If you’re a smoker, then you’ve probably considered quitting cigarettes in order to bring health benefits. But when is the best time to commit to stop smoking? Many wait for a special occasion, for the end of a stressful time in their lives, or for a New Year’s resolution to commit to stop smoking, but the fact is, the best time is always as soon as possible, not some point in the future. If you stop smoking, you will find a constant regaining of health benefits over a period of weeks, months and years. Here are a few of the benefits that will come to you if you commit to stop smoking:

Short Term Benefits

A lot of the most noticeable benefits come in the first year after you commit to stop smoking, and some will even be noticeable after hours or days. Within the first 24 hours after you quit smoking, you’ll find that your heart rate and blood pressure, as well as carbon monoxide levels in your blood, will drop. If you have a problem with high blood pressure, it’s hard to beat an immediate benefit like that!

Over the next few months, you’ll find that a lot of damaged systems in the body will start functioning better than before. Your smell and taste will return, which makes eating more pleasurable, and your lungs will be able to work better, both for taking in air and in keeping those lungs clean of harmful materials, which in turn will mean less infections. This is because once you commit to stop smoking, tiny little hairs in your lungs called cilia, which catch dust and other foreign materials, start to work like they’re supposed to.

Long Term Benefits

The big, lifesaving benefits that come when you commit to stop smoking are not as noticeable, since they prevent major health problems, but they have been well documented. In the years after you stop smoking, you will benefit from a reduction in the risk of coronary heart disease, most dramatic after the first year and over a period of more than a decade, steadily declining. You will also have a reduced chance of suffering a stroke and of several kinds of cancer. And while being able to smell your food better is a great benefit of not smoking, reducing the chance of suffering from deadly diseases is a more poignant reason to quit. So commit to stop smoking today and enjoy both the benefits that will come to you soon and the ones that will improve your life for years to come.