Quitting was step one. Your lungs are still doing step two.
Your airways are lined with millions of microscopic sweepers called cilia. Their one job is to move mucus, and everything caught in it, up and out. Years of smoke put those sweepers to sleep and thickened the mucus they are meant to clear. So it just sits. That is the throat-clearing, the morning cough, the heaviness on the stairs.
None of that is willpower, and none of it is in your head. It is a mechanism, and mechanisms can be helped. When you quit, the cilia slowly wake back up. Here is the part almost no one is told: you can nudge them along, gently, every single morning.
