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 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. What’s more, larger and larger of amount of nicotine is needed to feed the relief as your body adapts making you cravings grow as time grows by.
Before you can succeed in quitting smoking for good, you need to understand what nicotine can do to you both short and long term as nicotine can affect your physical body in different ways.
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. This will cause higher blood pressure which also at the same time limits blood flow to the heart. Because of the blockage, you will then experience difficulty breathing and result in always having short breath as well as having 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.
Discover How You Can Quit Smoking Cigarettes In As Fast As 1 Week Without Agitation, Cravings Or Withdrawal Symptoms By Visiting How To Quit Smoking Blog for More Resources.
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