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Quitting smoking eases stress levels

Smokers often say they need a cigarette to calm their nerves, but a new study suggests that after a person kicks the habit, chronic stress levels may go down.

Quitting smoking eases stress levels

Smokers often say they need a cigarette to calm their nerves, but a new study suggests that after a person kicks the habit, chronic stress levels may go down.

Smokers often see cigarettes as a tool to manage stress, and ex-smokers sometimes return to smoking in the belief that this will help them cope with a stressful life event. Yet studies have shown that non-smokers tend to report lower stress levels than smokers do. The reason for that difference has been unclear, but it could mean that people vulnerable to stress are more likely to take up smoking and that taking away that habit could worsen their stress. On the other hand, smoking itself may generate long-term stress, even if people feel it offers them temporary relief from trying situations.

To look further into the relationship between smoking and stress levels, researchers from UK recruited 469 smokers who had been hospitalised for a heart attack or heart bypass surgery. While the patients were still in the hospital, they completed surveys on their perceived stress levels and smoking habits. All said they were motivated to quit and had agreed to take part in a clinical trial of in-hospital smoking-cessation counseling.

At the outset, most of the study participants - about 85 percent - said they believed that smoking helped them deal with stress to some extent. Half said that the habit very much helped them cope. One year later, the study participants were surveyed again, at which point 41 percent had managed to remain abstinent.

It was found that the abstainers showed a 20 percent reduction in their reported stress levels, while patients who had gone back to smoking showed little change in their perceived stress. The relationship between abstinence and reduced stress did not change when the researchers accounted for factors such as patients' age and education, how heavily they had smoked before quitting, and how high their stress scores had been at the start of the study.

The above findings support the idea that dependency on cigarettes is itself a chronic source of stress.
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