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Yes, nicotine is a very powerful drug that can be very addictive.
But you are much better off not inhaling toxic smoke to get your nicotine-fix.
We have to agree that it's the other chemicals in cigarette smoke that are damaging to our health, and maybe the worst thing is the hot air itself that damages those delicate little alveolar cells with every drag....
Nicotine is the central molecule in the vitamin niacin and essential as the "N" in NAD--Remember high school biology class and cellular metabolism?
But I'll disagree about the addictive qualities of nicotine. It's a mild stimulant (then why do people smoke "to relax?") hardly affecting HR, BP, RR or nerve reflexes....If it did show real withdrawal, it should be a rebound lowering of those parameters. It doesn't.
It's easy to quit smoking (Mark Twain said it's easy--I've done it 100 times.) The withdrawal effects are very mild....The hard part is to stay off smokes because smoking is a deeply ingrained habitual behavior-- a ritual-- with all the secondary social benefits not related at all to the chemicals like coffee/smoke breaks, comradery as fellow smokers freeze their patutes off together in the winter congregating outside bar room doors, etc.
Smoking a cigarette allows the absorption of about 1mg of nicotine over the course of the 5 - 10 minutes it takes to smoke it...The mouth spray is 2mg and is all absorbed almost immediately thru the oral mucosa-- a much higher exposure than from smoking. Smoking is probably not truly addictive, but using the spray is. Maybe the OP should go back to cigarettes to wean off the spray?
Nicotine addiction doesn't last that long. No addiction does (recovered cigarette smoker and meth addict here, and have been quit on both for decades). Usually the addiction symptoms are gone within a few weeks, maybe 5 or 6 maximum. Beyond that it's a mental habit/mental addiction. Those can be just as difficult to break as a physical addiction though.
What works for a lot of people who get stuck are counseling (finding a good one that is supportive can be challenging but not impossible) and reading up on the whole physiological and psychological ways that addiction works. "Mindfulness", or non religious meditation used in a medical manner, is a powerful tool that everyone experiencing a problem w/ addiction should have in their toolbox.
Its self actualized and simple and easy to learn. It isn't easy to stick w/ it though. It produces subtle but profound changes in our lives because it drags us into present time. Addictions work by keeping us stuck in past mind states and looking forward into the future when we will have that drug of choice. This happens on the physical level. With mindfulness, you are basically rewiring a brain that got rewired due to addictive habitual thoughts and behaviors.
I could never have gotten away from meth w/o it, and that's a drug that's maybe 100 times more addictive than tobacco. Mindfulness is just meditation on the go, although sitting and walking meditation are a part of it. 20-30 minutes a day and you will start to experience a calming down of your thoughts. A person w/ a calm mind isn't anxious, and anxiousness gets us looking for the first thing to escape it, even if what we find is worse for us than feeling anxious.
Last edited by stephenMM; 01-29-2024 at 10:44 PM..
Probably one of the biggest things that pulls on you when you were (are?) addicted to certain substances, is not the physical aspect, but the very clear picture you have, that stays locked in your brain, about the good/great aspects of the substance you were addicted to, and a longing to return to them.
I assume this is why many return to smoking after they have purged their system, and gotten over the purely physical-aspects of this addiction.
You develop an addiction, and dwell in it long enough, you are at risk of permanent changes to
your central-nervous-system.
My late husband could never quite quit smoking, and died of a sudden, massive, unexpected heart attack at aged 62. He got it down to less than half a pack a day, but couldn't quite quit. All that work, and he died with a pack of cigarettes in his hand, after stopping to buy them at a convenience store.
I will never date a smoker again. Not of any amount.
Last edited by KathrynAragon; 01-30-2024 at 09:25 AM..
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