You hear it all over the place. “You should quit smoking.” “If you quit smoking now, you will drastically increase your lifespan.” Yaddah Yaddah…rapateta….it gets to be repetitive, right? Well, as incessant as this droning may be, all the statistics point to the fact that quitting smoking will, in fact, drastically improve your health, even within a matter of minutes. This is because smoking affects so many different parts of the body in deadly ways; removing this constant poison from your system allows your body to recover from it and get back to where it wants to be.
Some quick facts about quitting smoking:
• Within 20 minutes quitting smoking your blood pressure returns to normal (it is elevated while you smoke). This will also resume proper blood flow to your extremities, which may have felt colder because of the nicotine.
• Within 8 hours of quitting smoking your body will have reduced the nicotine to more than 93% of its peak level, which means it is almost completely out of your system. (By the way, nicotine is a poison in the same way that alcohol is a poison. It can kill in high doses)
• Within 12 hours of quitting smoking, your body will normalize the blood-oxygen ration which results in the reduction of deadly carbon monoxide levels to within a reasonable amount
• Within 24 hours of quitting smoking, there is a chemical shift in your brain that causes anxiety. While this isn’t a “benefit” per se, it is a sign that the toxins are leaving your system. Drink more water and do something entertaining or try to get some rest because…
• Within 48 hours of quitting smoking the body has begun repairs of all the nerve damage that was done by the toxins found in cigarette smoke and nicotine. When people report the return of their taste and smell senses, this is the reason. Typically, any anger or frustration you may have felt the day before begins to dissipate by the end of the second day.
• Within 72 hours of quitting smoking your body will be free of nicotine with only about 10% of nicotine metabolites still being processed. Any physiological chemical withdrawal symptoms should be gone and inflammation in the bronchial tubes will have been repaired so you can actually breathe better.
