Be Smoke Free

The main reason quitting is so hard is the severe cravings that are associated with the use of nicotine. What happens in your brain each time you light up a cigarette? When you smoke, nicotine sends a signal to your brain to release a chemical called dopamine that can give you a feeling of pleasure and calm. Unfortunately that feeling is short lived. So to achieve that feeling again, you have to light up another cigarette, and the craving process begins.

Regardless of the smoker’s perceived benefits from tobacco, one would assume that an overwhelming consideration must be the likelihood of an early grave after a life of gnawing addiction. However, the addictive qualities of nicotine often overpower a smoker’s fear of premature death.

Thanks in large part to work done at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the 1980s, it is now clear that all the elements of addiction found with “serious” drugs like heroin and cocaine are also found with nicotine. Smokers trying to quit are likely to become as psychologically distressed as the average psychiatric outpatient. In animal experiments, squirrel monkeys will press levers as many as 250 times to get a single intravenous dose of nicotine. Human smokers under the same conditions will dose themselves at orderly, predictable rates depending on how much nicotine they are getting — the very hallmark of an activity controlled by a substance.

BUT there is hope and there are effective alternatives.