Everyone has probably seen the quit smoking timeline that shows how your health improves at various points after quitting smoking.  They say things like “At 24 hours after you quit, taste buds start to regrow and you cough less” or “at 1 to 3 months after quitting, you can walk easier and breathe easier during exercise,” and so on.  They go on to say that your chances of lung cancer and other diseases drops to that of a non smoker after a certain number of years, like 10 or 15 or something.

But even thought we all want the health benefits of quitting smoking to become real for us, we also need other things to help motivate us.  For example, let’s take a look at the financial timeline for quitting smoking.  If you smoke a pack a day, and you pay about 4 bucks per pack, then that is just under $1,500 saved in the first year alone!

Over ten years of having quit smoking, that equates to just under $15,000 dollars!  That is a quite a lot of money…it sure adds up, doesn’t it?

But let’s consider another factor on the quit smoking time line: hours spent actually puffing on cigarettes.  Most people do not consider this when they think about their smoking or when they think about quitting cigarettes.

Here is the mind blowing statistic: if you smoke just one pack of cigarettes per day, and you are an average smoker in terms of how fast you actually smoke an individual cigarette, then you spend just under an entire month out of every year engaged in the act of smoking.  Almost a full month.  This is just crazy.  Think of how much time you are wasting out of your life, when you could be doing other things every day and getting way more stuff done.  Instead, you have to take time out constantly in order to smoke.  Not only that, but it interrupts your work flow in some cases and costs you even more time, because you are penalized in some tasks when having to stop and then start back up again.  It is a huge inconvenience that is multiplied a thousand times over throughout your life.  Wasted time, wasted productivity, and a lower quality of life.  Less time spent doing the things that really matter, and more time spent smoking cigarettes.

So if you quit smoking, you will gain back almost an entire month out of every year in free time.  Talk about experiencing a whole new freedom….