Ask any smoker. Why do you smoke? They’ll say:

It helps me relieve stress.

It helps with boredom.

It relaxes me.

It helps me concentrate.

Can you see how ‘Relaxing’ and ‘Concentrating’ are complete opposites of each other? Then how is the cigarette able to do both?

Here’s the truth: It doesn’t. It causes the stress and the lack of concentration in the first place.

To fully understand how it does that, you have to know a bit about nicotine, one of the 400 chemicals found in cigarettes. Nicotine is a fast-acting chemical, reaching your brain in 10-20 seconds (which is the ‘kick’ you feel when you smoke) and nicotine levels in your body fall to half in 20 minutes. As soon as the nicotine starts to leave your body, the effects also wear off.  This is when you experience ‘withdrawal’. And your brain starts craving for more. These cravings can be mild to intense, and manifest themselves as restlessness, increased appetite, irritability, inability to concentrate, and much more.

So if you are a smoker, and you experience these feelings everyday, you should know that this is not your body’s natural state, but actually ‘mini-withdrawals’ that your brain experiences between cigarettes.

But we as smokers don’t realise this process. We think that our body is genuinely feeling restless, or bored, without realising that its the cigarette that causes all these feelings in the first place.

And that’s why smokers smoke – To get rid of the unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. Anybody who tells you otherwise is either unaware of this process, or is lying. Trust me, I know – I was a smoker once.

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