Day 18 after quitting smokingThe stress it was causing

By Yevhenii, who smoked for 26 years · Updated 30 Oct 2026 · 2 min read

In shortCigarettes relieve mostly the dip caused by the previous cigarette, and smokers report more stress than non-smokers across the day. After six weeks without smoking, people show less anxiety and stress. If anxiety keeps building, talk to a doctor.

What's happening in your body

Most smokers say cigarettes calm them down, and in the moment they do. What they calm is the tension of the previous hour without nicotine. Between cigarettes a dependent smoker's mood dips below where a non-smoker's sits, and each cigarette lifts it back to normal. Measured across the day, smokers report more stress than non-smokers, not less.

And when studies follow people for six weeks or more after they stop, their anxiety, depression and stress end up lower than in people who kept smoking, and their mood higher.

What to expect

A bad day at work and the thought that this is exactly what cigarettes were for. For the first weeks that thought will feel like plain common sense. It is built on real experience, because for years every cigarette did bring relief. What it relieved was mostly the dip the previous cigarette had caused, and that dip is fading now. Stress itself does not leave with the cigarettes.

Deadlines, arguments and bad news still arrive, and for a few weeks they arrive without the old ritual to meet them, which is why this stretch can feel rawer than life will feel later. If anxiety or stress keeps building instead of settling, or it has been spoiling sleep and work for weeks, talk to a doctor. Help for anxiety works, and it works without cigarettes.

Try this

When the pressure rises, walk out of the room, open SOS and take the minute of paced breathing.

What else you could do

The old routine had a useful part hidden inside it. You left the room, stood still for five minutes and breathed slowly. Keep all of that. You get the pause without the dose that made the next pause necessary. Put the stressor into one plain sentence, even just to yourself, because a named problem is smaller than a vague pressure. Move for five minutes. Talk to someone instead of chewing it over alone. And keep an eye on extra coffee, since caffeine adds to the jitters, as day four showed.

Sources. Parrott AC. Does cigarette smoking cause stress? Am Psychol, 1999. Taylor G, McNeill A, Girling A, Farley A, Lindson-Hawley N, Aveyard P. Change in mental health after smoking cessation: systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ, 2014. Taylor GM, Lindson N, Farley A, et al. Smoking cessation for improving mental health. Cochrane Database Syst Rev, 2021.