Top 5 Reasons to Quit Smoking (Lung Doctor Explains) | Benefits of Quitting Smoking
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Published 2020-09-28
The BIGGEST reason to quit smoking is the most obvious one - smoking is extremely bad for your health. Tobacco smoke contains over 7000 chemicals, including toxic hundreds, and about 70 that can cause cancer, meaning they are carcinogenic.
⏩ Timestamps
00:00 - Start
00:11 - Why Smoking is Bad for your Health
06:32 - Smoking Affects the way you look & the way you smell
06:47 - Smoking Affects the Health of others
08:35 - Smoking Costs a lot of Money
09:01 - Benefits of Quitting Smoking
10:04 - What Happens to your body when you quit Smoking
10:27 - Why is it so hard to quit smoking cigarettes
14:00 - Quitting Smoking with vaping is helpful?
3 hazardous chemicals; that is tar, nicotine, & carbon monoxide. Tar is a substance that becomes sticky in the lungs & tar itself is actually made up of many chemicals known to be carcinogens. Carbon monoxide is a colorless & odorless gas that binds to the hemoglobin in your blood & therefore allows less oxygen to bind to the hemoglobin in your blood & ultimately results in less oxygen being delivered to the tissues in your body.
Finally, nicotine is an addictive chemical that gets into the bloodstream and travels to all body parts, including the brain. For example, when someone smokes cigarettes, the nicotine they inhale gets absorbed by the blood in the capillaries in the lungs. It then gets delivered to different parts of the body when the heart pumps it into the arteries.
But what about if someone is not smoking and instead you will say they are chewing tobacco or snuffing? Well, that nicotine gets absorbed mainly through the mouth's mucous membranes and ultimately still makes its way to the brain, but this is a slower process. Still, because it is constantly being absorbed, it has a steady-state in the bloodstream and has a steady effect on the brain. So, it is a more consistent effect of nicotine on the brain. Either way, whenever nicotine is in your bloodstream and ultimately makes its way to the brain, it activates receptors in the brain’s reward and motivation center.
This nicotine gives pleasurable feelings, but the brain needs more and more nicotine to get more and more of those pleasurable feelings over time. When the body eventually breaks down the nicotine in your system, you have less nicotine in the body. When that nicotine goes away, the withdrawal symptoms develop when the cravings develop. So, the withdrawal symptoms include difficulty concentrating, nervousness, anxiety, and irritability which can cause sleep problems and cause headaches, dizziness, and increased appetite.
Of course, this only makes people want to smoke to get that nicotine in their bodies. Nicotine comes in different forms, but ultimately, all nicotine forms are not good for your health. When it comes to smoking, whether from cigarettes, water pipes, or cigars - tobacco puts you at higher risk for all sorts of diseases. Inhalation of tobacco smoke entails inhaling toxic gases and particles of tar and eventually damages the lungs.
Not only can it cause damage to the lungs so that people develop inflammation of the airways - meaning bronchitis, but they can also develop different forms of pneumonia, in addition to COPD and emphysema. It can also contribute to other types of lung disease, something we call interstitial lung disease.
It includes things like pulmonary fibrosis, where you have scarring of the lungs. It can cause noninfectious types of pneumonia, such as acute eosinophilic pneumonia, in addition to desquamative interstitial lung disease and RB-ILD. Smokers are more likely to get respiratory viruses like cold, flu, and COVID 19.
Smoking also dramatically raises the risk of having coronary artery disease, including raising the risk of having a heart attack but also raises the risk of disease affecting blood vessels in other parts of the body, such as blood vessels in the brain, and that is why it raises the risk of stroke, also raises the risk of peripheral artery disease where you have constriction of the arteries in the legs making it painful to walk.
It is interesting to note that women are more likely to develop lung cancer than men regarding smoking and cancer. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in women; it claims more women’s lives than breast cancer, cervical cancer, uterine cancer, and ovarian cancer combined. Also, women who smoke have a harder time getting pregnant compared to women who don’t smoke. Women who smoke during pregnancy are more likely to have an underweight baby, defined as less than 5-1/2 pounds. Low-birth-weight babies are much more likely to die during the first month of life than normal-weight babies.
Doctor Mike Hansen, MD
Internal Medicine | Pulmonary Disease | Critical Care Medicine
Website: doctormikehansen.com/
Doctor Hansen's Courses: doctormikehansen.com/courses/
#quitsmoking
All Comments (21)
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TODAY is my 10 year anniversary of quitting smoking!!
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I quit today.. each like gives me a day more for my struggle in being nicotine free 🙏🙏
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I quit smoking years ago. My best advice to quit is to always carry a bottle of water. If you want a cigarette, drink some water till the craving goes away. I promise this works!!! Smoking is not worth it, your life is!!
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My prayer for all smokers ..'May God bless and give you strong self discipline to overcome your addiction' .. AMEN!! YOU CAN DO IT!!
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I was a smoker for 30 years. I had a massive heart attack with 100% block to my left descending valve and survived the Widowmaker. I stopped smoking. I then had a Domino effect for the good. I lost a hundred pounds I don't stink and I don't miss out on events because I am off smoking. If I can do it you can do. Give yourself the gift of life.
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I quit smoking almost 2 years ago after 36 years of 1 pack a day. When I smoked, nothing in this video would've moved me to quit smoking. You got to be living under a rock to not know smoking is bad for you, but deciding to quit is 100% a personal decision and all the scary stats are meaningless when one's addicted. And each time California raised the taxes on cigarettes and made them more expensive, I just got used to paying more. I started smoking when cigs were $1/pack and quit when they were almost $10/pack. What got me to quit smoking was turning 50 and thinking I didn't want to pull around an oxygen tank at 60. Or I didn't want to turn 60 and develop a debilitating disease that was completely preventable. I smoked my last cigarette on the night of March 31, 2019, slapped on a Nicoderm CQ patch, and have never looked back. After some time passes you completely stop thinking of cigarettes and it's one of the best feelings to have! Also since I quit, every month I put the money I would've spent smoking that month into a savings account for splurge spending. Best of luck to those who choose to quit... you can do it!
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I quit 5 months ago after 22 years of smoking cigarettes. One of the hardest things I ever did. I have less anxiety. Funny how the thing I thought was relieving my stress was causing stress.
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I smoked from the age of 17 to 27. This spring will be 10 years since quitting. I quit cold turkey.
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My dad had lung cancer and copd and he has passed. My mom had lung cancer and has end stage copd. I have tried to quit so many times over the past 5 years. It has been constant with me, but i just had an extremely emotional heart to heart with my mom and told her that i just smoked my last cigarette and that this is not only a gift to myself but it is a gift to hear as i want her to see that i have conquered this habit while she is still here with me on earth. This is it. Please say a prayer for me. This is the one gift that i need to give to my mom so that she can have peace while she is still with me and not have the constant worry that i am going to end up just as she is.
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After 23yrs I quit smoking!! 3 weeks and I don't have any cravings or desire to pick up again. Thank you Lord!!!
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22 years heavy smoker, quit for 35 days today. very difficult. i think the key is to 'get prepared for boredom'. the first few days i felt absolute boredom, nothing to do, what to do now? , something is terribly missing, always want a cigarette, dont want to get up, and life is very meaningless. to be ready to live in this boredom was my biggest helper i believe. it is a war and the weapon that is fighting you and attacking you every day is 'boredom'. you need to be prepared for it, and you wont be able to destroy it, just be ready to face it every day and do not say i give up. it will keep coming every minute probably. no problem, just stand your ground.
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I quit 3 years ago this week I'm like whooo hooo!!!!! (I forgot about it until I got a reminder on Facebook), also 13 years clean and sober if I were only sane LOL!!!!!
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If you can push past day 4, you're on a good trajectory I found. After 6 weeks you generally don't think about it anymore. I got lucky I guess, my internist/respiratory specialist checked my lungs with spirometry and high res CT and found that my lungs are looking good - "I see no evidence of a pack a day, 30-year smoker here". I guess 7 years of abstinence pays off even if I really don't feel all that different for quitting (it's nice not being a pariah in public or smelling of smoke all the time, however). How did I quit? I tried with all the patches and pills and failed. The best method I found was "cold turkey" and a strong resolve to get past the first week no matter what. Chantix made me ill and dropped my blood pressure alarmingly 30 minutes after the dose. Welbutrin gave me hives. A strong will to quit was the best for me and the cheapest. You need a strong will anyway regardless of what method you go with, to be fair.
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I just quit smoking 48 hours ago. Thanks for this video - it is motivating me so that I will not relapse.
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Covid lockdown made me quit smoking about 6 months ago. Hope to stick with this change.
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My best friend died of a heart attack, he was a heavy smoker...lived by himself..was found dead in his apartment by a family member....had been dead for 3 days...this is why you should quit if you smoke! Life is beautiful..live life ... don't help kill it!
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I’m 2 months into quitting - watching this for motivation... the clips of people smoking isn’t helping 😂😂😂 good info though
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I have big mad anxiety and trouble sleeping so I thought I should come here and see what i've gained so far and try to feel good about myself, kinda worked, I ve quit for around a week, good luck to you guys
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Smoker for 29 years. Never tried to quit until now. It’s my second attempt and I am on day 15.
