Quitting smoking has numerous benefits for your health, and your body begins to heal almost instantly. Heres what you can expect to happen when you quit smoking:
- Within 20 minutes: Your heart rate and blood pressure drop.
- Within 2 days: Your senses of taste and smell get sharper as your nerve endings start to heal.
- Within 2 weeks to 3 months: Your circulation improves and your lung function increases.
- Within 1 to 9 months: You can take deeper, clearer breaths, and you cough in a helpful way that actually clears things out.
- Within 1 year: Your risk of heart disease, stroke, and cancer decreases.
- Within 5 to 15 years: Your risk of cancers of the mouth, throat, voice box, lung, bladder, esophagus, and kidney decreases, and your risk of death from lung cancer will have halved compared with a smokers.
- After 15 years: Your risk of coronary heart disease is close to that of a non-smoker.
Withdrawal symptoms can be challenging, but they are signs that your body is recovering from the damage smoking has caused. Symptoms can include restlessness, trouble concentrating or sleeping, irritability, anger, anxiety, depressed mood, and an increase in appetite and weight gain. However, these symptoms will pass as your body gets used to not smoking, and there are ways to manage them, such as relaxation, deep breathing, and healthy snacking. Its important to remember that almost everyone who smokes regularly has cravings or urges to smoke when they quit, but these will also fade over time as long as you stay smoke-free.
