The Harmful Effects Of Smoking

Many people around the world smoke. They buy packs of cigarettes, go home and smoke them and they give very little thought to the harmful effects smoking has on many different aspects of a person’s life.

So why do people smoke in the first place? Because it feels good. When someone smokes, their nervous system and brain activities undergo an extended period of heightened stimulation from the drugs in it. A person’s heart rate and blood pressure quickly increases. Blood flow to the body’s end points (hands, feet etc.) is reduced, which can cause numbness in those extremities. Another thing that smoking effects is a person’s senses: their olfactory, taste and hunger senses are weakened. Some people even experience dizziness.

And then of course you get to the serious smoking effects: the many ways smoking can physically harm your body. First, smoking has an effect on the lungs. It damages them, causing them to develop scar tissue, blacken or lost function. It can even cause cancer to grow in the lungs as well. But there are many areas in the body that a smoking effect can appear: the throat (throat cancer), heart, eyes, reproductive system (sex organs, urinary tract, and male sperm production), bones and joints, and even the digestive system all suffer effects from smoking, even if that period is only five years or less.

And not all smoking effects are physical. Another smoking effect that nobody ever thinks about is what the smoke actually makes you smell like. Everyone, especially non-smokers, can smell the scent of cigarettes. They cling onto everything from clothes to hair and it’s very hard to get rid of it. In fact, even just one person smoking in a room can have a smoking effect on the entire house – even if nobody has ever smoked in a room, the smell somehow manages to permeate it. (Plus, another smoking effect nobody notices: prolonged smoking in a room leaves a yellow residue on the wall that you have to scrub to get off.

The severity of all of these things depends on a few factors that determine what effect smoking has on a person. For instance, the quantity of cigarettes smoked in a day matters greatly, as does a person’s natural level of resistance to tobacco. How old they were when they started smoking has an effect and so does the actual number of years they have spent smoking.