The first drag of a cigarette not only starts you down a road full of chronic disease risks – it can cause immediate symptoms smokers may not even realize come from indulging the vice.
Just one cigarette can instantly stuff up your sinuses and sting your stomach and drive spikes in your heart rate and blood pressure.
Even your brain gets an instant, addicting hit and goes into withdrawals in seconds.
We break down what happens to each part of your body after just one puff.
Smoking instantly starts to impair many systems in the body, changing your digestion, heart rate and even the emotional centers of the brain
1. Your first puff of smoke changes your next breath
Smoking basically simulates asthma for those that did not inherit the condition.
The primary symptoms of asthma are bronchospasms, which happen when the muscles lining the airways suddenly tighten up.
Spasms in the airway can lead to shortness of breath and fits of wheezing and gasping in both asthma-sufferers and even first-time smokers.
As smoke travels deeper into the lungs, it continues to wreak instant havoc.
A video demonstration using cotton in glass cylinder attached to a compressor to make the simulated lungs ‘inhale’ cigarettes shows how the toxic smoke collects from smoking 300 cigarettes.
A terrifying video shows how the smoke from just one cigarette starts to destroy any material it touches
But after even one cigarette, the pristine white cotton already begins to yellow at the edges. After only a few more, the whole mass of fibers is discolored.
By the time all 300 cigarettes are smoked and done, the cotton becomes a horrible rust color on the outside, and is gummed together with brown tar.
Our bodies are a bit more resilient and efficient at clearing out filth, but the cotton demonstration is not far off from what happens to the tissues in our lungs.
Mucus in the lungs works to trap anything that doesn’t belong there, including smoke and other toxins, but too much of the thick fluid can make breathing even more difficult by coating and blocking the small airways within the lungs.
Normally, tiny moving hairs inside the lungs, called cilia, clear this mucus away, but smoke paralyzes these natural filters almost instantly and for the rest of the day. It is only at night while you sleep that they begin to recover, coming back to life and collecting mucus.
By morning, the reactivated cilia have netted a hefty take of mucus, which is why heavy smokers may have a deep, wet cough in the morning as their bodies try to clear away the mucus and the toxins it has caught.
2. Smoking makes the heart work harder instantly
As soon as you take a drag, smoke starts to interfere the with the way that fat builds up and gets broken down in your body.
At the same time, your heart may start to race and have to work harder.
Bad cholesterol does more damage to the bodies of smokers, who also have lower levels of good cholesterol.
Nicotine impairs the ability of the body to break down low-density lipoproteins (LDLs) properly, so these ‘bad’ fats drift around more freely in the bloodstream where they can clump together and cause plaques to form in vessels.
These plaques form over time, congesting the flow of blood, but LDL levels begin to rise immediately when you smoke.
Simultaneously, smoking lowers levels of enzymes and proteins that make good, high-density lipoproteins (HDL) inaccessible to the body. HDL helps to clear bad cholesterol out of the system, so lower levels of it further increase the risk of harmful build-up.
Nicotine is also a stimulant, instantly increasing the heart rate of anyone that smokes, chews, or otherwise gets it in the bloodstream.
Studies have shown that smokers’ hearts have as many as three beats more per minute than non smokers’ hearts.
A heart that beats faster can also tire out more quickly over time, and is linked to a higher risk of sudden death, even in young people.
Smoking makes your stomach more acidic, leading to instant aches for some
3. Even a little nicotine instantly spurs acid and disturbs your stomach
Smoking can induce acid reflux almost instantly.
Nicotine reduces the protective coating of the stomach while increasing the amount of acid the organ produces.
The stomach needs acids to break down food into usable energy but is lined with a base coating that is more alkaline or basic which helps to neutralize the necessary acid.
Smokers’ stomachs still produce this base, but nicotine and smoke make it less basic, cutting back its neutralizing effects and leading to acid reflux.
That acid is also more likely to rise up into the esophagus because, when you smoke, the muscles that control the opening between it and the stomach do not work as well, letting the irritation travel up through the body immediately.
While your stomach is busy churning out acid, it also less able to absorb micronutrients like vitamins C and E and folic acid. Shortages of these can quickly leave you feeling weak and depressed.
A few puffs can keep your ears from clearing fluid, which can quickly cause an ear infection
4. Lighting up stuffs up your nose and builds ear pressure
Your sinuses are lined with the same kind of tiny hairs that keep your lungs clear of phlegm.
Smoking affects them in exactly the same way, too. As soon as smoke reaches your nose, the normally active hairs freeze up, allowing mucus to build in the sinuses, too, where it makes you vulnerable to infection and inflammation.
In turn, your sniffles can develop quickly into a headache and dull your sense of smell – in the short and long term.
Tobacco smoke also keeps your ears from clearing themselves naturally. As soon as this function gets depressed, fluid begins to build up in the middle ear, which can soon turn into a painful ear infection.
5. Your withdrawals start before you finish your cigarette
Many smokers claim that a cigarette break calms them down and relaxes them.
But research shows that smoking itself does exactly the opposite to the brain, very quickly.
Nicotine hits the brain very quickly, and momentarily soothes areas that control our emotions, sense of direction and abilities to plan.
But the ‘high’ only lasts a few seconds. When it is over, the brain is left in an immediate, mild form of withdrawal which comes with a feeling of anxiety.
With each additional drag and cigarette after it, the brain’s receptors for dopamine – the neurochemical that gives us a feeling of reward for doing things that are good for our survival, like eating – die off.
This means that even when we complete behaviors that should make us feel good, our brain can’t process that happy chemical and those activities feel less enjoyable.