Kick Your Craving

How does nicotine addiction work?

It’s the fourth day since I last smoked a cigarette and I’ve been reading a little about how nicotine addiction works and why it can be so hard to stop smoking. One of my frustrations with trying to quit smoking is some of my non-smoking friends not realising how difficult it can be.

Logically, smoking doesn’t make sense. It costs a fortune, makes you smell bad and is likely to kill you. Why would anyone smoke in the first place?

A while back I read Allen Carr’s “EasyWay to Stop Smoking” and subsequently visited his London clinic. I wasn’t successful quitting smoking that time (obviously as I wouldn’t be writing this now) but it did change my attitudes towards smoking and helped me to understand how the addiction worked.

The basic premise of “EasyWay” is that, once you realise that smoking offers you no benefits and that although nicotine is very addictive, the genuine withdrawal symptoms are only very slight, it should be easy to stop smoking. In the book he asks you to remember the first cigarette you tasted and how disgusting it was. He then explains that nicotine addiction works roughly like this:

1. You smoke first cigarette and it tastes disgusting - you don’t believe you could ever get hooked
2. Unknown to you, you have received a massive dose of nicotine, a very powerful addictive drug and this is now rapidly leaving your body leaving you wanting more
3. You smoke more cigarettes gradually getting used to the taste, receiving further nicotine doses and therefore becoming more addicted as you go on
4. You start to associate cigarettes with relaxing you, relieving stress and a host of other things, when really all each cigarette does is relieve the craving for nicotine the last cigarette has left you with

The only way to break the cycle is to remove the psychological addiction by understanding how smoking and nicotine addiction works, and then remove the physical addiction by stopping smoking. Most nicotine leaves your body within 48 hours so in theory the real physical addiction should be over in that time.

Nice in theory and definitely changed how I viewed smoking, but it didn’t seem to quite work for me. I started smoking again a few weeks after attending the Allen Carr clinic and the follow up sessions were not as effective as the first time around.

This time I’m using nicotine patches to help relieve the cravings. They’ve helped me quit for periods of time previously and seem to reduce the withdrawal symptoms I experience. I found this article on nicotine addiction which seems to explain why.

Apparently, if you smoke for a little while, your brain changes structurally and chemically as the number of nicotine-sensitive receptors increase. This has the effect that you need ever more nicotine to satisfy cravings. Nicotine Replacement Therapy such as patches allow these receptors to still be satisfied but without getting the quick fix that a cigarette provides, effectively re-programming the way your brain deals with nicotine:

What this means is that with nicotine replacement medications, nicotine no longer provides the instant gratification that your brain craves. It’s like eating a piece of chocolate, but having to wait minutes or hours to taste it! For most people, if you don’t get the pleasurable flavor immediately, then it’s not worth eating.

The last part of the article worried me a little but also gave some insight into why I never seem to be able to have “just one cigarette”:

Once your brain realizes that nicotine no longer delivers that “quick fix,” the number of receptors that respond to nicotine will gradually return to normal levels. But there’s a catch — they never go away completely. Many are merely dormant, so to speak, and they always retain the memory of the effects of nicotine. That’s what makes “just one puff” such a slippery slope once you’ve quit — even months or years later.

So, my brain is programmed to be addicted to nicotine forever. Great! The good news is, as long as I keep away from the idea of having “just the one”, I should be free of any withdrawal symptoms fairly quickly.

Photo by StreetFly JZ.