What to Do About Muscle and Joint Pain After Quitting Smoking?

You’ve done it. You’ve embarked on a journey towards wellness by stopping smoking. Congratulations!

Keep in mind that this is no easy feat — studies have shown that it takes so much effort to quit smoking for good that even the first hour or day is a gigantic step towards wellness.

While relatively harmless, nicotine is a highly addictive chemical that urges you to light a stick and pushes you to keep on smoking.

Long-term smokers can feel mild to severe symptoms — but this doesn’t exclusively depend on how long you’ve been smoking.

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These symptoms can feel very physical, manifesting in the form of muscle and joint pain after quitting smoking.

It pays to remember that your muscles and joints probably don’t have any problems — you’re going through physical withdrawal which is a normal part of quitting smoking.

There are various effective ways to manage the pain while continuing to stop smoking and function effectively at work and during your activities.

Let’s learn more about them in this post.

Why Your Body Aches When Quitting Smoking

You’re past the retirement age and have stopped smoking for a while. Isn’t it normal to have arthritis and muscle and joint pain now that you’ve quit smoking?

It’s true that the muscle and joint tissues in our bodies gradually wear out as their healing capabilities fail to keep up with the wear and tear.

However, you’ll probably feel little to zero pain if you’re still smoking today — you’ve built a tolerance around it.

But, now that you’ve come quite far with quitting smoking, you feel the full brunt of the muscle and joint aches that smoking has kept at bay.

This is normal, and these are the primary cause of muscle and joint pain when quitting smoking.

Pain Suppression

When you stop smoking, you might have asked yourself, “Why do my joints hurt so much?”

It’s most likely due to increased pain sensitivity after nicotine leaves the body.

Nicotine, the primary component that causes withdrawals during quitting, suppresses pain. The relatively harmless chemical that gives you a small burst of energy, affects your sense of taste and suppresses your hunger, also has an effect on your nerves, specifically the pain receptors in your body.

A study has shown that smoking slows the regeneration of nerve cells, which explains the lack of sensation or pain in different parts of your body.

The body’s nervous systems start to improve once you’ve quit smoking. Being smokefree brings benefits to your breathing and lung capacity.

But, also keep in mind it will increase your sensitivity to natural muscle and joint pain. It’s much more pronounced in retirees who have stopped smoking for good.

Part of the reason why the pain is intense is the severity of damage the harmful chemicals in cigarette smoke may have caused — and the longer you’ve smoked, the much more severe it can be.

However, this pain won’t last. Over time, your body will, again, tolerate this pain even without the pain masking of nicotine and cigarettes.

Give your body’s pain threshold time to adjust, and you’ll be okay.

Increased Inflammation Due to Smoking

In each cigarette are thousands of dangerous chemicals (69 of which are known to be carcinogenic to humans).

Some of these chemicals cause blood pathways to constrict, limiting nourishment and nutrients to your muscles and joints during the time you’re still smoking. 

The chemicals also affect your body’s inflammation response, causing it to go haywire and exacerbate symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, but not feel too painful due to nicotine’s pain suppression effect.

It also disrupts hormonal activities – an effect that can make female monthly periods unbearably painful and thrown off schedule, and also affects your thyroid’s functionality.

When you quit smoking, you feel much more pain due to the damage, inflammation and increased pain sensitivity, but it should only be very temporary. 

Over time, the body’s inflammatory response and pain sensitivity will start to normalise. While it would take a few days or weeks, you would be able to walk properly and do your activities with minimal to no discomfort without any joint and muscle pain relief.

Fatigue and Tiredness

Feeling fatigued and easily tired is one of the most common side effects of quitting smoking among motivated smokers who have stopped for a few days or months.

Remember that your body is still adjusting to your independence from the chemicals and nicotine in cigarettes. 

More importantly, your body is using a great deal of resources and nutrients to repair damaged cilia in the lungs, areas of the stomach, and blood vessels due to smoking.

You’re also going through withdrawal symptoms, which take a great deal of mental and emotional willpower to get through. 

If you’re feeling too weak to even reach for the remote or prepare dinner for the night after the strong withdrawal urges have passed, it’s okay – know that this is normal for most motivated smokers.

In just a few months, your body will start to relax and do well without smoking. You’ll start to breathe better, helping your body improve oxygenation that aids in repairing muscle and joint tissue through improved blood flow.

How to Relieve These Minor Side Effects of Quitting Smoking

It might feel better just to get back to smoking and alleviate the muscle and joint pain when the symptoms feel too much. But, there are better, more effective ways to find relief after experiencing physical discomfort. 

Here are some of them.

Pain Medication

Pain management is a helpful tool once you feel severe physical withdrawal symptoms from quitting smoking. You can buy ibuprofen or acetaminophen over-the-counter from any local pharmacy without prescriptions.

However, pain medication can be tricky — if you’re taking other maintenance medications (especially for retirees), you may want to consult your pharmacist or GP to ensure it won’t interfere or cause unnecessary health complications.

Also assess how the pain medication interacts with you. If the pain doesn’t stop even after taking them, you may need other types of pain management tools — your GP can help with that.

Pain medication is helpful for anyone enduring muscle and joint pain after quitting smoking , but make sure it doesn’t put your health in jeopardy.

Be Active

You’re already in pain, why encourage you to walk or jog and induce it further?

It does sound silly, but movement is the best medicine for aching muscles and joints after quitting smoking. Even a small round of relaxed walking around the park will increase blood circulation to your legs, elbows, shoulders.

Sure, you’ll feel tired and achy afterwards, but you’ll probably feel your muscles relax once the pain goes away.

The best part is, the more consistently you go with it, the more your muscle and joint pain goes away.

Being active also doesn’t mean setting new personal records in various areas or building muscle with weights — simple activities like doing chores, walking in parks, or even morning stretches are already enough (especially if you’re already past the retirement age).

These activities are also great in improving your dopamine levels. Nicotine has hijacked your dopamine levels by inducing its release with every hit.

Replacing it with exercise further aids the psychological aspect of quitting smoking and reduces the pain you can feel on your muscles and joints.

Balance Your Activities

As we’ve mentioned, you’re not going to a gym to lift the heaviest weights or run the longest miles – your physical activity should only be light enough to stimulate and not damage your aching muscles and joints.

Start with light exercises to alleviate the pain. When you feel better, you can start gradually pushing the intensity while being mindful of how it feels on the muscles and joints. 

Balancing your physical activities is a far more sustainable alternative than risking injury from overexertion, worsening your muscle and joint pain later on.

Check Your Weight and Physical Wellness

Smoking has a negative impact on your muscle and joint growth and recovery, putting you at higher risk of rheumatoid arthritis. If you were overweight when you were smoking, you may need to lose a few kilos to relieve physical pain.

Motivated smokers are at a high risk of overeating – an understandable situation because quitting makes food taste better than it used to. If you’re overweight, you might experience more muscle and joint pain once you start eating more again.

Fortunately, it’s easy to maintain or even reduce your weight after stopping smoking and dealing with a better appetite. 

Prepare your meals at home or go for nutrient-rich, low-fat options available when eating out at work. Go for more vegetables, lean protein, and fibre in your diet. 

With better nourishment, you can reduce the risks brought about by being overweight and aid the inflammation and recovery of your body.

What Happens When You Stop Smoking?

It’s understandable that motivated smokers feel overwhelmed by weaker muscles and their aching back and joints after quitting smoking while dealing with their withdrawal symptoms.

But, once they overcome these temporary side effects, they’re on their way to having a better lifestyle, physique, and mental health.

Within a few hours after you’ve stopped smoking, you’re breathing better, and the body has started improving your blood flow and conducting repairs on various parts of the body.

Within six days, your body has started producing more antioxidants that combat dangerous free radicals associated with accelerated muscle breakdown and joint pain.

In just a few months, your skin drastically improves along with your energy levels. You can even walk or jog better now without the muscle and joint pains.

After a year of stopping smoking, you feel like a new person capable of great focus and better performance in everything you aim to do.

All it takes is to just overcome these initial hurdles of painful joints and muscles combined with irritability and mood swings brought on by withdrawals. 

We promise that after going through all of these, you’ll start feeling and seeing the best person you can be.

Summary

It pays to remember that the muscle and joint pain after quitting smoking is just a one-time segment of the wellness you’ll feel after you’ve left behind cigarettes for good. Now that you understand its causes and how to deal with it, you’re well on your way towards living a healthier, more active, and happy lifestyle.

We know you’re reading this because you’re unsure why you feel physically weak and pained after quitting smoking. We can help.

Smokefree Clinic gives you access to many medically reviewed and trustworthy resources that can inform and aid you in your path to wellness, so have a look around! 

If you’re ready to get started, Smokefree can connect you to Australian healthcare professionals who excel in helping patients quit smoking for good.

Link Reference:

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10858725/
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6089646/
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10484360/
• https://academic.oup.com/jleukbio/article-abstract/100/5/1105/6933122?redirectedFrom=fulltext