Smoking is not really a pleasure for the senses. The first time a person is exposed to cigarette the most common thing is that they do not have a pleasant experience, tobacco has a strong smell that bothers you, when swallowing there are burns and feeling choking, however many people become addicted, get used to smoking and, in the future, have difficulty quitting smoking.
Nicotine is the substance responsible for cigarette dependence. This compound is an addictive alkaloid. After inhalation, nicotine takes about 10 seconds to reach the brain, where it stimulates dopamine production, but in the long run begins to cause the release of an increasingly smaller amount, which suffocates less, as a result, more and more people feel the need for higher doses of nicotine to produce the same effects as before.
“A cigarette defines the smoker, as the poem defines the poet. -Richard Klein-
Unlike other medications, nicotine does not cause radical behavioral changes, yet many studies have shown that tobacco addiction also influences powerful psychological factors, this habit is considered a ‘behavioral reinforcement’ without an exclusively physical addiction.
It is very common for people to start smoking in adolescence, this fact has its reasons. Tobacco and alcohol are two legal psychoactive substances, easy to buy and relatively inexpensive, a habit commonly banned by parents and teachers, and it is precisely these factors that attract young people.
In a Scientific Psychic study, it was found that these are the main reasons why people start smoking:
In short, there is a strong psychosocial component in smoking, most commonly teenagers smoke in the presence of other people and do not maintain this habit when they are alone, many of these young people stop smoking, but there is also another group that gets stuck in nicotine networks.
Several unconscious aspects of smoking are also involved. In psychoanalysis, smoking addiction is known as the expression of an oral symptom, which would represent a regression to the childhood phase of life.
Experts on the subject, such as Coderch, say it is a typical habit of people whose overprotective mothers have calmed the child by making him happy orally, that is, they calmed his anxiety by giving them food, a pleasurable action for the little ones. .
A lot of people say she wants to smoke when she’s distraught and, according to them, smoking reassures them. Some authors suggest that pulling the smoke literally, what people are doing is swallowing their aspirations, in this sense smoking would be a response to frustration, symbolically this helps to inhibit cravings.
In the same line, it has been stated that what is sought with the smoking habit, symbolically, is inspiration. The lack of ideas or resources to solve a situation unconsciously leads to smoking. It is an act that represents the desire to be inspired, but without achieving it.
For many ancient crops, tobacco is a sacred plant, intuitively these cultures knew that tobacco is an element that has positive effects on the brain, has been shown to stimulate memory, increase thinking speed and stabilize mood.
The difference between these cultures and ours is that no psychoactive substance has been inserted into consumerist logic, there are times and places for tobacco, as there are for coca leaf and other similar plants, it is common for them to be part of a collective. and well-defined rituals. In these cultures, the use of these plants aims to make people wiser. On the other hand, in today’s Western societies, people get stupider when they use them.
An old maxim says that “where there is smoke, there is fire”. This can be applied to people used to smoking. They live incorporating and releasing smoke, while tobacco burns and turns to ash.
People addicted to smoking carry inside them something that burns them, the answer is to turn it off, in the form of a cigarette, and to let it consume, one thing is certain: it is proven that when the psychological motivations of smoking disappear, nicotine addiction is overcome with relative ease. We have to think about it.