Quitting Smoking
When you’re quitting smoking you need to understand how nicotine effects your body, to help you understand and control your cravings. It’s not so much the amount of nicotine in your blood that you want or think you need: you can hardly tell it’s there. What you really want are the sensations you get, for just a few seconds, when a dose of nicotine is entering your body.
You know the feeling. For a moment your heart races and you feel a dizzy kind of intoxication. Extra adrenalin runs through your body. It’s a feeling of excitement, a very brief ‘lift’ or ‘high’. It’s a nicotine buzz.
In a scientific experiment designed to test smokers addictions, the nicotine was delivered gradually, over one hour. If it had been administered quickly the subjects would have been aware of it and it would have felt to them like smoking, delivering a buzz and thus satisfying their desire to smoke.
If you have ever tried using nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), such as gum, patches or lozenges, you will know what I’m talking about. It delivers the nicotine too slowly to be truly satisfying. Some people can get a very mild buzz from it, and can even get hooked on it, just as some get hooked on other slow-delivery methods, like non-inhaling pipe and cigar smokers.
Nicotine in your blood, even if delivered very gradually, will make your heart beat a little bit faster, among other things, but the effect it has is much more subtle. For the vast majority of cigarette smokers, the buzz is the most important thing, and you only get that from a sudden, rapidly absorbed dose of nicotine.
Unfortunately this increased heart rate isn’t real energy – otherwise athletes would smoke during marathons. It’s a false stimulation, and like all artificial highs it’s immediately followed by a depressed state. To make matters worse, cigarette smoke includes many poisons too, so although the heart is beating raster there is less energy-producing oxygen in the blood. This is why most smokers find they have more energy when they’ve stopped.