Stop Smoking Cigs

Nicotine is the naturally occurring chemical in the tobacco plant which helps prevent insects from eating the plant. Nicotine is a toxin that can kill if ingested directly, but when ingested through smoking tobacco is one of the most addictive substances on earth.

How Does Your Body Become Addicted to Nicotine?

When you smoke a tobacco cigarette, nicotine generates dopamine which provides significant stimulation to your body’s nervous system. It also triggers a release of adrenaline in your body as well as stimulating the sertonin pathways that impact your mood and impulsive behavior. Once your body experiences these effects from the nicotine, it drives you to want more by smoking additional cigarettes.

Your Brain Creates the Nicotine Dependency

When you ingest nicotine and it reaches your brain, your body’s defense mechanisms attempt to diminish the effects of the chemical by growing additional receptors (referred to as acetylcholine) in order to better disperse the nicotine. Unfortunately, this also creates a greater dependency of your body on nicotine. When you try to quit smoking, this increased dependency on nicotine makes the nicotine withdrawal symptoms more severe. If you try to stop smoking cold turkey, there is a significant chance of having large mood shifts, increased anxiety, and a generally feeling of discomfort associated with your nicotine addiction.

How Does Your Body Recover from Nicotine Addiction?

If you have made the decision to stop smoking and are successful in quitting tobacco cigarettes, your body will not recover from its nicotine addiction overnight. Your brain will need time in order to get its receptors used to the absence of nicotine again. This process is referred to as down-regulation. As this is occurring, your mind will also need to recondition itself to not intaking nicotine at traditional times of the day such as after meals, while drinking, and during breaks at work. You will also need time to find activities to do other than smoke in order to help prevent yourself from relapsing.

In the short-term, your body’s nicotine reserves will be cut in half about every two hours and 72 hours for your blood to be nicotine free. At this point, many smokers who try to quit smoking cold turkey fail due to the increased anxiety and nicotine withdrawal symptoms realized at this point in their efforts to stop smoking.

Problems with Nicotine Replacement Products

Nicotine Replacement Therapies try to convince consumers that they should gradually wean themselves off of their nicotine addiction, instead of quitting the substance altogether. Some NRT’s make the insinuation that the nicotine contained in their product(s) is somehow different from that found in traditional tobacco cigarettes. This is not the case, however, as the nicotine found in NRT’s is just as addictive as that found in tobacco. Now many people have successfully quit using NRT’s, but if you are looking to make a decision on what program/product to use to help you stop smoking, there are some facts that you should know before making a decision on what path you will take on your way to quitting smoking:

• If you don’t use any product or system, the odds of quitting smoking is about 10%
• Some studies in the early 2000s showed that using over the counter nicotine gum only resulted in a 7% chance of being nicotine free at the 6 month point.
• Almost 40% of nicotine gum users have used the product for more than 6 months.
• If you fail to stop smoking using the patch, don’t try it again. Some studies have found that if you try to use the patch a second time, you have a greater chance of relapsing to smoking again.
• Combining stop smoking products with a support system will increase your odds of stopping smoking almost three-fold.

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