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Stop Smoking To Reduce Stress!
 

A friend of mine always tells me that a cigarette is what he needs when he feels he is under pressure or moody! So I supposed smoking could help reduce one’s stress level. But what the British scientists discovered is quite different: chronic stress levels might just go down after a person gives up smoking!

In a study of 469 smokers who tried to quit after being hospitalized for heart disease, researchers from Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry found that those who quitted smoking for a year reported a reduction in their perceived stress levels. For heart disease patients who went back to smoking, their stress levels were essentially unchanged. This more or less supported the theory that smoking actually lead to chronic stress, at least for some people. The findings were published in June 2010 in the journal ‘Addiction’.

According to the researchers, smokers frequently feel that cigarette could help them manage stress, and some ex-smokers might even go back to smoking thinking that it will help them cope with stressful life events. But studies have shown that non-smokers tend to have lower stress levels than smokers do.

At the beginning of the study, 85 percent of the 469 smokers believed smoking helped them deal with stress to some extent and 50 percent of them claimed that smoking helped them a lot in coping with stress. A year later, 41 percent of the participants had not returned to smoking. These abstainers showed a 20 percent reduction in their reported stress levels, while those who went back to smoking showed little change in their perceived stress.

Even after taking into account of factors like patients' age and education, how heavily they had smoked before quitting, and how high their stress scores were at the start of the study, the relationship between abstinence and reduced stress level held true. Thus, the study supported the theory that dependency on cigarettes is itself a chronic source of stress.

For instance, a person who smokes 20 cigarettes a day essentially goes through 20 bouts of stress each day, as the levels of nicotine in the body decline. But when this person gives up smoking and gets over the initial period of withdrawal, he or she will have 20 fewer periods of stress each day. The findings suggested that giving up smoking might not only benefit smokers’ physical health, but also possibly their mental well being as well.

In another paper appeared in the October 1999’s issue of the ‘American Psychological Association's American Psychologist’, researchers from the University of East London reported that smoking only raises one’s stress level instead of reducing it, after reviewing studies on the smoking and stress relationship.

It seemed that regular smokers experienced periods of heightened stress between cigarettes, and smoking just briefly restores their stress levels to normal. But very soon they would need another cigarette to suppress the occurrence of abstinence symptoms. The repeated occurrence of negative moods between cigarettes tends to cause the smoker experience slightly above-average levels of daily stress. Thus, nicotine dependency seems to be a direct cause of stress.

Meanwhile, smokers might be more neurotic. As shown in a number of studies, the above-average neuroticism scores were found in adult smokers as compared with non-smokers.

There is no doubt that smoking is bad for the health. Many studies have shown that it will not only cause lung cancer and other kinds of cancers, but also contributes to many chronic diseases including atherosclerosis, hear disease, hypertension (high blood pressure), lowering of HDL or the good cholesterol, stroke, aortic aneurysm and arterial disease. That is why many countries have imposed smoking ban in public places such as bars, restaurants, and shopping complexes.

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