Top 10

Top10 Reasons Why 2022 is The Year You Quit Smoking

10 Reasons Why 2022 is The Year You Quit Smoking

10. The environment

The ways that cigarettes harm the environment is something that is not always mentioned when discussing reasons to quit. But it should be.

The negative environmental impact that cigarettes have on the environment was recently brought to light by a damning WHO report. The report pointed to all the ways, from tobacco farming to cigarette waste to cigarette litter, that cigarettes wreak ecological havoc.

Some quick facts:

Cigarette production generated 45,000,000 tons of waste since 1995
6,000,000 tons of nicotine residue
4,000,000 tons of chemical waste
You can read the full report here. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. You need to understand the extent to which cigarettes and smoking harm the planet and people. When you do, you’ll have no trouble finding the motivation to quit.

9. No More Playing with Fire (literally)

Cigarettes burn. In fact, it is the burning of tobacco that causes the release of so many dangerous chemicals. The harm caused by combustible cigarettes is one of the reasons so many people turn to vaporizers, as the best vaporizers only heat the nicotine, thus releasing fewer harmful elements.

Cigarettes burn other things too. The fact that cigarettes are responsible for 8-10% of all home fires in the US over the last decade (that’s nearly 90,000 fires a year) is another nugget of despair gleaned from the WHO report.

So, in addition to all the other ways cigarettes can kill you, they can also set your house on fire. It is not just residential property that suffers. Wildfires are generally (well, 90% of the time) started by humans. Although cigarettes are not always the culprit, they still cause a lot of damage.

The Fort Collins wildfire that swept through parts of Colorado in 2017 was caused by a lit cigarette butt. In 1999, a single lit cigarette butt thrown from a moving truck in the south of France started the infamous Mont Blanc tunnel fire that killed 39 people.

8. Be a Quitter and Pick Up Your Litter

Quick quiz: Do you know what the most trashy object in the world is? Hint: These are not plastic bags, cups, bottle caps, or paper receipts. They are cigarette butts.

I hear you thinking (because I’m on your mind right now) “but how can cigarette butts be the most literal object in the world, when they are so small and tiny?” Well, I’m about to plug the answer into your brain as Leonardo DiCaprio did in Inception.

There are about 1.1 billion smokers in the world. These 1.1 billion smokers smoked more than 5.8 trillion (trillion with T) cigarettes in one year. Imagine if instead of cigarettes these billions of people threw away, I don’t know, banana peels or used diapers (Ewwww).

You’d notice the accumulation of used diapers and banana peels on city streets, parks, and beaches if 5.8 billion of them were thrown away each year.

And that’s the situation with cigarette butts. But, not only are there many but there are also butts:

Non-biodegradable, which means that they can take almost fifteen years to degrade.
They contain poisonous and dangerous chemicals that leach into the environment, especially into bodies of water, where they produce substances known as “leaching,” which kill half of all marine life that comes into contact with them.

7. Waste of Money

The last three points should be enough for most conscientious people to quit smoking. But now we’re getting to the reasons why smoking is bad for you and you alone. You like money, don’t you?

So why waste it on a habit that costs your heart and lungs? And also, a lot of money. You can use this handy cigarette calculator to estimate your savings if you quit smoking. Many quit smoking programs across the state offer free incentives, such as telephone counseling, free or subsidized samples of NRT medications.

But one study found that in places where cigarettes are most expensive — New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island — a lifetime of smoking can result in a bill of a million dollars or more. Even in places like the Midwest and southern states, where cigarettes are cheaper than in other states, a lifetime of smoking still costs millions of dollars.

If you live in a state that doesn’t offer free quit smoking help, you can always try quitting with an e-cigarette. Many of the long-term effects of vaping are unknown, and ideally, you should not consume any nicotine at all.

But if you want to replicate that feeling of smoking, the best vaporizers out there are not only cheaper and more cost-effective, they’re also far less dangerous than smoking cigarettes.

6. Something to be Proud Of

“Bucket list” is a term that recently entered pop culture. Wish lists are lists of all the things you want to do before you die. A smoker’s wish list could possibly have “quit smoking” as number 1 on that list.

But don’t beat yourself up if you think “quitting smoking” isn’t as laudable or amazing a goal as climbing Mount Everest or skydiving. Quitting smoking can be your Mount Everest.

Think about what you’re up against: nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on the planet. 85% of people who try to quit tobacco suddenly relapse within the first year. Stopping is no small thing.

So instead of gifting your friends with photos of Mount Everest, tell them, proudly and with your chest puffed out, “I quit smoking.” It will blow your mind, guaranteed.

5. Did We Mention the Environment?

Just as the first and second rules of Fight Club do not talk about Fight Club, it is worth mentioning, for the fourth time, the importance and breadth of the environmental impact of cigarettes. It is amazing, however, how much damage even tobacco farming causes.

Most tobacco is grown in developing countries, such as China, Brazil, and India. Tobacco, like all crops, needs land. And when there isn’t enough land, trees and other plants begin to die. The clearing of land for tobacco crops is a major cause of large-scale deforestation around the world.

Not only that, but growing tobacco also requires higher use of insecticides and pesticides than other plants, as tobacco has no natural defenses against other plants or pests. So even growing tobacco is bad for a lot of people.

4. Your Lovelife

It has almost become a stereotype: lighting up after a satisfying lovemaking session. But the reality is that cigarettes and smoking can shorten, or even nullify, your plans to lose weight.

Smoking constricts blood vessels. And constricted blood vessels are a major contributing factor to erectile dysfunction. If you’re reading this and thinking, “Thank God, I don’t have a penis,” I’m sorry: Women are just as affected by the adverse effects of smoking on libido as men.

3. Your Life

Cigarettes are totally and overwhelmingly destructive; it makes sense that stopping would significantly improve your chances of living longer. The evidence is everywhere. Your heart and lungs work less than when you smoked.

Within the first twenty minutes of not turning on, your heart rate returns to normal. The longer you don’t smoke, the more benefits you’ll get. Your breathing improves. Your senses of taste and smell are alive and vibrant again.

The long-term effects are even more favorable. Smokers who quit before age 40 can expect a 90% chance of avoiding most, if not all, smoking-related diseases.

2. Your Health

Horses are such beautiful creatures, which makes it all the more sad and tragic that we have to beat this dead horse once again. Not literally, of course. Smoking is bad for you. It says so right on the package!

Some quick numbers:

4,000 different chemicals (carbon monoxide, tar, arsenic) in tobacco smoke
250 of those chemicals are poisonous
50 of them are known carcinogens
Need we say more? Yes. The number one reason to quit smoking in 2022 is:

1. Saving Lives

This list has gone beyond the personal, in terms of good reasons to quit smoking. If all the negative effects of smoking and cigarettes on the environment, tobacco farmers, and your health that we’ve seen in this list aren’t compelling enough, you need to think of only one thing: the life it will save. that is not yours.

Smoking kills almost six million people a year. However, the most worrying figure of all is the number of people who die each year from secondhand smoke: 600,000. 600,000! And these are people who never smoked.

The cigarette companies may be responsible for your death, but who is responsible for all those people dying? People who don’t even smoke? Tobacco control campaigns often try to shame the smoker for what he does to himself. But maybe they should also focus on the people who smoke kill, by accident.