Giving up smoking brings many benefits – physical, social, financial and emotional. Improvements start within hours of quitting.

Immediate benefits

You will:

• have more money to spend each week
• have no more bad breath, or nicotine-stained fingers and teeth
• breathe easier and feel healthier
• feel and smell fresher.

Long-term benefits

You will:

• lose your smoker's cough
• have fewer colds and other infections
• reduce your likelihood of heart disease, lung and throat cancer
• have no more hassles from non-smokers about passive smoking.

Physical changes

Within 6 hours, your heartbeat will slow down and blood pressure will drop slightly. It may take 3-30 days for your blood pressure to return to normal.

Within 24 hours, carbon monoxide is excreted from your body. Your lung efficiency will improve and you will be less short of breath when you exert yourself. Your staying power will improve.

Within a couple of days, there will be no more nicotine in your blood stream. You will start to feel and smell fresher. Your taste buds will come alive and your sense of smell will return. You may also experience euphoria after achieving something you may have thought impossible.

Within days, accumulated phlegm loosens in your lungs and you may cough it up over the next few weeks. Cilia, the body's natural cleaning structures, begin to recover. It may be up to three months before cilia can efficiently sweep your lung passages clean.

Within three weeks, your lungs are working better. Exercising is easier.

Within two months, blood flow to your limbs will improve giving you more energy.

After three months, your lungs' cleaning mechanism will be working normally. In men, sperm will become more normal.

Gradually, blood components and cells lining your lungs return to normal. This may take a long time.

After 12 months, the risk of sudden death from heart attack is almost half that of continuing smokers.

Within five years, the risk of sudden death from heart attack is almost identical to that of non-smokers.

This information was first published in You and Your Heart - an education booklet for patients, families and friends. © 2006 Northern Sydney Central Coast Area Health Service