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You asked for advice and mine is that nicotine is your addiction, with a lot of other components swirling around it, and you should decide if you want to quit n

You asked for advice and mine is that nicotine is your addiction, with a lot of other components swirling around it, and you should decide if you want to quit nicotine or not. Patches, gums and vaporizers are just new and fancy ways to feed your body the ridiculously addictive nicotine it craves. I also suggest reading "The Easy Way to Quit Smoking". If nothing else it's very encouraging. It might also help you realize that nicotine and alcohol have no special relationship. Not any more than cigarettes and food or cigarettes and sex. When you are a nicotine addict, everything becomes a trigger for your addiction. Trying to differentiate is just playing into the addiction and giving it special powers.

mszcz 8y ago
Can vouch for Allen Carr's Easyway. At first the idea that someone can _talk_ me out of smoking seemed silly. Anyhow I tried it via audiobook that I listened while driving. Near the end of the book I just... stopped smoking. This seemed really weird to me. Allen has a weirdly effective way of explaining smoking away.
taneq 8y ago
> It might also help you realize that nicotine and alcohol have no special relationship. I thought the relationship was that alcohol lowers your inhibitions, including your inhibition against smoking?
wahern 8y ago
> Tobacco may well be as addictive as heroin, crack, alcohol, and Cherry Garcia combined into one giant crazy sundae. But as laboratory scientists know, getting mice or other animals hooked on nicotine all by its lonesome is dauntingly difficult. As a 2007 paper in the journal Neuropharmacology put it, “Tobacco use has one of the highest rates of addiction of any abused drug. Paradoxically, in animal models, nicotine appears to be a weak reinforcer.” > That same study, like many others, found that other ingredients in tobacco smoke are necessary to amp up nicotine’s addictiveness. Those other chemical ingredients things like acetaldehyde, anabasine, nornicotine, anatabine, cotinine, and myosmine—help to keep people hooked on tobacco. On its own, nicotine isn’t enough. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a-nicotine-patch-make-you-smarter-excerpt/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a-nicotine-p... There are other sources and studies I'm too lazy to look up, but AFAIU nicotine is a powerful cognitive enhancer that makes activities easier to perform and more rewarding (including, perhaps, the metabolization of other substances), and it's this experience boost that may be what addicts people. In any event, it's now understood--relatively uncontroversially--that this is why many people with certain cognitive deficits (ADHD, schizophrenia, depression, etc) self-medicate with nicotine, though it works to elevate cognitive performance even for people without deficits.
- phil248 8y ago
  Humans generally move easily from one nicotine delivery system to another but fail miserably when trying to quit nicotine all together. It's also very important to understand that nicotine, like most addictive chemicals, impacts different people in different ways. Some people have no problem smoking a few cigarettes a month for years bon end without every developing an addiction.

mszcz 8y ago

Can vouch for Allen Carr's Easyway. At first the idea that someone can _talk_ me out of smoking seemed silly. Anyhow I tried it via audiobook that I listened while driving. Near the end of the book I just... stopped smoking. This seemed really weird to me. Allen has a weirdly effective way of explaining smoking away.

taneq 8y ago

> It might also help you realize that nicotine and alcohol have no special relationship. I thought the relationship was that alcohol lowers your inhibitions, including your inhibition against smoking?

wahern 8y ago

> Tobacco may well be as addictive as heroin, crack, alcohol, and Cherry Garcia combined into one giant crazy sundae. But as laboratory scientists know, getting mice or other animals hooked on nicotine all by its lonesome is dauntingly difficult. As a 2007 paper in the journal Neuropharmacology put it, “Tobacco use has one of the highest rates of addiction of any abused drug. Paradoxically, in animal models, nicotine appears to be a weak reinforcer.” > That same study, like many others, found that other ingredients in tobacco smoke are necessary to amp up nicotine’s addictiveness. Those other chemical ingredients things like acetaldehyde, anabasine, nornicotine, anatabine, cotinine, and myosmine—help to keep people hooked on tobacco. On its own, nicotine isn’t enough. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a-nicotine-patch-make-you-smarter-excerpt/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a-nicotine-p... There are other sources and studies I'm too lazy to look up, but AFAIU nicotine is a powerful cognitive enhancer that makes activities easier to perform and more rewarding (including, perhaps, the metabolization of other substances), and it's this experience boost that may be what addicts people. In any event, it's now understood--relatively uncontroversially--that this is why many people with certain cognitive deficits (ADHD, schizophrenia, depression, etc) self-medicate with nicotine, though it works to elevate cognitive performance even for people without deficits.

phil248 8y ago
Humans generally move easily from one nicotine delivery system to another but fail miserably when trying to quit nicotine all together. It's also very important to understand that nicotine, like most addictive chemicals, impacts different people in different ways. Some people have no problem smoking a few cigarettes a month for years bon end without every developing an addiction.