Quit Smoking Help: Understanding Nicotine Before You Quit Smoking

Nicotine is Extremely Addictive

Whenever someone inhales a puff of smoke from a cigarette, nicotine travels from the tobacco smoke into the bloodstream and into that smoker’s brain within a range of 7 to 10 seconds.

Then, the nicotine substance causes chemical reactions which result in the smoker having feelings of temporary pleasure. However, this is extremely short-term as this temporary pleasure will only last for minutes.

Smokers will begin to feel agitated and irritated from withdrawal symptoms as soon as the level of nicotine drops in the blood stream. Thus, in order to have a sense of relief from this agitation, there is a need to feed the body again with more nicotine. This goes on and on into a vicious cycle.

Before you can succeed in quitting smoking for good, you need to understand what nicotine can do to you both short and long term.

Quitting smoking involves both psychological and physical challenges. Most smokers make the mistake when they think it’s just a psychological challenge and they can quit at any point of time they want to. More than that, the addiction is actually because of a highly addictive substance – nicotine.

Let’s take a look on how nicotine can affect your body...

How Nicotine Affects Adrenaline

When nicotine is in your brain, it causes the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline in general causes your heart’s rate to increase, leading to higher blood pressure which also limits blood flow to the heart. You will then experience difficulty breathing and rapid heartbeat rate.

How Nicotine Affects Dopamine

Nicotine causes the increase of the level of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that causes the brain to feel pleasure. Other substances abuse such as drugs like cocaine have the same effect, which is to increase the level of dopamine in your brain. As the effect of this “pleasure” wears down, the smoker must then keep smoking to maintain the effect and at the same time avoiding withdrawal symptoms.

How Nicotine Affects Insulin

Nicotine also restrains insulin from releasing from your pancreas. Insulin is a hormone that helps remove surplus sugar from your blood. Thus, nicotine causes a smoker to have extra than normal sugar in his blood. Since sugar suppresses appetite, this is why most smokers lose their appetite when smoking.

Besides nicotine, research has shown that cigarettes have 4000 other toxic chemicals including tar. Tar increases the chances to get lung cancer. Apart from that, carbon monoxide released from cigarettes increases the risk respiratory diseases greatly as well as cardiovascular illnesses.

Because nicotine addiction is a substance abuse, time is needed to recover from this addiction. With perseverance, anybody can overcome this gradual process of being free from nicotine.

Article Tags: Quit Smoking, Nicotine Affects

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