Why Some People Just Can’t Stop Smoking

Whether you’ve been smoking for years and know that you need to quit, or you’ve only been at it for a little while and are already starting to feel the pangs of addiction, you already know that giving up smoking once you’re addicted is an extremely difficult thing to do. You may wonder what makes quitting seem a like a breeze from some and more like fight that can’t be won for others.

There are several reasons why some people cannot seem to kick the habit, and with a better understanding of these reasons, you can reach a better understanding of this condition that afflicts so many people. With national awareness on the rise and the figure that one in three smokers who do not quit will eventually die of the damage they do to their bodies, it can be difficult to understand why they might not just stop. While many do try and stop, it can seem impossible.

To understand the nature of cigarette addiction, it is important to understand nicotine. Nicotine is the substance in cigarettes that makes it addictive, and when it enters the bloodstream, it creates a stimulating effect on the brain. Not only can it calm you down when you are upset, it can also affect your hormones and your respiratory system. The nicotine is effective because it stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain. This, along with the chemical dependency, bring smokers back for more. Nicotine is a drug that you can become inured to based on exposure and eventually, more will need to be taken to get the same effect. Many people are addicted to the calmness that smoking brings on; it can be quite hard to give up and it settles in slowly enough that you might not even know that it’s happening.

One reason that scientists have pinpointed that might explain the difficulty in giving up cigarettes actually lies in the DNA. Scientists have identified more than 200 genes quitters do not share with non-quitters. Given this number, it is possible to see that there is a great deal that might be happening beneath the surface. While this data is far from conclusive when it comes to which gene might be the culprit, it puts us one step closer to figuring out the ins and outs of cigarette addiction. When you consider that more than 80 percent of the people who try to quit will relapse, it is time to start looking for a correlating factor that could provide a solution to this problem.

Similarly, researchers have also found that injury or trauma to a certain part of the brain will instantly destroy a life-long smoking habit. This research, originally centered on stroke patients, showed that when damaged, the insula, a small region underneath the frontal lobes, could effectively end the addiction to cigarettes. This break through affects all sorts of addiction research, but smoking is the one that it has proven to be effective with. Like the research in genetics, this fact brings about the idea that the roots of addiction to cigarettes go a lot deeper than might have been originally believed.

When you take into consideration the damage that you are doing to your body and the issues that you will cause your friends and loved ones, there is only one answer to when you should stop smoking: You should have stopped smoking yesterday.