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Stopping smoking boosts mental wellbeing too
09/03/21 .
Blog
Usual old hat for National No Smoking Day? Well, actually, no.
You may think you’ve heard everything about the damage smoking does to you. Every organ in the body harmed. Well, new research suggests it’s also bad for our mental health.
Smokers often claim smoking helps with stress. It does. But only because we’re feeding our addiction. You feel anxious and need a nicotine hit. You get the hit. You feel better. Yes, so on the face of it, smoking helps. But what about if you didn’t need the hit in the first place?
Freedom from stress
If you quit, you may feel some stress when the nicotine first leaves your system. And, true, it takes maybe four weeks. But any irritability or restlessness will give way to a far less-stressed feeling. You now no longer need that nicotine top-up. Freedom. And if you don’t believe me, there’s new research
Research from 2014 showed that stopping smoking reduced depression and anxiety when compared to continuing to smoke. An updated analysis is out now. In summary, the new findings from over 160,000 people show that quitting:
- Reduces depression
- Reduces anxiety
- Improves mood
- Improves quality of life
And another thing: we often worry that we’ll lose our ‘smoking mates’ if we stop. The research found no evidence of this. Fact is: they all want to stop too.
Improved mental health. It’s another good reason to quit.
- All our Smoking FAQs
- Men's Health Week 2021: men, mental health and Covid-19
#TodayIsTheDay #NoSmokingDay #QuitforCovid
Jim Pollard,
Editor (gave up smoking on third attempt!)
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The Men’s Health Forum need your support It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking. In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to. It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for. We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing. Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.
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