Essay: Risk Behavior – Smoking

Sample Essay

Words 1,432

Abstract

Smoking is risk behavior with many health hazards. Recent trends of water pipe smoking have risen amongst the youth with even more harmful side-effects. The text also reviews for choosing this particular topic.

“Every time and at-risk behavior occurs, someone is exposed to potential injury. The more often this behavior occurs and the more people performing it, the greater the exposure.”(Geller) For example, taking one puff of a cigarette is risky for someone who has any lung related disease but continuous smoking by a healthy person has an even greater risk. People continuously take part in high risk behavior although they are aware of the consequences. To understand why people, especially adolescents, indulge in risk behavior such as smoking we must look at Caffrey and Schneider articles “Why do they do it?” They say that smoking is a way to relieve stress and unlike alcohol and sex it is not related to pleasure seeking. (pg. 18) Also, “Adolescents who smoke are more likely to engage in other unhealthful behaviors as well, according to a survey of over 15,000 adolescent orthodontic patients in Southern California.” (Swan, 2000) Another recent epidemic is ‘hookah’ smoking. Water pipes are more popular than ever in youth groups today. People who usually do not smoke are indulging in this dangerous activity which is far worse than cigarette smoking. This is a trend here to stay for long unless the youth is not educated about the severe health risks of water pipe smoking. Smoking is one of the most significant risk behaviors and has a high rate of health hazards, its like going through chemotherapy without having cancer.

First reason to choose this topic is that a lot people start to smoke due to peer pressure or as a means to reduce stress, the former targeting esteem issues and the latter relating to the inability of coping with stress. Understanding both of these issues is critical for a person to do well in the future and act as a responsible person in society. Second, the decisions we make regarding our personal health are interlinked with psychology. Why certain people do certain things gives us insight into the way human beings work, especially when it comes to doing things that can cause severe harm to oneself.

Kindly order term papers, essays, research papers, dissertations, thesis, book reports from the order page.