Here's another great reason to kick your nicotine habit: Non- and former smokers have better memory than people who puff, according to a new study in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
Researchers at Northumbria University in England sent participants—a mix of current, former, and non-smokers—on a campus tour and asked them to perform one task at 15 separate locations. (For example: Check your cell phone when you reach the library.) Those who had never smoked in their lives performed an average of 12.1 tasks correctly, and former smokers performed 11 correctly. Meanwhile, those who still lit up only averaged 8.9 tasks—or 37 percent worse than nicotine-free participants.
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While previous research shows that quitting smoking can boost your retrospective memory (the ability to learn new information and remember it later), this study examined prospective memory, which is the ability to remember to do something at a certain time in the future.
"It probably has to do with the toxic mix of up to 300 chemicals [in cigarettes] that can damage your brain," says lead author Tom Heffernan, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Northumbria, about how smoking likely interferes with memory. "For example, recent work on the toxins included in smoking is associated with degeneration of the neurons of the cortex."
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On average, the former smokers in the study had been off nicotine for 2.5 years. Since they performed 25 percent better than current smokers, does that mean your memory begins to become restored after a relatively short period of time?
"The results from our study would suggest that, but I wouldn't recommend smoking for 40 years and then thinking that things will be OK after a 2.5-year abstinence," Heffernan says. "Smoking seems to have a cumulative impact on health and cognition, so the greater number of 'pack years,' the greater the brain degeneration has been observed."
Need help quitting? Send a text. Researchers in New Zealand compared how well two groups of smokers were doing in their attempts to quit. They discovered that those who received daily text messages containing tips on beating cravings were twice as likely to kick ash as the people who went textless. When you're finally ready to stub your cigs, set a quit date and then go to backpackit.com, where you can write text messages to yourself and have them sent on preset days and times.
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Additional reporting by Lisa Jones