How to quit smoking

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

We are told that smoking is just a bad habit. But research says this is real addiction.

According to WHO, there are 44 million smokers among adults in Russia. More than 85% of them need nicotine all the time and cannot pause for the whole day. At the same time, 60% of smokers would like to quit tobacco use. Over the past year, every third of them tried to quit, but the feat was crowned with success only in 11%. In light of these numbers, it is rather strange to talk about smoking as a bad habit. It is much more correct to consider it as a full-fledged drug addiction.

Nicotine: what and why?

The tobacco bush does not accumulate nicotine in the leaves in order to plunge us into the abyss of addiction. This ability has been entrenched in the course of evolution, so that the plant is protected from insect pests. Insects use a substance called acetylcholine to transmit signals from nerves to muscles. Nicotine is similar to acetylcholine in chemical structure and binds to the same receptors. As a result, when an insect eats a tobacco leaf, the normal work of its muscles is disrupted, they are activated too much, and the pest dies in convulsions.

Humans also have acetylcholine receptors. They are arranged differently, and nicotine practically does not affect the muscles. But he is able to activate receptors for acetylcholine in the brain. There are especially many of them in the reward system - the area of the brain associated with positive emotions and concentration. When a person lights a cigarette, nicotine enters the bloodstream, reaches the brain, binds there with acetylcholine receptors and is able to improve mood and improve performance (however, the intensity of this effect depends on genetic characteristics, and for many it is hardly noticeable).

It would be nice if not for one detail. When nicotine enters the brain on a regular basis, the number of acetylcholine receptors increases and at the same time their sensitivity decreases. Consequently, one's own acetylcholine, which previously itself successfully activated the reward system, ceases to cope with this task. A person feels an urgent need to smoke more, because without this he feels stupid and unhappy. This is how physical addiction is formed, and it can be very powerful.

The authoritative scientific journal Lancet published in 2007 a review comparing 20 different drugs, in which it awarded physical addiction to nicotine the "honorable" third place for the severity of addiction - just after heroin and cocaine.

Nicotine itself is not very dangerous for health. Its role is to induce and maintain physical dependence. For the colossal damage that smoking causes to the body, other substances are responsible - nitrogen dioxide, phenol, heavy metals, ketones, aldehydes, and so on. Some of them are found in tobacco leaves initially, some are formed during combustion. According to the WHO, among the 4000 substances that make up tobacco smoke, at least 250 are hazardous to health and 50 have proven carcinogenic effects.

Regular inhalation of this cocktail of toxic substances (and a person addicted to nicotine usually smokes about a pack of cigarettes a day) leads to a serious reduction in life. According to the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the life of a male smoker is, on average, 13.2 years shorter than a nonsmoker, while for women the figure is 14.5 years.

The life of a smoker, as in the joke, is “bad, but short”: tobacco smoke not only negatively affects directly the lungs, but also disrupts the blood supply to literally all organs.

This manifests itself in different ways: as problems with erection, premature aging of the skin, reduced ability to tolerate cold, poor gum health, etc. Even an improvement in performance, for which people once started smoking (if they did it deliberately, of course), in practice, it disappears very quickly: the positive effects of nicotine are completely canceled out by the negative effects of poor blood supply to the brain.

Fight for freedom

Cigarettes are a very insidious thing, because nicotine is incorporated into the biochemical processes in the brain and becomes vital for a person. The life of a smoker can be compared to the life of a person with diabetes: he constantly has to worry about where and when he can get the dose of the necessary substance. A person with a nicotine addiction, who is devoid of tobacco, of course, does not die, but in fact, he experiences very serious problems with performance and control over emotions.

The good news is that after the nicotine supply stops, the brain can still return to normal.

According to tomographic studies conducted at the University of Kyoto in Japan, receptor recovery takes about three weeks: if this period is passed, the brain will start working well again and will no longer need cigarettes - at least at the physiological level.

In practice, very few people succeed. The insidiousness of smoking is that it puts the brain in manual control mode: a person always has a means to spur thinking here and now, albeit at the cost of reduced performance most of the time. Former smokers yearn for this sensation, and very often break down, even if they managed to last three weeks.

Most smoking cessation methods are ineffective.

For example, according to scientists from STIVORO, an anti-tobacco research center in the Netherlands, psychological assistance helps to quit smoking in only 16% of cases, and drugs - in a maximum of 24% of cases.

Today, the scientific community has high hopes for a "vaccine against smoking" - antibodies to nicotine that make tobacco use useless, since the drug binds in the blood and does not reach the brain. In clinical trials, such drugs show very good results: about half of the participants in the studies quit smoking.