Smoking and Your Circulation
So, once again you’re standing outside a friend’s home, or a few yards from the entrance to a restaurant or bar because you need to get your nicotine fix. Now, if the weather is fine and comfortable you might not notice that smoking has impacted your circulatory system, but if you are somewhere where the weather is cold or even freezing you might realize that you cannot seem to get warm. You’ll notice this particularly in your extremities, like your fingers, toes and face.
It is not the cold weather alone that is making you feel so miserable, it is the damage to your circulatory system that your nasty little habit has caused. Smoking does a whole bunch of bad things inside of the body, and though most people point out the horrific accumulation of tar and toxins in the lungs, it is actually the circulatory system that takes the worst hit.
Let’s look at what happens when you take a drag on a cigarette – the first thing the nicotine in the smoke will do is head to the brain via the lungs and the blood stream. (The average cigarette requires from ten to twenty drags to complete, so this example must also be multiplied by ten for the best illustration.) Once the drug hits the brain it activates the natural “fight or flight” system which releases all kinds of things into the blood stream. Generally, stored fats are included in the mix, and these are actually intended to provide energy to combat our enemy or run away quickly. Since we are neither fleeing nor fighting, that fat remains in the blood stream where it begins to stick to blood vessel walls throughout the body.
Now, it is necessary to understand that nicotine and smoking also damage the cells that line these vessels, and instead of allowing them to remain slick and healthy, they get sticky and weak. What happens is a buildup of plaque-like residue that continually thins the inner channel of the vessel and constantly reduces blood flow.
This means that as smoking increases blood pressure, almost all of the body’s blood vessels are getting thinner and weaker and ever-more clogged up. This is seen in the number of smokers who suffer strokes, early aging, hear attacks, organ failure, disease and so much more.
So, while you stand there freezing and inhaling all of that cigarette smoke it is important to understand that you are tricking your body into harming itself in more ways than you could know, and that is the reason that you can’t feel your toes and why you also struggle to pull in a deep breath as you climb the stairs to head indoors.
