People who work long hours are likely to become more stressful and indulge in unhealthy behaviors such as snacking, smoking and drinking caffeine.
Lindsay Lohan holding a cigarette in a hand
Stress disrupts people’s normal habits. For example they become opt for harmful high fat and high sugar snacks in favor to healthier food choices. Also people under stress eat less than usual in their main meals including their vegetable intake but shift their preference to high fat/high sugar snacks instead. And also they smoke much more cigarettes per day than other people.
Researchers explained that cigarettes fill many roles especially for women who smoke. Women often report smoking because the think that it is helpful in reducing negative mood, even enhancing positive mood, managing the stress of daily life and also managing appetite and weight gain. Women are looking to cigarettes to help them with those different situations, and as a result, it’s often more difficult for women than for men to give up their cigarettes.The new research found the link between smoking and the higher-than-normal stress levels.
Researchers investigated 2,250 adults, which were smokers claim to experience frequent stress in their lives, compared with just 35 percent of ex-smokers and 31 percent of non-smokers. Even controlling for basic demographic characteristics such as sex, age, education, income and parental status, the researchers said that current smokers are still more likely than non-smokers and quitters to have self-reported stress.
With a survey showing a quarter of smokers worried about the decline are smoking more, and another 13 percent are preventing quitting for the same reason, experts said that the new report reflects an urgent need to expose the “legendary relaxation response” of cigarettes.
Rob Cunningham, senior policy analyst for the Canadian Cancer Society, said: “Many smokers realize smoking as a way to calm stress, when, in fact, what they’re doing is satisfying nicotine cravings and withdrawal. In many respects, smoking — or the delay in having a cigarette — is the cause of stress.”
Cunningham believes that this new research will supports the need for more educational messages about the link between stress and tobacco use. At the same time, he’s not convinced the deepening economic disorder will inevitable increase smoking in Canada, which have remained flat (roughly one in five people) since 2005. “Clearly, a decline is bad news for Canada,” added Cunningham. “But less available income may be a motivator to quit, or not start.”
Vince Harden, a smoker for nearly 40 years, is doubtful of the findings and points to the fact that tobacco rations were given to soldiers during the Second World War as an aid to relaxation. If his stress is any higher than the non-smoking population, he continued, it’s not because of cigarettes, but rather the anti-tobacco people agitating against their use.
According to the this report, about a quarter of smokers consider themselves “very happy,” compared with more than a third of quitters and nearly four in 10 non-smokers. When asked about family life, smokers were also less likely to report being “very satisfied:” about six in 10, compared with seven in 10 non-smokers and quitters.
