mike evans smoking images

Two questions:

Have you made your New Year Resolutions?

Do you smoke?

If you answered YES to both questions, you have found a great goal. Here is some information that will help you.

Smokers say that smoking sooths them, relaxes them, reduces stress, helps them focus, opens their mind. All this is true, but only for the wrong reasons. Let me explain.

One of cigarret’s ingredientes is nicotine. Nicotine is highly adictive. Nicotine is absorved by the lungs into the bloodstream, and reaches the brain only in a few seconds causing a temporary high, a sense of pleasure. With time, this sense of pleasure becomes the norm, and now the moments that you are not smoking cause a temporary down, a sense of sadness and stress. So, the next cigarret relieves you from your stress, not from your daily strees, but from the stress caused by not smoking. When you started, smoking cuased happiness, now smoking is the new norm and not smoking causes sadness and stress.

The relaxation and mental clarity come not only from the nicotine, but also from oxigenation. When you inhale, you not only inhale tobacco, but also inhale air and oxigen, which makes you feel good and alert. You could have most of the effect you get from smoking by breathing deeply and filling your body with oxigen. The sense of happiness that nicotine causes in the brain is very similar to the one caused by hormones that are naturally produce by your body, specially when you excercise, and you could get the same results just by walking 30 minutes each day. Yoga is a good excercise that focuses on breathing, and can produce better results than smoking.

Another ingredient of tobacco is tar. Tar, among other things, cuases cancer and respiratory problems, which in turn makes excercising difficult. I think that the possibility of getting cancer and respiratory problems is itself a cuase of stress, the same stress that you are trying to get rid of by smoking.

So, if you smoke, all these things may be a good reason to make quiting your goal for 2013.

You don’t smoke? How about making helping a loved one quit? Even if they don’t ask for your help, even if they don’t want your help, even if they temporarily hate you for helping them live a better life.

I found this video from Dr. Mike Evans (click here to watch it), this time talking about the effects of smoking and the mechanics of quiting. His videos are very educative and interesting (if you want to see the one I posted about excercising click here). I hope you enjoy it.