There’s no shortage of reasons to quit smoking. It’s better for your physical health, it’s better for the health of the people who live in your house, it will probably save you money; not just from cigarettes but also air freshener. If you’re a smoker, by now you know that the world wants you to kick your habit.

Perhaps in the past we haven’t pushed enough how smoking is bad for our mental health, instead we’ve focused on printing ugly pictures of teeth and lungs on cigarette packets. Yet mental health is probably one the biggest and underestimated hurdles when trying to stop smoking, because I’m not oblivious to the fact that it is indeed hard to refrain from an addictive substance.

From my own personal observations of friends and family, everybody finds it hard to quit smoking because they think it offers some psychological benefit, helping to regulate their feelings and calm them. This is the viewpoint of someone totally unaware of the mechanisms of addictive substances.

Although smokers think that they are smoking to rid of feelings of irritability and anxiety that they’re experiencing as part of everyday life, it’s more probable that they’re actually  ridding of these nicotine dependent symptoms that have developed since their last cigarette. Thus when these feelings disappear after a cigarette, it leads a smoker to think that cigarettes have positive psychological effects. In reality it’s the short withdrawal from nicotine that created these feelings, thus ridding of them when having another cigarette. This is a vicious cycle of negative mental health resulting from addiction, which is only seemingly cured by continued exposure.

Therefore what seemed a good method of regulating mental health is actually creating poor mental health, and it’s already known that smoking is in fact associated with bad mental health. Yet a new review of research reiterates that smoking cessation significantly reduces stress, anxiety, and depression. It also improves positive mood and quality of life, whether or not you had a mental health condition in the first place. This in contrast is a positive circle, where initially quitting smoking improves mental health, and improved mental health makes you more likely to abstain long term.

Of course, quitting smoking is easier said than done, but all it takes is a few weeks to change your brain functioning and rid of those withdrawal symptoms. This means that the first few weeks of quitting smoking are your most important, and perhaps during this time we should learn to distinguish between what is an emotion resulting from daily life, and what is an emotion resulting from nicotine withdrawal.

Faye Prior (Researcher)

Source

Taylor, G., McNeill, A., Girling, A., Farley, M., Lindson-Hawley, N. et al. (2014). Change in mental health after smoking cessation: systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ, 348, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g1151

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