Cravings Explained When You Quit Smoking Nicotine

Advice from Bee Milbourn Specialist Consultant

This section of Quit Smoking Nicotine is here because some people might visit the site wanting to know more about nicotine and it’s effects.

You don’t have to read this but if you do it might really help you to understand just how tricky nicotine is – but if you are sick and tired of hearing all this health stuff,  click away now.  But if it was my body ….. I’d want to know.

What Exactly is Nicotine?

Nicotine is a liquid organic compound of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sometimes oxygen which together act as a stimulant in a similar way to the caffeine in coffee. In the tobacco plant it is about 5% by weight but in a cigarette there is only 8 to 20 milligrams depending on the brand. A tiny 1 mg is absorbed by your body from one cigarette and it is this tiny microscopic droplet which smokers allow to control their lives.

What happens in the body when you quit smoking nicotine.

As we will see tricky is a great way to describe little devil. It is easily absorbed through the lungs, the mucous membranes of the nose and throat and even through the skin. Once inside it hitches a ride in the small blood vessels lining in the tissues of the respiratory system carried via the bloodstream firstly to the brain and on to the rest of your body.­ When you inhale your lungs, which are lined with  millions  tiny air sacs, provide the perfect vehicle for the nicotine to be absorbed quickly and go directly to your brain,  and that makes you feel fantastic, at least it does until it stops.

When you don’t give your brain it’s fix regularly it lets you know. It would stamp it’s feet if it had any and scream and scream and scream until it’s was sick like a toddler screaming for a candy bar at the mall.

It takes 10 to 15 seconds from the first puff for smokers to be in nicotine heaven, but nicotine is a flighty friend, one, two, three, four, five , six seconds later it’s out of the brain and on its way to your liver and your liver is not so pleased as your brain to have the job of getting shot of it.

It makes a good job of it though.  Together with help from your lungs and your kidneys you will soon be flushing that droplet down the pan.

Almost all gone withing six hours – so where is the problem?

Well it may not be around for long but while it is it decides to literally change the way your brain and your body function.  The effect is both to stimulate and relax you, sometimes at the same moment.  It is quite different to alcohol your first drink may loosen you up a bit and give you ‘dutch courage’, but after several drinks, you’re usually pretty comatose.

Nicotine on the other hand releases a generous dose of  the “fight-or-flight” hormone adrenaline. What follows is rapid heartbeat, increased blood pressure and rapid shallow breathing.  The same symptoms as if you were running scared, frightened, stressed! And you thought you smoked to relax  – ha.

The sneaky little droplet has blocked you insulin, flooding your blood with more sugar, suppressed your hunger (that’s not good either because it’s not a healthy weight loss).  Your ‘bad’ cholesterol increases damages your arteries and making it more likely that you will have a stroke. Oh dear and all this for six seconds of feeling ‘good’.

Quit Smoking Nicotine and the Brain.

Your brain is the key player in nicotine’s action. This bit is a bit complicated so I will try to keep it simple. The bottom line is that nicotine makes you feel energised by mimicking a natural body chemical which stimulates you, re energises you improves your reaction time and your ability to  focus, making you feel like you can work better. Whats more this stuff makes you feel at peace and happy by promoting the ‘reward’ chemical dopamine.  It acts as a pain killer too, just like morphine, and can give you a ‘high’.

Sounds like this stuff should be on prescription

Maybe If you have Alzheimer’s Disease it can slow the rate of decline, if you have Tourette’s it can give some relief from the twitching associated with that disease But……… But, for those of us without those conditions, the cost in health for that six second high is far  far worse than any benefits.

The main issue isn’t the nicotine though that’s bad enough, it’s the other stuff, the 4000 carcinogenic compounds that get delivered in the same parcel, chemicals that cause cancer, emphysema, heart disease and stroke.

The biggest problem with nicotine is it does make you feel good and you become dependent on smoking or chewing tobacco to get that good feeling again and again and again.

Addiction and Withdrawal

It may surprise you to hear, it did me,  that experts are not agreed on whether nicotine is addictive or not.  Billions of dollars have been spent on research and the  medical and scientific communities concluded that, yes,  nicotine is most definitely addictive both psychologically and physiologically. I think we knew that, the question is how strong is that addiction and can it be removed with the right kind of intervention.

Nicotine’s effects are short-lived, 6 seconds in the brain and lasting only 40 minutes to a couple of hours in any meaningful way in the body. This leads people to smoke  periodically throughout the day to dose themselves with nicotine.  Add to this the fact that you can become tolerant to nicotine’s effects — you need to use more and more nicotine to reach the same degree of stimulation or relaxation — and you can see how people would quickly move from smoking one cigarette to a pack a day habit.

What happens when smokers abruptly quit smoking nicotine?

While you’re using nicotine-containing products, your body adapts the way it works to compensate for the effects of the nicotine. Put simply your body says “OK – you getting that stuff for yourself so I will stop producing the natural stuff for you.  Suddenly deprived of the artificial stuff it takes es time for the body to kick into gear again and you feel irritable, anxious, depressed  and you crave for a ‘hit’ It doesn’t take long before  these symptoms subside but for many smokers, even a day without nicotine is a challenge. Every year, millions of people try to break the nicotine habit; only 10 percent of them succeed. Most people throw in the towel after less than a week of trying, because they let nicotine win.

Here is the good news – it doesn’t have to be that way, when you quit smoking nicotine, with the right help, craving can be at worst manageable and at best non existent and that is what my program does – it takes away the struggle.

This unique Stop Smoking Program which is a copy of my super successful hospital program tailored to help you quit is available either as a download or shipped as a 4 X CD set and at the unbelievable price of just $27.00 for the download and $47.00 + ($7.25 p&p). That’s just $54.25 to quit smoking for life. – £27.00 if you download now.

I hope you enjoy Quit Smoking Nicotine and that it is useful to you.

To your health, wealth and happiness

Bee