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100 Questions & Answers About How To Quit Smoking |
People would talk about the effect of smoking on your lungs.
Do you know that there is another organ in your body that is equally vulnerable to smoking damage?
That organ is your brain. Smoking can harm your brain and reduces your cognitive abilities and memory.
Your brain
Your brain is the center for consciousness, makes thinking and feeling possible, controls the voluntary movements and regulates digestion and breathing.
And your brain also controls both the conscious thoughts as well as the unconscious body processes.
How smoking affect your brain?
Below are some effects of smoking has on your brain,
Smoking leads to brain injuries…
Brain injury happens when there is a breakdown of barrier between the brain and blood vessels.
Long term smokers develop problems with motor function, actions like walking or talking will be affected.
They will experience fidgety hands and stuttering speech after having smoked a few cigarettes in a short span of time.
Smoking blocks your carotid arteries, cutting of blood supply to your brain cells resulting in a stroke called cerebral thrombosis.
Smoking causes the thickening and clotting of your blood and also causes oxidative stress.
Stroke
Nicotine from the cigarette you smoke enters your blood and makes your blood thicker.
Prolong smoking increases plague deposits on the inside wall of your arteries causes blockage to your arteries and at the same time harden it.
Your arteries lose its elasticity as well as blockage due to excess of plague deposit, resulting in a stroke.
Your brain relies on these arteries to the supply of oxygenated blood from your heart.
Reduced IQ and concentration
When smoke, you would have realized that your capacity to work with analytical problems reduces as time goes by.
This reduction in mental capacity is attributed to the reduction of oxygen supplied to your brain and increased carbon mono-oxide in the hemoglobin.
The reduced oxygen supply to the brain also causes fatigue. You will always feel tired.
You would feel restless and tired due to contaminated and low oxygenated blood passing through the brain.
Neuroinflamation
Smoking can lead to neuroinflamation and can further lead to complications like multiple sclerosis.
Neuroinflamation is caused by the presence of a compound known as NNK which is commonly found in all tobacco products.
This NNK compound is a pro-carcinogen, it becomes carcinogenic after it goes through your body metabolic processes.
It works on provoking the WBCs to attack other healthy cells, and this can lead to significant neurological damage.
Unlike drug or alcohol dependency, NNK does not have any direct effect on the brain cells but it can lead to neuroinflamation.
To summarized
Nicotine gets into your brain after about 10-15 seconds of the smoke you inhaled and it is active for the next 20-30 minutes.
Once it gets into your brain it change and controls your brain's receptor cells.
This will affects your brain chemistry and have an impact on your mood.
You will notice specific effects such as anxiety, irritability and mood swings, noticeable in the early days when you quit smoking.
Smoking is known to block your carotid artery, restricting the supply of blood to your brain cells.
When these conditions worsen, it can lead to a stroke (cerebral thrombosis).
Do note that smokers have an increased risk of suffering from a stroke when compared to non-smokers.
Continuous smoking leads to oxidative stress, and can also cause your blood to thicken and clot.
Long-term smoking has harmful effects on your memory, problem-solving and IQ.
In fact, smoking diminishes the thinking ability of a person.
The benefits of quitting smoking are not just physical but psychological as well.
Posted by: Mo Salle
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