Nicotine Addictions

To first understand nicotine addiction you first need to understand why we start smoking in the first place and why we get hooked. Most people start smoking to relieve stress or anxiety, other people want to lose weight, teens succumb to peer pressure or they’re trying to look cool. Have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to go without eating, why we feel anxiety when bored and an “aahh” sense of relief when we finish a task? This was dopamine. When we feel hunger our dopamine pathways are teasing us with anticipation, wanting for food.

If we keep wanting the anticipation may build into urges or even craves. Each bite that we take or drag off a cigarette stimulates the dopamine until we had enough and have become satisfied. While family members and loved ones are screaming at the smoker to stop, their brain dopamine pathways are screaming even louder that continuing to smoke is important as life itself. Nicotine addiction is permanent, just like alcohol there is one rule when you quit, just using once you will have to go back.

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It does not matter how much will power we have, the years of smoking, the recorded years of nicotine feeding have wired your brain for relapse. If this is true, that no matter how much will power you have you will go relapse. Then why are some social smokers able to continue and stop like its nothing while the rest of the smoking population got hooked. These social smokers are referred to as “chippers. ” These “chippers” account for less than 10% of all smokers.

Being immune to nicotine addiction is thought to be from genetics. Smokers who are hooked tend to feel sorry for themselves atching 10% walk away like its nothing, little do they realize they were once chippers to, at least for their first couple of cigarettes. Nicotine addiction affects all ages, there are many children who smoke around the world, take for example Ardi Rizal. Ardi Rizal is a two year Indonesian baby who smokes about 2 packs a day or 40 cigarettes. Smoking is normal in Indonesia it is the world 3rd largest leading tobacco consuming country in the world. A lot of adults who are around children will smoke; they will carry a baby in one hand and a cigarette on the other.

His mother wants Ardi to quit, but her motivation for Ardi to quit was more on the spending 4 dollars a day other than his health. If Ardi does not smoke he throws tantrums, he has a scar on his head from running into a wall during one of his tantrums, and he also vomits when he cannot satisfy his addiction. The government has offered to pay the family with a brand new car and 100 thousand dollars if they help the baby stop smoking. Nicotine addiction affects all ages. The road to recovery from nicotine addictions is very hard.

The first few days might feel like an emotional train wreck on the average smoker but as each passing day the challenge begins to grow less intense. In fact there are more ex-smokers in the United States then there are smokers! There are roughly 70% of daily smokers who want to stop. But few realize that they’re dealing with a permanent disorder and disease of the mind. A puff of nicotine is all it takes for relapse to occur. Usually it takes multiple fail attempts for the user to actually find the key to success.

Every recovery is different, it be days, weeks, months, maybe even years to successfully quit smoking, to not feel the desire of a cigarette. There many types of treatment but no cure, there is the nicotine patch, rehab, nicotine gum and Chantix, Chantix has a 50% chance to help the smoker. Nicotine addiction is a serious mental disease and illness. Nicotine related disease causes 440,000 thousand deaths per year, 36,666 thousand per month, 8,461 thousand per week, 1,205 thousand per day, 50 per hour, in the United States alone.

It is the number one killer around the world. Every cigarette that you smoke cuts 5 minutes off your life, the same time it takes to smoke it. Smoking just doesn’t cut a few months off the end of your life; it reduces the life of the average smoker by 12 years. Most people don’t think when lighting up especially teenagers, they don’t care about the cancer it causes, the things that it does to your body and physical appearance, that’s how addicted they are. They willing to ignore these facts for a death trap called tobacco.