Smoking is bad, they say. It will attack your lungs, incapacitate your heart, yellow your teeth, wrinkle your skin, and empty your wallet. And once it’s gotten its fill, it will probably kill you too.
But there have to be perks to smoking too, right? Right?? Why else would almost 20% of the population continue to actively use tobacco products? We dug deep into the well on this one, but were able to come up with some “benefits” of smoking cigarettes.
Benefits of Smoking Cigarettes Uncovered
We found 3 benefits of cigarette smoking that most people don’t think of. Here they are:
1. Look Older, Distinguished
Do your youthful features hold you back in life? Do you find yourself thinking, “Man, if only I looked like I will 20 years in the future!”? Does your young, healthy appearance bring you down? If so, you’re in luck. One of the lesser known benefits of cigarettes is that you can add decades to your physical appearance in just a fraction of the time!
Smoking allows anyone the ability to fast forward through their body’s physical life. While this usually means early death and/or chronic disease, many smokers take the risk. The “aged smoker” look, as shown above, is apparently all the rage.
If you want pale, wrinkled skin and a face that says “I have been ravaged by life and time”, you’ll certainly find benefit in sucking down tobacco smoke daily. Ensure you are never mistaken for a youth again!
2. Enjoy Smoke Break Culture
As a smoker, you’ll receive unlimited participation in 7-10 minutes of organized puffing and talking with other smokers. These are most often called “smoke breaks”.
Smoking break situations can happen any time, anywhere and with anyone (well…anyone who smokes). And boy, non-smokers are really missing out on the mind-blowing scope of conversation that goes on during your typical smoke break. We broke down the data of smoke break conversations and found the following:
3. Become a Regular
There’s something about being a “regular” at a place of business that is just a little bit magical. Being on a first name basis with the waitresses at your favorite restaurant, ordering “the usual” and feeling at home in a public restaurant is a unique and fulfilling experience.
Which brings us to our third and final benefit of smoking! Smokers also get to experience the thrill of being a regular at a business, just without all that human connection BS.
Just replace Big Boy and their cheery staff with the closest liquor store to your home, and its revolving crew of surly clerks. There’s just something so…edgy, yeah we’ll call it edgy, about having “regular” status at a store that deals in human vices, about a staff that knows you by the brand you smoke rather than the person you are.
And when you drive by with your mother-in-law or new girlfriend, you can proudly say, “That’s my spot!”
Wrapping Up
Smoking tobacco cigarettes does not have any benefits beyond the short-term and the shallow. And these “benefits” are absurdly out of proportion with the risks involved and the damages caused by tobacco.
Most benefits are imagined or sensationalized by the nicotine-addicted mind, which is prone to morph perception when it comes to anything involving cigarettes.
So, for example, let’s say you haven’t smoked a cigarette in a while and are feeling a bit of brain fog. You then smoke a cigarette and feel more alert. The perceived benefit is that the cigarette made you more alert. But the truth of the matter is that you were withdrawing from nicotine and smoking the cigarette simply satisfied the withdrawal and helped clear away the fog. Not a benefit because the cigarettes caused the brain fog in the first place.
There may even be other short term benefits. Maybe you feel an initial sense of belonging with other smokers. You may find comfort in the ritual of a smoking at a certain time of day. But none of these short term rewards will ever come close to nullifying the devastating toll that tobacco smoke takes on the body.
On the other side of those few meaningless “benefits” lie extraordinarily high risks of death and suffering. It may be a death sentence in the form of an incurable lung cancer diagnosis. It may be 10 years of suffering from COPD (also incurable), a life of struggling harder to take in breath each day until finally it wins, you can’t take that next breath and you die. It could be a factor or even the main cause of a heart attack or stroke. Not to mention all of the other havoc that it wreaks on the human body. All of the minor benefits of smoking wouldn’t even tip the scale against the long-term risk and short term damage.
In all seriousness: If you are still smoking tobacco, I am telling you from the bottom of my heart that you should find a way to stop. In just 35 short years, I’ve seen so much suffering at the hands of cigarettes in my family. It’s taken a toll on me emotionally and shown me just how devastating it is to everyone involved.
I think everyone has the power to quit cold turkey, but if you can’t or don’t want to, than just switch to another way to get your nicotine. We recommend the patch or electronic cigarettes, they both deliver the same damn substance to your nicotine receptors. Just realign your perception and run away from tobacco as fast as you can.