Smoking is a killer in more ways than you might realise…

…I stopped smoking and noticed how unaffected by the nicotine I was yesterday morning…

…I’m doing an experiment involving nicotine and smoking tobacco.

I have a bad addiction to smoking and we all know that that is because of the very addictive Nicotine that laces the cigarette, cigar or roll-up. Nicotine is a dangerous and highly addictive chemical. It can cause an increase in blood pressure, heart rate, flow of blood to the heart and a narrowing of the arteries (vessels that carry blood). Nicotine may also contribute to the hardening of the arterial walls, which in turn, may lead to a heart attack.

Every year around 78,000 people in the UK die from smoking, with many more living with debilitating smoking-related illnesses. Smoking increases your risk of developing more than 50 serious health conditions. Tobacco is dangerous. According to one studyTrusted Source, smoking-related diseases are responsible for about 435,000 deaths per year in the United States. That’s about 1 in every 5 deaths in the United States. Stopping smoking, no matter how long you have smoked, can greatly benefit your health.

The Biology of Nicotine Addiction

Nicotine acts on nicotinic cholinergic receptors, triggering the release of neurotransmitters that produce psychoactive effects that are rewarding. With repeated exposure, tolerance develops to many of the effects of nicotine, thereby reducing its primary reinforcing effects and inducing physical dependence (i.e., withdrawal symptoms in the absence of nicotine). Smoking behavior is influenced by pharmacologic feedback and by environmental factors such as smoking cues, friends who smoke, stress, and product advertising. Levels of nicotine in the body in relation to a particular level of nicotine intake from smoking are modulated by the rate of nicotine metabolism, which occurs in the liver largely by means of the enzyme CYP2A6. Other factors that influence smoking behavior include age, sex, genetics, mental illness, and substance abuse.

Yesterday after I woke up in the morning I didn’t head straight to make a roll-up. I put on a Nicotine Patch and refused to smoke as I desperately wanted to stop the habit and give my body a rest. What struck me the most and in the most amazing way was that I realised what had been happening to me when I did smoke.

For me, the very first drag on a roll-up in the mornig after waking up was like having a joint, where my eyes would get heavy and start to close and I’d feel sluggish and heavy.

Because I hadn’t smoked straight away after waking up yesterday, when I woke up I woke up better and without negative thoughts, they just vanished leaving a clear space to be able to think clearly.

I could feel drive and motivation instead, something of which I hadn’t felt in a long long time and was getting quite desperate with it and was slowly giving up.

I started using my vape (which wasn’t doing anything by the way) and just like the last time I tried it when I managed to quite for 6 months, I was dragging on the thing like constantly. Not good!

Anyway, this afternoon I found myself sitting here manically chewing a nicotine gum while chugging on a vape with a patch on feeling like I was going to take off and couldn’t relax at all, I was telling myself that I want to smoke. To buy baccy and that that will be ok, that I’ll enjoy it. But I’ve had to tell myself that if I do that I’ll just get stoned again and lose all my drive and level headedness and I was telling myself that I’m going to do an experiment and write it here on this blog post, so I went and bought some more backy from the shop, .

 I’ve just had a roll-up and I can feel the effects of the nicotine on my brain straight away. I feel like I’m buzzing, like a mellow being stoned in a kind of way. I feel heavier and more enclosed than I felt before. By enclosed I mean that I almost feel like I’m falling inwards and could sleep. These are very light symptoms but they are real.

Now that I’ve had 3 roll-ups and gone through the initial grip of the nicotine effect, I feel like I’m back to normal but without the drive and the clear sense of thought that I had. It’s sapped my energy and ruined my motivation and positivity, well it is there it’s just not as strong as it was this morning and the worst thing is that it will fade all together.

Apart from harming just about every part of the body, lungs especially, I never gave it a thought to how it effects the brain and the emotions, or maybe I did, it’s just that because I was so addicted I was fooled?

I’m not exactly sure where this experiment is going to take me apart from becoming a smoker again, but now that I know that nicotine really does have quite a strong effect on me it will hopefully be easier to maintain the effort when this tobacco that I have is all gone.

On a phsychological level I think I’ve just talked myself into being able to smoke again, and all I wanted was the one. Long gone are the days when you could buy 1 cigarette for 10p or even a 12.5 gm box of backy.

Smoking messes with my head. It rambles up my thinking processes and I feel lost with it, but at the same time it’s a nice feeling and I’ve been doing it that long that I’m comfortable with it and at the same time again I can think how that it’s one of the reasons why I’ve been chasing my own tail. I must get used to being without the feeling of being sedated with nicotine.

It just goes to show how addictive it is so never start smoking!

When I started smoking that day I was counting what I smoked and noticing the time between every smoke but by the end of the day I had smoked around the same as I had previously, so the habit doesn’t take long at all to again grab a hold. It’s been a week now and I’m just about at the end of yet another pouch. I’ve been wearing a patch for the last 2 days, and I’m also listening to an audiobook called ‘The Easy Way – by Allen Carr’, which I think is slowly changing my minsdet about smoking. He tries to get you to do it without the help of nicotine substitues like patches/gum/vapes etc. and I’m a bit daunted by this prospect to be fair but I’ll try it out. I’ll update this at a later date, but for now I can’t see that working and I also can’t see me not buying another pouch. More later…