A life without cigarettes
The first puff that you take on a cigarette may be the start of a nicotine habit that leads ultimately to death.
Certainly everybody today knows how harmful smoking is to human health. Why then do we keep on doing it? What is it about tobacco that makes it such an addictive substance? Some scientists say that nicotine is even more addictive than many known narcotics. The first puff that you take on a cigarette may be the start of a nicotine habit that leads ultimately to death.
Why do people start smoking?
Although they are physical, habits of any kind actually get started in your brain: in a sense, it's your brain that creates a substance dependency. Through frequent repetition, physical actions may become essential parts of one's life.
Habits are not necessarily bad things: some habits are vitally important in the conduct of everyday life. Walking and swimming are habits; so too are driving a car, reading, and writing. These are all activities that we can do without thinking about them because we've learned to do them: they've become habits. Just like riding a bicycle, smoking can become a habit because certain signals are repeatedly received and interpreted by the brain. These signals can come from surprisingly different sources: a particular environment for example, an object, or a situation. The sight of an ashtray or a lighter, a cup of coffee or tea, finishing a meal, a stressful situation, or even watching TV can provoke a previously conditioned desire to "light up". If you can condition yourself in such cases to say "But I don't want to smoke", you can go a long way towards reducing your dependence on this bad habit.
About a third of all young people experiment with smoking while still of childhood age. The evidence shows that even that first puff results in a future smoking habit about 85% of the time. Moreover it's a habit which, once it gets started, becomes increasingly more difficult to give up.
One puff, two puffs, three puffs, four
The moment you take a drag on a cigarette it begins to have an effect on your body: first your pulse rate goes up; then you begin to breathe faster while your blood circulates more slowly.
A single cigarette contains about 3,700 poisonous substances, a great many of which are known to cause cancer. Among the most harmful are carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, and ammonia. All these poisons enter your blood with a single puff on a cigarette. They can result in asthma, lung inflammations, and chest pains. You may find yourself more susceptible to colds, flu, and similar infections. Even worse, statistics show that someone dies of smoking-related diseases once every thirteen seconds on average worldwide. About two and a half million people die every year due to such diseases. Lung cancer is the most common cause followed by heart disease and other forms of cancer.
Even if it doesn't kill you outright, smoking can also cause strokes brought on by damage to the heart, lungs, and arteries. Women who smoke have a significantly higher risk of cancer of the womb. Smoking has been shown to cause miscarriages and birth defects in pregnant women.
Fortunately the damage caused by smoking doesn't have to be permanent. The human body is wonderfully resilient and capable of repairing itself. The moment you stop smoking, the amount of nicotine in the body drops sharply and if you can go for about ten years without starting again, it's as if you've never smoked at all as far as your body is concerned. Of course you've got to stop before you come down with cancer or heart disease: if you wait that long, it's too late to do anything more about it unfortunately.
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