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Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Your Dai­ly Health

Quitting smoking linked to improved mood

by

20140313

Smok­ers who kick the habit ap­pear to ben­e­fit from an im­proved mood, ac­cord­ing to a new re­view of past stud­ies. On av­er­age, quit­ting smok­ing was as­so­ci­at­ed with im­prove­ments in men­tal health sim­i­lar to tak­ing an an­ti­de­pres­sant drug, a team of UK re­searchers found.

"The main mes­sage is that when peo­ple stop smok­ing, they feel bet­ter than they did when they were smok­ing," Dr Paul Ave­yard, one of the re­view's au­thors, told Reuters Health. "Peo­ple who quit smok­ing may feel grumpy, ir­ri­ta­ble and bad–those feel­ings are sim­i­lar to feel­ings of stress and peo­ple con­flate the two," Ave­yard, from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ox­ford, said. "For clin­i­cians like my­self, when we see peo­ple who smoke who al­so have men­tal health dif­fi­cul­ties, there's of­ten a feel­ing that we are de­priv­ing them of a way to deal with the stress," he said. "But in fact we are help­ing these peo­ple to get bet­ter."

With that in mind, "the claim of this pa­per that quit­ting is as good as drugs needs more re­search," Dr Prab­hat Jha, of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to Cen­tre for Glob­al Health Re­search in Cana­da, wrote in an e-mail to Reuters Health. Jha was not part of the new analy­sis.

For their re­view, the re­searchers ex­am­ined da­ta from 26 stud­ies of smok­ing ces­sa­tion. Some stud­ies in­clud­ed smok­ers in the gen­er­al pub­lic and oth­ers fo­cused on peo­ple in psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tals. Par­tic­i­pants smoked an av­er­age of 20 cig­a­rettes per day ini­tial­ly.

All of the stud­ies as­sessed par­tic­i­pants' men­tal health be­fore quit­ting smok­ing and about six months lat­er, on av­er­age. Com­pared to peo­ple who con­tin­ued to smoke, the stud­ies showed drops in anx­i­ety, de­pres­sion and stress and im­prove­ments in psy­cho­log­i­cal qual­i­ty of life among quit­ters. Oth­er ex­pla­na­tions re­lat­ed to mood im­prove­ments among quit­ters need to be con­sid­ered, the re­searchers write in the British med­ical jour­nal BMJ. For ex­am­ple, it's pos­si­ble that life events im­proved peo­ple's mood, lead­ing them to quit smok­ing.

Still, there is "an en­trenched be­lief in our cul­ture that smok­ing 'calms the nerves' and can help al­le­vi­ate stress­ful sit­u­a­tions," psy­chi­a­try re­searcher Ben­jamin Le Cook of the Cam­bridge Health Al­liance in Somerville, Mass­a­chu­setts told Reuters Health in an e-mail. He said this mes­sage has met lit­tle re­sis­tance from pub­lic health, men­tal health and med­ical com­mu­ni­ties so far. The cur­rent re­view serves as a re­minder that to­bac­co with­draw­al symp­toms like anx­i­ety can eas­i­ly be con­fused with men­tal health prob­lems, said Bri­an Hits­man of the North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty Fein­berg School of Med­i­cine in Chica­go. Both he and Le Cook were not in­volved in the re­view.

"It's pos­si­ble that the emo­tion­al with­draw­al symp­toms are in­ter­pret­ed as an acute wors­en­ing of psy­chi­atric symp­toms," Hits­man wrote in an email to Reuters Health.

Ave­yard and his col­leagues con­clude that peo­ple who smoke "can be re­as­sured" that quit­ting is tied to im­proved men­tal health. "It's get­ting hard­er and hard­er to find any re­al ben­e­fits of smok­ing," Jha said. (Reuters Health)


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