No one would ever think that owning an Apple watch can make you quit smoking but here is a true story of how it made someone quit smoking.
As per the World Health Organization, tobacco use is the number one cause of cancer. It is not that people don’t know about it. There are warning signs everywhere. There is no more common knowledge in the world than the fact that tobacco causes cancer and people should avoid it.
Among all tobacco uses, smoking is the most prevalent one.
As per the data from WHO, there are more than 1.2 billion smokers in the world today. The last data is from 2024, but the good news is that smokers are constantly declining, as the number of smokers was nearly 1.38 billion around 2000.
Tobacco smoking causes an estimated 7 to 8 million deaths per year, and there might be more. The worst thing is that it is totally controllable, but since the government generates huge revenues on it through taxes and the tobacco companies lobby hard to put fewer restrictions on its consumption, cigarettes are found literally everywhere, even in grocery stores all around the world.
Of all the deaths related to cancer, nearly 25% of the deaths can be attributed to the habit of smoking, and yet people do it all the time.
Celebrities indirectly endorse it all the time through movies and publicly smoking during interviews and travelling, despite knowing that cameras are shooting them.
It comes as a surprise to many that despite smoking so much, celebrities rarely get cancer like common people do, and this fact can be attributed to two main factors – first, celebrities have money and they have the highest quality of medical services available to them all the time, which normal people can’t afford, and second, celebrities normally do not disclose what diseases they have or what problems they are facing in fear of people stop admiring them for their sickness. They want to appear strong all the time.
Cancer, however, is one of the many problems caused by tobacco smoking in the human body. It causes lung diseases, is also one of the main causes of heart stroke and respiratory diseases, and often causes premature deaths to people who are too careless to notice changes in their body due to smoking.
Recently, there was a story which was told to me by a friend of mine about how Apple Watch made a man quit smoking, and hence I decided to write about it, hoping it might help someone.
The man named Mark (name changed) was a smoker — not a heavy one, but he had been smoking for nearly 25 years. For the last five years, he had been suffering from anxiety and mild depression. He had not consulted anyone for depression, but he claimed he had one after reading the symptoms online.
Lately, he had started having high blood pressure, frequent headaches, and fatigue problems. He wouldn’t move out of the house and thought that maybe it was because of a lack of vitamins and other minerals in the body.
On someone’s suggestion, he started taking supplements. For a brief amount of time, he was all right, but soon he developed chronic constipation.
As constipation increased, he had more problems of headaches and fatigue. He started having hair fall.
He decided to have a full body blood test. Nothing came out of it. Every doctor said that he was all right. That was a relief, but again he had to do something about the constipation.
He started reading about it and tried probiotics and other things, and improved his eating habits, but this time nothing was working.
Finally, he decided to show himself to a doctor for the constipation problems.
As per him, the doctor checked his blood pressure, weight, oxygen levels, and pulse as a normal routine, and everything turned out to be normal except one thing — his heartbeats per minute were 150 to 160.
He had no idea what it meant, but the expressions of the doctor changed after watching the stats on the oximeter.
Mark had hidden the fact from the doctor that he smokes for embarrassing reasons.
Basically, your heart beats 72 times per minute, which is considered an average for most human beings.
When a baby is born, he is said to have more HBM (heartbeats per minute) than a normal young man.
If your HBM is less than 60, which can be considered an abnormally slow rate and might cause dizziness, then it needs to be immediately checked by a doctor. This condition is called bradycardia.
However, low heartbeats don’t mean a red flag every time, as many athletes in top shape at the peak of their career have HBM of 30–40 during their rest times. However, in the medical world, that is considered an exception.
If your HBM is more than 100, then it is considered a red flag as well and is called tachycardia.
However, at that time, not knowing the gravity of this problem, he bought some prescribed medicines related to the heart recommended by the doctor and came back home.
As his usual habit, he went to his terrace, took out a stick, and started smoking.
He felt a little pain in the chest, his heart beating higher than normal, and a little perspiration and heavy head.
He had experienced this before, almost every time he smoked, but this time was different. This time he knew that his heartbeats were abnormally high, as the doctor had told him.
That very same day, he bought the Apple Watch, as after reading reviews he found that though not as accurate and precise as medical equipment, it would at least give him some idea of his heartbeats.
At that time, he didn’t know that buying the Apple Watch would not only give him data about his pulse rates but would also lead to a major change in his life.
As he wore the Apple Watch, he realized that his pulse rates varied between 100 and 130 in normal times.
He took medicines that night and saw that his heart rate dropped to 90, and he felt relieved. He went to sleep.
Next morning, as usual, he took his coffee and cigarette pack and went to the balcony to enjoy his morning coffee and smoke.
As he was smoking, there was a vibration on his watch and his heart rate had jumped to 160. Scared, he threw the cigarette and coffee.
Maybe it was high in the morning, and caffeine often spikes the heart rate — he had read it somewhere.
Later, after nearly two hours, he again went to the balcony to smoke, and again his pulse rate jumped to 152.
This happened throughout the day.
Every time Mark went to smoke — his normal day would be 5–6 smokes a day — he felt that spike.
He decided to avoid coffee, tea, and smoke for a while.
The pulse rate was becoming normal again.
Three days passed, and his brain started sensing that every time he smoked his pulse rate spiked to 150–160, and it scared him so much that he decided to level down his smoking from 5–6 a day to only two a day.
Even those two cigarettes would spike his heart rate so much that it would scare him that what if he would be the next case of a heart attack on the local news channel.
At this moment, Mark remembered his good friend, a restaurant owner and college friend, who had a heart attack last year and who was a smoker too. He was a heavier smoker than Mark.
Even if sometimes Mark slips into a cigarette these days, the vibration and high pulse rate on his Apple Watch scare him so much that he throws the cigarette midway.
My friend told me that Mark had been trying to quit smoking for the last 8 years and had read every book he could lay his hands on on the planet, but nothing worked permanently.
Smoking was not just an addiction anymore to him; it was his lifestyle.
When he bought that Apple Watch, his wife scolded him severely for wasting money on the Apple Watch, as she felt that digital watches are more headaches with their constant notifications and health updates, which to an extent she is right, but in this case it did help Mark quit smoking.
Twenty years back, Mark wouldn’t have known what was happening to him and might have collapsed someday due to a high pulse rate and ended up in a hospital bed due to cardiac arrest, and who knows, might not have lived to see more days.
Everything digital today has its own pros and cons. It is not always wise to wear an Apple Watch and be scared all the time to do anything, but if you use it moderately, a good health watch can be a lifesaver as well.
