous substances.

How does smoking affect your lungs? By destroying the cilia. When those little brooms are not working, dirt-filled mucus slides down your lungs and blocks the tiny airways – and the air can’t get in or out properly. That is the reason why smokers cough a lot -because they have to cough to rid of the dirty mucus in their lungs. Whereas those unexposed to cigarette smoke hardly ever need to cough, because their cilia are working just fine.

How does smoking affect your lungs? By enlarging the cells producing mucus in your lungs and airways. The amount of mucus increases, and the mucus thickens. Your lungs and airways then get irritated and inflames, narrowing and reducing the airflow.

How does smoking affect your lungs? By causing detrimental changes in your lungs and airways – changes that can be sudden or long-term. Changes that appear suddenly, lasts a short time then goes away are called acute changes, and examples of these are colds and pneumonia. Chronic changes are those that happen slowly and last a long time – some for the rest of your life. A chronic change caused by smoking is emphysema. Bronchitis and lung cancer are other chronic changes. How does smoking affect your lungs? By destroying your lungs and killing you.

Health Reasons

First and foremost, smoking is horrible for your health and leads to numerous diseases and disorders. Smoking leads to cancer, heart disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). COPD alone kills thousands of smokers yearly. From the first breath of smoke the damage begins and the longer a smoker continues smoking the worse the damage becomes. Eventually the damage is permanent. Worse yet the same damage can occur to the smoker’s loved ones who are continuously subjected to second hand smoke.

Cosmetic Reasons

Smoking has many unpleasant cosmetic effects on the smoker. Smoking gives you bad breath. Continuous smoking also leads to yellow teeth. A smoker is three times more likely than a non smoker to lose their teeth. Smoking also has negative effects on the skin. Smokers age prematurely, getting wrinkles and ashen colored skin. If you have seen someone who has smoked for a long time you can see that they look older and unhealthy.

Financial Reasons

The smoking habit has gotten more and more expensive over recent years. The average smoker spends $30 a week on their habit. That is over $1,500 a year. That is money that could be spent on much more constructive things or money that could go towards bills and life expenses. If a smoker continues to the point they get one of the above mentioned diseases then they will have to spend money to treat these diseases. Also, smokers may have to pay more money for health and life insurance.

In Conclusion

Why is smoking bad for you? The three reasons above are a few of the main reasons but there really are many more. If you are a smoker than now is the time to stop smoking before you have severe health problems, suffer cosmetic effects, or spend too much money on the habit.

Making Connections

Since most habitual behaviours don’t require conscious thought (hey that’s why they are habits right?), we rarely spend time thinking about that habit. It can be quite illuminating to sit down in a quiet environment, away from riotous kids and niggling chores, and really reflect on your smoking habit. Go back in time through your memories and try to identify the precise moment you started smoking. As you travel through your memory banks you will probably make a connection, and not necessarily just one, with a specific event that had an impact on your smoking. It could be that a break-up with a cherished girlfriend or boyfriend in your teens started you smoking; or perhaps a negative family incident caused the habit to start.

By exploring how past events may have influenced your smoking you can determine whether in fact you need to resolve some deep emotional issue first before you can really tackle stopping smoking. If the event that is fuelling your smoking habits isn’t dealt with you will find it much harder to quit smoking.

Breaking Connections

Once you have identified one or more key past events that may have started you smoking you should seek ways to break the connections. There is scientific evidence in the realm of psychology that suggests we form memory links between the emotionally charged events that occur in our lives and our physical bodies.

You will be aware that when you recall a strongly emotional past event, whether positive or negative, there is often some physical feelings that seem to accompany the memory. This is the link mentioned previously; our thoughts produce physical reactions in our body. Fear is a classic example of this. When we think about something that frightens us we nearly always also actually feel the sensations that go with the emotion of fear even when the object of that fear isn’t near by; we are not in danger and yet we can manifest the physical feelings of our fear simply by thinking about what causes our fear. Phobias are the most well known form of this phenomenon.

When such a past event is linked in this way to smoking, for example when we remember something negative from the past our immediate reaction is to seek solace in a cigarette, it becomes very difficult to abandon the one thing that appears to help us i.e. the smoking. However, the good news is it is possible, and often very simple, to break these emotional connections and open the way to breaking the smoking habit completely.

The four big killers from cigarette smoking are lung cancer, heart attack, stroke and Chronic Pulmonary Obstructive Disease or COPD. The lung cancer is not the only form of cancer that smokers put themselves at markedly higher risk of either.

Smokers represent 90% of all male lung cancer sufferers and 80% of all women lung cancer sufferers, of whom, 90% die within 5 years of diagnosis. Smoking also increases the risk of other cancers. Amongst the plethora of other diseases, smoking enhances the risk of cervical cancer, cancers of the mouth, lip and throat, cancer of the pancreas, bladder cancer, cancer of the kidney, stomach cancer, liver cancer and leukaemia.

Of course smokers are made totally aware of the illnesses that they risk as a result of their habit. Health warnings are emblazoned everywhere. Governments and health organisations around the world continue to berate smokers with warnings and images of the diseases they are risking as a result of smoking. The reason they argue being that smokers are intelligent and can make choices when given the appropriate evidence. As an ex-smoker (and a happy one at that), I disagree.

The problem with their argument is that these health organisations and governments think that smokers smoke out of choice. This is blatantly not so. To understand the flaw in this idea I suggest we do a little mental experiment:

Let us imagine we take a smoker and a non-smoker as our subjects. We then starve the subjects for 24 hours but give them water so they will not die. We then offer them some food of their individual choice, whether it be soup or stew or curry or cake, they get to choose. Then let us poison this food in front of each subject and tell the subject we are poisoning his or her food. Stick with me here… both of our subjects are famished and both know that their favourite food in front of them is laced with poison and will kill them if they eat it.

Which one is more likely to go ahead and eat the poisoned food, the smoker or the non-smoker?

Neither of them of course, but now ask yourself this question;

“Which one of them is no longer hungry because the food is poisoned?”

Do you see the problem? Just because something may be bad for you and you know that, does not necessarily mean you will not want it. Smoking is not a matter of choice, just as eating isn’t. Smoking to a smoker is a means of obtaining nicotine and the craving for that nicotine is going to be no less when you tell him or her that it’s delivered by a health destroying, cancer instigating, stroke inducing, emphysema causing, heart attack inducing cigarette.

Nicotine delivery is most effective when taken as smoke from cigarettes, rolling or pipe tobacco. It gets delivered fast to the bloodstream and fast to the brain where it is wanted. Nicotine patches, gums, sprays and inhalators all deliver nicotine but it takes several minutes for the delivery. Smoking takes less than 10 seconds to get the nicotine to the brain and that is important because the cravings are short lived but intense, hence smokers prefer to smoke than have a patch dribbling them a little of what they are addicted to.

Once you can understand that nicotine addiction is the problem and you understand that you must overcome that addiction, you build on your chances of becoming a happy non-smoker.

Part of the problem with the government sponsored and pharmaceutical company led solutions to smoking are that they re-enforce the belief that quitting smoking is difficult and they try to solve what they see as a problem of tobacco smoke by giving the addict the drug in a different form such as NRT.

For years now, NRT has been preached as the saviour of smokers around the world, just as methadone has been preached as the solution to heroin addiction. Neither are terribly effective at achieving the goal of bringing people back to normality; i.e. being nicotine or heroin free. Governments and health organisations need to think more about the addiction smokers have to cigarettes because of the nicotine than brow-beating them with bad news about the health effects.

Arguably 80% of smokers are motivated to quit smoking, but motive does not necessarily provide means and opportunity. If smoking is to be overcome, a smoker must not just “not want to smoke”, they must believe that they have no desire to smoke. Only once a smoker can lose the desire for cigarettes, can they become happy non-smokers. Understanding how they can reach the point of not desiring a cigarette is key in removing the perennial problem of relapsing ex-smokers.

Well coming from someone whose wife has tried to quit smoking a number of times, I can personally tell you that this transition is not an easy one. The first time my wife stopped smoking, it was really difficult for here, as well as it was for me. Between the moodiness, cravings, and fact of not knowing what mood she was in, after 3 weeks I went out and bought her a pack of cigarettes myself, because I did not get married to live that way. To that let me add that my actions were really inappropriate, uncalled for and not necessary. I was at the time just unaware of what she was going through, and only looking at things from my point of view.

Something everyone one that is going through this with a loved one, family member or friend, needs to know is what they are going through. They are trying to kick an addiction in the rear. Trying to improve their life by dramatically changing a life controlling habit is not the easiest thing to do.

While it might appear that there is a lot of negative things happening, at the same time several positive things are happening simultaneously. Even though they are moody, unpredictable and maybe even a bit negative towards things or you, their body after only 12 hours of giving up cigarettes has started healing itself.

But let’s deal with these things that might seem negative. Mood changes and emotional are two very normal things to happen to people when they give up smoking. These things happen because the amounts of hormones in the body are changing, quite dramatically, and the body I dealing with it the best it can. The important thing to remember is that this will all pass in time. Once they have went a full month without nicotine the mood swings and fast emotional changes will start to subside. I know first hand that these things are not the easiest to cope with, but they are necessary to complete.

After the second month you will start to see a dramatic change in attitude, mood and things will start to return to normal. The first month is the by far the hardest. A good tip to make it through is one talk to the person quitting, and let them know that you are there for them, and try to talk to them about how you are feeling. When you do this, do not take the focus off of the fact that you are supporting them one hundred percent, and stay positive to the fact they are making such a positive change in their lives. Another good thing to do is enlist support; I have said many times that if you are quitting smoking to always have someone to talk to, but this is also true when someone close to you is quitting smoking.

I will leave you with this; your loved one is making one of the most important changes in their lives. They have decided to change for the better, change their habits, their health, and the way their life has been since this addiction took over. Stay supportive, understand what they are going through, and do what ever they ask of you to help them through it. Once this journey is complete and they are smoke free, both your lives will be so much better, and you get to spend more of it together.

So you have finally decided to quit smoking? Now it’s time to enlist help, nothing wrong with getting help. We all know that quitting smoking is one of the hardest things we will try to do. Don’t go this alone, stick with us and we will help you stay the course. Our program works in 3 easy steps, and in just 5 days you are smoke free.