Smoking Facts

No, this is not another list of statistics about how much is spent on tobacco each year and how many people die, what the chances are of smoking killing you and how many harmful chemicals there are in each lung-full. Why bother? These are exactly the statistics that the government bring out each year in a half-hearted attempt to stop you smoking. I want to look at the facts behind smoking from a different angle...

Nobody is born a smoker - you start smoking for various social or environmental reasons, but the fact is that nobody forces you to do it.

Nobody needs to start smoking - when you start smoking it makes you feel sick. The only reason you have your second and subsequent smokes in the early stages is the same reason as you smoked the first one (whatever that may have been - 'my parents smoke', 'my friends told me it would calm my nerves' etc.). After a few smokes your body becomes desensitised to the smoke and it no longer makes you splutter. At the same time your body is getting addicted to the nicotine. The net effect is that you start to enjoy smoking because you now need the nicotine that smoking is giving you. The experience of getting used to inhaling smoke, and the process of becoming addicted happen at the same time and this makes you think of smoking as giving pleasure, even though there is nothing intrinsically pleasurable about inhaling smoke. This is why you continue after you are over the first hurdle of getting used to smoking.

Since it is a process that happens over a period of weeks, you don't notice the fact that you are getting addicted. What you are also unaware of is the slight withdrawal symptoms that you experience after you have had a smoke. The effect of this, because the withdrawal and addiction are so slight, is that you can go without a smoke for a while and think that you are not addicted. But the next time you have a smoke, it satisfies the slight nicotine pangs from the last smoke. This gives you the impression that smoking is a pleasure.

The fact remains that the nicotine, the addiction, the perceived benefits and the withdrawal symptoms are totally encapsulated in your smoking. What I mean by that is that smoking has no benefit for you other than relieving the pangs caused by the act of smoking. Your addiction is entirely as a result of your smoking - you were not born a smoker. The withdrawal symptoms were created by smoking and the stress relief that it gives you is only relieving the stress that smoking itself has caused. When your concentration improves as a result of smoking, this is only because the nicotine pangs and their related anxiety are stopping you from concentrating. All of the benefits you get from smoking are a creation of your addiction. Whatever reason you give yourself for continuing to smoke, it can be traced back to your addiction - the enjoyment, the stress relief, the aid to concentration and the relaxing properties are only possible because of the withdrawal symptoms of nicotine. If tobacco smoke contained everything but the nicotine, the above properties would never exist - smoking would not relax you, help you concentrate or reduce your stress, and it would be very doubtful if you could ever enjoy it. Your body conditions itself to accept and even like smoke because it associates the experience with satisfying the nicotine addiction. Take that addiction away and you take away the whole pleasure of smoking.

You may think 'I can't stop smoking - I need to smoke to relax myself'. If you do stop smoking and allow the physical nicotine addiction to leave your body you will have nothing to relieve because the physical nicotine addiction will have gone. This will leave you with the more powerful psychological addiction to overcome. This is the main drawback with stopping smoking using willpower. However, if you mange to reverse the process and get rid of the psychological addiction before you even start on the physical addiction you will have a much smaller hurdle to overcome. This sounds like nonsense - trying to take away the addiction while you are still smoking - but it does work. You need to consider why you started smoking at all, you need to look at why you smoke now and believe that whatever the reason is for you smoking you will be happier without it. Finally, you need to understand that you enjoy smoking no more now than you did the first time - that the feeling of pleasure or enjoyment is simply the feeling that you associate with the relief of your nicotine pangs.

If you smoke long after the physical addiction has gone you may think that you enjoy it. The reason for this is that you will get the light-headed feeling that anybody gets with the first smoke after a break, and you will also get the taste and sensation of the inhaled smoke. These have, since early in your smoking life, been associated with pleasure. So, even though this smoke physically gives you nothing more than the light-headed feeling from unneeded nicotine and lack of oxygen to the brain, you still associate the experience with pleasure. This has nothing to do with the nicotine, it is purely an association your brain is making with the taste and sensation of smoking and the pleasure that it once felt from the relief of nicotine withdrawal.

Now couple that with all of those mental images that we have from anti-smoking campaigns - the dish full of tar from a smoker's lung, the old lady painfully dying of emphysema, the man with an electronic voice-box that replaces his cancer-ridden larynx, the amputee who lost his legs as a result of smoking etc. Do you not agree that it all adds up to a compelling reason to stop?