The benefits of quitting smoking are enormous, but they’re not always immediate or easy to grasp. Welltory will help you spot these benefits clearly, providing the positive reinforcement you need to follow through on quitting. These are our top tips:
1 Get feedback from your body
Take measurement with Welltory to see how your body and nervous system respond when you quit smoking. Typically, our users see their stress levels fall and energy levels rise within just a couple of days of smoking their last cigarette. Keeping track of how much better your body actually feels without cigarettes will keep your motivation high and may help you cope with cravings.
If you do end up smoking, you can also take a measurement to see how your body responds — seeing just how much a cigarette increases your stress levels may help you get back on track and stick to your resolution to quit.
2 See the impact of quitting on your sleep, workouts — just about anything you can track
Sync your fitness tracker or other apps and gadgets you use with Welltory, and we’ll visualize your data on charts so you can track trends and changes, as well as correlations between different data flows.
For example, if you sync your sleep data from Sleep Cycle, Apple Watch, or Garmin, you can watch how quitting smoking impacts your sleep duration and number of wake-ups throughout the night. You may have heard that quitting smoking improves sleep quality, but seeing proof on your own data is a lot more motivating.
Same goes for workouts — you might spot positive changes in your maximum workout heart rate, intensity, and even duration.
Head to My Data to check out the full list of data sources you can sync with the app — there are over 120 of them.
It’s easier for our brains to take action or to avoid giving into a bad habit when we can see how it affects us and Welltory helps you track your cravings, triggers, as well as your progress in several ways.
Since positive feedback is crucial to habit formation, the more you can quantify the positive changes of quitting smoking, the more motivated you will be to stay the course. Alternatively, in preparation to quit, you can actually measure what cigarette smoking does to your sleep, stress levels, and heart rate variability.
Welltory works with your tracker and apps like Apple Health, Google Fit, and Samsung Health, to gather data from more than 120 sources that will show you how smoking affects your mind and body. One of them, a free web-based service called IFTTT (if this then that) lets your apps and gadgets talk to each other via simple command chains called applets. When you use IFTTT you can plug in any two behaviors and see their correlation. If you’re still smoking, you can see what triggers make you blow through a pack in one go so you can make a plan for how to handle these situations in the future. Once you quit you can use IFTTT to see how certain behaviors impact your cravings, so you’re better equipped to make decisions that will make the process easier. Maybe you’ll find that taking a dance break keeps the cravings at bay, or that staying late at the office every day makes you want to light up.
Welltory’s Experiments feature lets you see how certain activities affect your stress, energy, and focus levels. Take heart rate variability measurements before you smoke and then again after to see how that cigarette affected you body. If you’ve already quit, you can take measurements before and after taking a walk, or a meditation and see how they’ve impacted your stress levels.
The good news is that your body begins recovering exceptionally quickly, starting with a drop in heart rate just 20 minutes after you put out your last cigarette. Within 24 hours your risk of having a heart attack starts going down, and in three days your body will be nicotine-free.