Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

A study by Dr Ian Lang and colleagues, reported on in Eurekalert, suggests that times of transition may be good times to make other life changes. Specifically, the study looked at smoking cessation at the time of retirement and found that significantly more people gave up smoking around the time of their retirement than either before or after.

Said Dr. Lang: “Retirement is one of the great transitions in life, which is why a greater proportion of people may find it easier to make significant changes elsewhere in their lives at this time. Retirement is a point of life at which people have a whole range of opportunities to do things they haven’t previously felt able to do. We are excited at the possibility that what we have seen with smoking may also apply to other aspects of lifestyle, like eating more healthily and doing more exercise.”

In some ways, this seems counterintuitive. Smoking and other unhealthy behaviours are often used to deal with stress. Wouldn’t a time of transition, which is normally stressful, be worse, not better, for giving up?

Apparently not. Looking at it another way, perhaps the fact that your daily habits are already being disrupted gives you the opportunity to reassess them consciously, rather than continuing them without awareness. I find myself that my good habits are often disrupted by change – travel, having relatives visit, moving house – and I have to make a conscious effort to reassert them. The same may well apply to habits that you want to get rid of.

Traditional societies are very aware of life transitions and mark them with ritual and ceremony. Our society is not completely without ceremonial transitions, though: weddings, funerals, retirement parties, 21st parties, housewarmings and graduations, for example. In fact, because our society changes rapidly and we are all going through transitions all the time – changing jobs, houses, even relationships, much more rapidly than our ancestors – we have more opportunities than ever before to make these changes to our habits. It’s keeping them that is the challenge.

photo credit: destinelee

Dr Lang also looked, in a separate study, at the relationship between smoking and psychological wellbeing. Does smoking – as some smokers contend – make you happier and better able to cope with life?

Apparently not. In the study “Was John Reid right? Smoking, class, and pleasure: A population-based cohort study in England” with his colleagues Gardener, Huppert and Meltzer, Lang found that, in fact, smoking was associated with lower levels of pleasure and poorer quality of life. Something which doesn’t make it into the abstract but is in the full text of the article is that the “results indicate lower pleasure and well-being scores for ex-smokers than never-smokers and for current smokers than ex-smokers”, suggesting (but not proving) that there may be a causal relationship between smoking and poorer quality of life. This is strengthened by the finding that quality of life seemed to decline in proportion to the lifetime quantity of cigarettes smoked (a “dose-response” relationship), but the only way to establish cause would be to conduct a long-term study during which the quality of life was measured for the same people both before and after giving up smoking.

The perception of pleasure from the cigarette is probably related to the mechanism of addiction, which involves the brain’s reward system. The brain is convinced that having a cigarette is rewarding, despite the fact that the actual act of smoking is unpleasant for many people, even long-term smokers.

This is not to say, of course, that nobody receives any pleasure from smoking. Many people do, but the study seems to show that in general, people who smoke enjoy their lives less than those who don’t, or who used to, but have stopped.

More later on life transitions and the opportunities they provide for lifestyle changes. For now, I’d suggest: if you are waiting until your life “settles down” to make a lifestyle change like quitting smoking, forget it. Even if it ever happens, a settled period in your life is probably when you’re least likely to change.

Technorati Tags: smoking, health, quit, cessation, tobacco, quitsmoking, quitting, nicotine, pleasure, lifehacks, personal change, lifestyle change

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