By Samantha Burns, a Boston area mental health counselor who promotes healthy life choices.
It’s never easy to kick a bad habit, whether you’re a a teen or a grown up. Smoking is especially difficult to snuff out, complicated by cravings and withdrawal symptoms. Not to mention that the teen brain is in a super sensitive phase of neurochemcial changes and cognitive growth. But a new study published in the Pediatrics journal shows that exercise can help hard-core teen smokers, especially teen boys, quit the habit.
The study looked at teen smokers ages 14-19. Researchers found that teen boys in particular who participated in a stop-smoking program, combined with exercise, were much more likely to quit cigarettes than those who only received traditional anti-smoking advice. This means they were able to kick two bad habits, smoking and lack of exercise, which are often related – after all, it’s hard to jog with a cigarette in your hand, right?
Exercise didn’t have the same effect on female smokers, though, and the researchers didn’t exactly know why. Maybe boys are typically more confident and enthusiastic about being physically active. Maybe similar results would be found for female students if the study was conducted over a longer period of time, which would give the females more time to adjust to the exercise schedule and feel confident in their ability to work out? One thing is for sure: no matter what you gender is, exercise can help with the stress, weight gain and other factors that often complicate ending a heavy smoking addiction.
Past studies have found that it’s more difficult to quit in adulthood if smokers start at an early age. In fact, about 80 percent of adult smokers started before age 18. Because it only gets harder to quit with each day you smoke, why not make today be your last?
Last reviewed Nov 10, 2014.
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