Rhiannon Ingle
It's New Year's Eve tomorrow (31 December) and I'm sure many of us are frantically drawing up all our resolutions we plan to stick to in 2025.
Whether it's cutting back on your boozing and committing to Dry January, swearing you'll go to the gym more, saving more of your money or simply promising to read at least one book a month - it's clear quite a few of us use the start of a new year to bring on a new and improved version of ourselves.
And no doubt for all the smokers out there, limiting how many cigs you smoke a day or quitting altogether is definitely high up there on the list when it comes to New Year's resolutions.
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Now, we should already know by now just how harmful smoking is for our health but a new study has now revealed the extremely disturbing amount of time a single cigarette takes off your life expectancy.
Researchers at University College London discovered that, on average, just one cigarette can take around a staggering 20 minutes off someone's life.
So, by that logic, a standard pack of 20 cigarettes can decrease your lifespan by nearly seven whole hours.
And, if you smoke a pack a day, that's nearly 50 hours every single week you're shortening your life by.
The analysis found that if someone who gets through 10 cigarettes a day decides to quit the habit on New Year's Day (1 January), they could prevent the loss of a full day of life by the 8th of January.
Furthermore, they could boost their life expectancy by a full week if they continue to hold off the habit until the 5th of February and, incredibly, by an entire month if they stop until the 5th of August.
And, by the end of the year, they could have avoided losing 50 days of life, according to the assessment which was commissioned by the Department of Health and published in the Journal of Addiction.
"People generally know that smoking is harmful but tend to underestimate just how much," explains Dr Sarah Jackson, a principal research fellow at UCL’s alcohol and tobacco research group.
She added: " On average, smokers who don’t quit lose around a decade of life.
"That’s 10 years of precious time, life moments, and milestones with loved ones."
Jackson continued to share with the Guardian: "Some people might think they don’t mind missing out on a few years of life, given that old age is often marked by chronic illness or disability. But smoking doesn’t cut short the unhealthy period at the end of life.
"It primarily eats into the relatively healthy years in midlife, bringing forward the onset of ill-health. This means a 60-year-old smoker will typically have the health profile of a 70-year-old non-smoker."
The authors of the study have since stressed that smokers must quit completely to see the full benefits to their health and life expectancy, writing: "Stopping smoking at every age is beneficial, but the sooner smokers get off this escalator of death the longer and healthier they can expect their lives to be."
Smokers can find advice, support and resources on the NHS Quit Smoking app and the online Personal Quit Plan, which tailors its advice to individual’s preferences.
Prof Sanjay Agrawal, a special adviser on tobacco at the Royal College of Physicians, said: "Every cigarette smoked costs precious minutes of life, and the cumulative impact is devastating, not only for individuals but also for our healthcare system and economy.
"This research is a powerful reminder of the urgent need to address cigarette smoking as the leading preventable cause of death and disease in the UK."