“What happens to your body when you quit smoking?” is a question most medical professionals and others involved in helping people to put down cigarettes love to answer. Ideally, the question – in order to more effectively aid people who are thinking of quitting – needs to be answered in terms of phases of what happens to your body when you quit smoking.
For instance, the matter is different in the withdrawal phase than it is in the long-term, or maintenance, phase. In withdrawal it’s easy enough to explain what happens to your body when you quit smoking. The answer, of course, is withdrawal. And this process can take many forms, ranging from mild and hardly noticeable to severe and extremely demanding.
Which form of withdrawal occurs depends many times on the physiological makeup of the individual quitter. Generally, however, what happens when you quit smoking at first may involve mental anxiety, physical trembling, headaches, mild-to-moderate blurring of vision (rare) and a feeling of loss or emptiness. Nicotine as a drug acting in the body presents a number of physical and mental challenges to a person when it’s withdrawn, and that’s a medical fact.
In the longer term, over the next three to ten days, what happens to your body when you quit smoking… will involve the beginning stages of self-repair along with those issues of withdrawal, unfortunately. However if you can keep in mind the ultimate potential benefits, it may become a little easier to see a way through to the end of physical cravings for cigarettes.
To start – and this is within the first twenty-four hours – repair of even the tiniest components of the lungs (the alveoli) begins to take place. Of course, the brain and the body misses the ways in which nicotine once acted on them, so your last concern may be the fact you’ll be able to breathe better soon enough. But this is a fact of what happens to your body when you quit smoking.
After the first week to week-and-a-half, there may be actual noticeable beneficial improvement in certain parts of the body and in the way the body carries on its regulatory processes. Skin tone might begin – and certainly will begin, in the longer term – to improve. Formerly blotchy or even ashy skin could see an overall smoothing out of color and improvement in texture.
Another relatively rapid – at least in terms of weeks and months – change in the body will be in hair and fingernail appearance. In relation to both of these components, what happens to your body when you quit smoking can be pleasing. Fingernails may regain a healthy color and clarity, losing possible yellowish overtones reported in many smokers’ nails. Hair also becomes slightly thicker and shinier.
But probably the most impressive condition in what happens to your body when you quit smoking is that you start to regain years once lost to the harmful physical effects of cigarettes. Your odds of contracting many forms of cancers associated with smoking also go way down, in many cases. Lastly, given the monetary cost of the habit, you will suddenly find yourself with a sometimes-significant increase in extra funds, when spread out over a year’s worth of buying cigarettes. Given all this, why wouldn’t somebody want to quit as soon as possible?
Read the Smoke Deter Review here.
Talk soon,
Wayne J
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