5 Good Reasons To Stop Smoking In The New Year
Our Streatham dental team discuss the damage that cigarettes can do to your health.
2020 is now here and many of us will already have forgotten about Christmas. With work and daily life back into a routine, some of us may also have already fallen back into habits that we pledged to break as New Year’s resolutions. Amongst these will be people who have started smoking again just a few days after determining to stop.
There is a good reason for this. Nicotine is a highly addictive substance and this can make smoking a very difficult habit to break. Indeed, those who attempt to do so are very likely to experience a number of withdrawal symptoms. It is no surprise then, that so many people fail to quit this habit, but, as dental health professionals, we know that there are a number of good reasons why it is worth battling through the withdrawals and eventually becoming a non smoker.
Below, the Confidental Clinic team look at some of the main benefits in kicking this harmful habit.
Finances
With cigarettes now costing over £10 for a packet of twenty, even at this relatively conservative estimate, if you smoked 20 a day for a year, you would have spent £3650 during the year. We all have different tastes but we are sure that everyone can think of something they could spend that sort of money on. For example, a quick look at our dental prices page shows that you could have your teeth whitened and straightened and much more with the money saved by giving up smoking.
Personal hygiene improvement
We probably didn’t notice it as much when a lot more people smoked, but with smokers now being in the minority, it can be very noticeable when you stand near a smoker or sometimes even not that near. The smell of stale cigarette smoke that hangs around on clothing can be very powerful and definitely not very pleasant. Smokers often have bad breath too, both from the smoke and from oral health issues which we will come to shortly.
Stained teeth
Christmas is now just a week away, followed by a short break until the New Year celebrations begin. Despite our focus being on these events, is never too early to start to plan for the new year. This applies as much to your dental care as it does to any New Year resolutions that you might make.
During 2019, our team have posted many blogs, focussing on different aspects of your oral health, from basic family dental tips to in depth analysis of treatments such as dental implant placement. We write these blogs so that patients of the Confidental Clinic can be better armed with information about oral care and seek ways to improve their own.
Anybody who uses the internet or takes a daily paper will have, at some time, seen a story about someone whose cosmetic treatment has resulted in an exaggerated, and often unnatural looking result.
If you are a regular watcher of TV, you can’t help but have noticed the number of younger people who have really white teeth.
When the electric toothbrush first came out, they were seen by some as a passing gimmick, and a rather ‘space age’ looking one at that. They are now more widely accepted though and this type of toothbrush is now widely used, although manual toothbrushes have by no means disappeared altogether.
For most of us, cleaning our teeth is a habit ingrained from when we were young. Most of us will have heard the cry to ‘brush your teeth before you get into bed’ and most of us will continue to do this both morning and night for the rest of our lives.
