Reasons to Quit Smoking
We all know that smoking is bad for us, yet many people continue to smoke. Even though your brain knows about the reasons to quit smoking, your body is telling you to reach for another cigarette.
Smokers have become addicted to nicotine, which is a powerful brain stimulant. The brain becomes accustomed to regular doses of nicotine, and when it is deprived for any length of time, you will feel a strong craving for cigarettes.
This is especially true when you try to quit smoking. You know all the reasons to stop smoking, and you know you should not have another cigarette, but your brain does not care about the reasons to stop smoking because it wants its regular dose of nicotine.
Don't Get Discouraged
Many people have lapses when they try to quit smoking, and if this happens to you, don't get discouraged! Each time you renew your resolve to stop smoking it increases your chances that you will succeed.
It is a fact that smoking is bad for our health, but we don't often hear about the specific benefits of quitting smoking. Here are some facts from the US Surgeon General's report that may give you extra reasons to stop smoking.
The benefits of quitting smoking start almost immediately. Twenty minutes after smoking your last cigarette your blood pressure returns to normal. Just eight hours after smoking your last cigarette all of the carbon dioxide has been eliminated from your system.
Three Months Later
Three months after quitting smoking your lung capacity increases by 30%. One year after stopping the habit your chances of having a heart attack are half that of a regular smoker.
Those are all good reasons to stop smoking, but the accumulated health benefits increase the longer you refrain from smoking.
Five years after you have quit smoking your risk of stroke is the same as the non-smoking population. And 10 years after stopping your risk of lung cancer has fallen to 50% that of a regular smoker.
It doesn't matter what age you are when you quit smoking - the benefits are the same. That is perhaps one of the best reasons to quit smoking - even if you are 60 years old and have been smoking for 40 years, you will benefit almost immediately from quitting the habit.
Of course, if you are younger, there will be less accumulated damage to your body, so you are likely to regain your health sooner.
But no matter what, quitting smoking is the best decision you will ever make.
One day I will have the same risk of getting a stroke as a non smoker.
People are not sports cars. There is more to being human than just making sure the machinery is oiled and the hood polished. Smokers KNOW that smoking is bad for their physical health, which tells us that, obviously, they do not smoke for their physical health. Of course, it's they know it's bad for them. That's not why they smoke. That would be like jumping in a lake to dry off. That's why the anti-smoking message is so ineffective, because it never addresses why they smoke to begin with.
Smoking is an attempt to self-medicate for psychological trauma.... the lack of connectors in the brain usually brought about by childhood trauma (the years in which the brain is forming). Like a body buried in the surf, smoking keeps the tide from washing the sand away. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study has shown that the higher the percentage of trauma during childhood is directly proportional to the likelihood of smoking, drinking, promiscuity, and a host of other adverse habits which are manifest even 50 years later. (http://www.acestudy.org/) (http://www.cdc.gov/ace/findings.htm)
Society tramples over the psyche, feelings, emotions of their fellow human beings, treating peole as mere use-values and discarding the rest as worthless and of no consequence. It is all part of the human package. You cannot be human without emotions, without feelings. By deriding them, you're doing the complete opposite of coaxing them from their smoking.
You can tell them until you're blue in the face, “Smoking is bad... you're stupid for smoking when it is so obviously detrimental to you're health.”
Obviously, they don't smoke for their health. The anti-smoking crowd loves to make it all about themselves. Demanding that smokers strip it away from their lives, while offering them nothing to fill the hole left behind, all so that they may feel good and high-minded about themselves and somehow feel justified in their soapbox of derision. Too lazy to investigate the origins of the actual problem, they just want to bark out some psuedo-solution so they can shine on their self-made hill. What do they honestly expect the return reaction to be, but.... “Mind you're own goddamn business.” ?
They can ban it everywhere all they want, but as long as human beings are viewed as robots or cattle, there shall always be a “self-medication” in some form or another. If being human is too abstract to understand that it is more than just a physical body, then whose reasoning capacity is truly deficient?
Do you treat chicken pox the same way? "Curing" each individual blemish while ignore the illness that causes them in the first place?
Theres a difference between disciplining a child and being too drunk to get up to beat them so you reach for the nearest object to throw at them, such as the empty whiskey glass that you just gulped down or an ashtray... my brother had a pair of scissors thrown at him once.
To grow up in such an environment... to have to be constantly on guard for your safety... from the very people who are put in charge of your safety, lest you are beaten, injured, raped, assaulted. Every single day... every single night, your mind must grow and develop around it... in spite of it.
Then if you survive long enough to leave it and start a life on your own....Ahh , now, you can be normal...but what the hell is normal?? It is an alien landscape never before experienced. Not only must you learn all over again, but you must also strive against the defense mechanisms built and fine-tuned over the years in your mind which kept you alive under the constant bombardment of extreme circumstances. So now its a matter of learning and un-learning at the same time, carrying over into decades and decades of adjusting and re-adjusting.
Smoking medicates those stresses. It keeps the lack of connection at bay. It is far better to be a smoker than an axe murderer.
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