What Makes Smoking Such an Addictive Habit?

The New Year is upon us. Once again, millions of smokers will attempt to start anew and quit smoking for the betterment of their health.

However, what most find is that it’s no easy task to quit this highly addictive habit. It often takes several attempts at quitting smoking before one can finally kick the habit for good.

This is the way that cigarettes were designed. Cigarettes, as you probably well know, contain an addictive substance called nicotine. Nicotine acts as a stimulant, and there is also evidence that it works on the pleasure center of the brain.

It does this by stimulating the production of serotonin, which is a “pleasure chemical” that is made by our body. In short, smoking makes us feel good. It helps people to relax, and this in itself is an addictive quality.

What makes it even harder, without some sort of help in the form of a nicotine patch or herbal smoking cessation patch, is the way your body reacts when you stop smoking.

When you stop smoking, your body actually expects that extra serotonin production. If you’ve been smoking for a very long time, it makes matters worse.

Your body stops making serotonin on it’s own when you smoke, because nicotine kind of “takes over” the process for a while. In other words, your own ability to make serotonin essentially becomes impaired when you smoke for long periods of time.

This is why so many people experience irritability when they quit smoking. It’s also the reason that so many smokers experience weight gain when they stop smoking.

In addition to making you feel good, the extra serotonin your body makes when you smoke also suppresses your appetite.

When you take this away, your appetite goes up significantly. Also, because you don’t have that “oral fix” where you have something in your mouth a lot (instead of food), you tend to want to fill that void with eating food.

One of the biggest reasons so many people are afraid to quit smoking, even though they know the habit is detrimental to their health, is the weight gain. Because so many other smokers experience this as a side effect of taking away cigarettes, it’s a good bet that you may have the same problem.

Today, there are a lot of smoking cessation aids that can help ease you into the process of becoming a healthy “non smoker”.

There are e-cigarettes now, which make you feel like you are smoking a cigarette. Most of them produce some sort of vapor that is inhaled into the lungs. It may or may not be infused with nicotine.

These are a novel approach since they address both the physical, nervous habit by letting you hold something in your mouth, as well as the addictive chemical portion of the habit.

There are patches, which are affixed to the skin in a non-conspicuous area. These patches continuously release either herbal or natural ingredients into the skin. These ingredients are absorbed and enter the blood stream.

Patches are meant to ease the symptoms of smoking cessation that people find so troublesome. These symptoms include extreme irritability, increased appetite, alertness, and even a mild depression due to the absence of excess serotonin.

If smokers feel like they need something extra potent to quit smoking, or they’ve had numerous troubles trying to quit the habit in the past, they may opt for a prescription.

Some doctors will prescribe a mild antidepressant to help smokers quit who are having a lot of trouble. This may help by reducing the likelihood of lapse due to mood swings, but it really should be a last resort.

Danna Norek owns and contributes editorials to several blogs and websites in the field of natural health, beauty and self improvement. Information on how you can make quitting smoking much easier on yourself without adding more synthetic chemicals into your body, can be found at Natural Quit Smoking Products and additional information on the various natural smoking cessation products can be found here at Stop Smoking Aids [http://herbal-therapeutics.com/stop-smoking-aids.html]. Quitting smoking is the best thing you can do for your health.

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What Makes Smoking Such an Addictive Habit?