Addiction
- While smoking, a dose of nicotine reaches the brain about every 10 seconds
- Nicotine at first has a relaxing and calming effect, as well as a boost in concentration
- Repeated exposure to nicotine will cause changes in the brain, and eventually an addiction
- This causes withdrawal symptoms such as headaches and insomnia for a few days to weeks before the addiction wears off
- The symptoms can be alleviated by smoking, which reinforces the addiction and makes smokers nicotine dependent
Stress and Anxiety
- Many people smoke as a way to take advantage of nicotine's calming and relaxing effects to alleviate the effects of stress and anxiety
- It actually doesn't reduce stress or anxiety either. The short term effects help for a time, but it has no long term positive effects on either
- It actually worsens the effects of them over the long term because the withdrawal symptoms, which actually have a similarity to the regular symptoms of stress and anxiety
Depression
- Many people who have depression are smokers as well
- Though whether smoking causes depression or depression causes people to smoke isn't clear, smoking definitely has negative effects when it comes to depression
- It is actually more difficult for depressive smokers to quit due to the withdrawal symptoms, which worsen the effects of depression
- An effect of nicotine is the release of dopamine in the brain, which is the primary reason it is relaxing and calming initially, but long term exposure eventually causes the brain to stop the mechanism for regular dopamine production
- People with depression often have low dopamine levels, and smoking boosts those levels for a short time. When the brain stops producing dopamine, however, will result in those levels returning to the way they were before smoking
- This results in even more dependency on smoking, as quitting will reduce dopamine levels even more and worsen the symptoms of depression