How smoking can decline your cognitive functionalities
You must have heard it hundreds of times before, quit smoking because it’s bad for you. Smoking is one of the leading causes of death around the world. It lowers your life expectancy and makes the remaining portion of your life terrible. It is also bad for the environment and for the people who are closest to you. Second hand smoke has effects that are more severe than the smoke you inhale. Second hand smoke causes the babies of pregnant women to have weak brains, gives little children respiratory infections, and causes adults to develop psychiatric problems.
It Gets Into Your Blood
When you light a cigarette for the first time, it creates a combustion. This combustion contains carcinogens and other deadly toxins. When you inhale the smoke, you inhale the combustion with it. The toxins enter your body. Your body naturally cleanses away the toxins, but cigarettes also contain nicotine and nicotine is addictive. Your body becomes dependent on the nicotine, so you take more cigarettes. Upon repetition, the toxins that collect inside your body become too much for your body to clean. The heat, smoke, and particles also begin to wear out your lungs and airways from the inside. All the toxins reach your bloodstream and start the onset of lots of diseases in your respiratory system and circulatory system, which are both connected to your brain.
It Makes Your Brain Disintegrate
The toxins reach your cranial cavity and weaken the partition between the rest of your body and your brain. There is a boundary that keeps your brain from being disturbed by the natural functions of the rest of your body. In time, the toxins break this barrier. Foreign particles and the toxins reach your brain to infect it. The functions of your brain get disrupted by the presence of foreign chemicals. Cognitive functionalities decline due to disintegrating brain parts. Weakened cognitive skills don’t become evident in old smokers only. Younger adults also get lesser cognitive function due to smoking. Smoking 15 cigarettes per day lessen memory by 2 percent.
It Quickly Makes You Old
The bad effects of smoking get a lot worse as you get older. In fact, it speeds up your aging. It alters your DNA and makes you wrinkle faster, weakens your bones faster, and makes you develop diseases of the elderly faster. You don’t get older in appearance and feelings only, smoking also makes you older through your brain. By 50, your brain responds slower to stimuli. Cognitive flexibility gets lessened, cognitive processes become slower, and you start to get memory gaps. Your mental health gets worse, and you develop diseases like depression due to your dying brain cells. By 60, you get cerebral degenerative changes. Your brain processes information much slower. You start forgetting at an alarming rate.
How to Stop It
You can quit smoking by using the tricks that have been used by several successful quitters in the past, such as chewing gum and collecting the money that you would have spent on cigarettes. Because of the dependency on nicotine and other factors, attempting to quit smoking is extremely hard, and a lot of people fail at it. Fortunately, our time has the advantage of modern technology: we now have e-cigarettes. An e-cigarette is an electronic version of the cigarette. Instead of real tobacco that you have to light up, it contains a little mechanism and buttons that you can adjust.
More Ways to Stop It
As you begin to quit smoking, you can speed up your journey to recovery from the damages caused by smoking through healthy living. Change your diet to leafy, green vegetables. Eat whole grains like sandwiches and bread for breakfast, or eat cereal with milk to start your days well. Eat fresh fruits like strawberries, mangoes, and oranges for dessert. Eat seafood like tuna fish, because they are rich in omega-3 fatty acids and are good for your heart. Drink fruit juices instead of soft drinks. Take lots of exercise by jogging around the block whenever you can. Get enough amounts of water and enough sleep. Spend time with happy people and do activities that make you happy to stay away from depression.
Conclusion
Don’t give up just because you’ve been smoking for some time and have encountered certain diseases already. It’s never too late to quit smoking. Quitting at any time creates significant change in your health. When you quit smoking, your fast-paced trip to death automatically stops. You gracefully get older at a normal pace. You get to play with your grandchildren because you are still physically strong and mentally strong. You can spend a long time with your loved ones, feeling less pain from fewer diseases and causing everyone less trouble to leave behind a better memory once it’s truly your time to go.
