What does cigarette smoking do for people?
I've never smoked, but I've been around people that do. What do people feel during/after smoking? It doesn't seem to make people high or hallucinate or anything. It maybe mildly relaxes them?
You are viewing a single comment
Nicotine creates a temporary feeling of well-being and relaxation, and increases heart rate and the amount of oxygen the heart uses. As nicotine enters the body, it causes a surge of endorphins, which are chemicals that help to relieve stress and pain and improve mood.
After you've experienced all the above, it's incredibly difficult to stop. Never start smoking!
In retrospect it’s amazing how the nicotine addiction causes you to accept hocking up giant wads of brownish-black phlegm every morning as entirely normal.
I feel extremely lucky that smoking only seems to give me anxiety.
I smoke a cigar once every year or so and this sounds about right to me.
Huh. TIL
Only thing nicotine ever made me feel was lightheaded
Who are you the Marlboro Man? Nothing you wrote is correct at all. You don't get any feeling other than nicotine withdrawal. Relieving the nicotine withdrawal will of course feel good but if you never had any nicotine in your body to begin with, nicotine does nothing to make you feel good. It does not cause a surge of endorphins. For sure it makes your heart rate go up, because it contracts your blood veins, but that's not good either...
Nicotine feels great. It's why I still crave it after giving it up a while back. Everything else involved is horrible but there's a reason people get hooked to begin with.
7 years smoke free still crave it, but it nasty and I have desire to start smoking again. Definitely an addiction that hard to overcome.
Gave up 27 years ago, got cancer anyway, still have dreams about smoking. Once you’re hooked, the cravings never go away.
Thanks for confirming my fear. 20 years for me. My dad been quite for going on 20 and only smoked for like 15 years and still gets craving.
I did not find that at all.
I'm sorry you have that - I didn't. I was quit with no cravings for five years, what got me back in was spliffs with tobacco. (Now I vape, because I do intend to occasionally smoke weed with tobacco.)
The reason you still have cravings is because you never deprogrammed yourself. You still associate gaspers with relief, relaxation, pleasure.
If you can reframe the sensation of smoking as the tense tickly feeling of "god I could use a fag", which no-one would claim to enjoy, the rest is plain sailing, and within a few weeks you'll be past any cravings. The bulk of the cravings are done within a few days.
I don't mean to suggest that it's easy to quit - most people fail. But the trick is not too withstand cravings for the rest of your life, it's too break the paradoxical association of fags with pleasure, which is a one-time thing.
I'm going to disagree with you on that. Prior to smoking cigarettes I would have a cigar every couple months. This wasn't nearly enough to develop dependency, but I could feel a sense of well-being and relaxation when I had one.
Same. What @willya@lemmyf.uk said (temporary feeling of well-being and relaxation, stress relief, improved mood) describes rather well how it felt back then for me.
Back when I did smoke I only ever really got that feeling from the first cigarette of the day, which is probably why I didn't have trouble quitting.
I progressed from cigars to cigarettes and that effect eventually got replaced by a more basic feeling of satiating a craving.
No but my dad let me redeem his Marlboro miles when I was a kid.
I have a folding bike that was originally meant to be part of a Marlsboro rewards program. Apparently smokers weren't all that interested in exercise. Who knew?