Why E-Cigarette is so Addictive?
I like to eat chocolate and drink coffee but I can go without these for days or even weeks without any discomfort. Some people are addicted to chocolate and coffee as I used to be to vaping.
They can’t go a day without their fix. We are all addicted to something so is it only the chemicals that control us or is it something else.
Nicotine activates reward pathways making you feel good. Nicotine stimulates a feeling of happiness. Maybe in the beginning cigarette had such an effect on me but at the end it was a different relationship.
E-cigarette was not so much making me feel good as I felt bad without it. It seems to be the same story with all drugs. Even exercising is actually a drug.
Runners start running to improve their health, achieve a goal. As it becomes a habit they can’t stop. They need to exercise because if they skip a day they start to feel bad physically.
People exercise because they feel better and even euphoric. I’m talking about the so called “runners high”. It is called this way because it really is the same thing as drug “high”.
The key is endorphin. It’s the “carrot” of your body. It’s the happiness drug that you get every day. Not always it is in high doses. Tasty cake triggers your pleasure but if that cake produced a drizzle, drugs produce a flood.
This is important because you need to get one thing out of your head – nicotine is not as strong a stimulant as morphine or cocaine. When I vaped I actually searched for exactly this in Google: “nicotine addictive as cocaine” and I was sooo happy to find an article that "proved" to me that quitting smoking is the same as quitting hard drugs.
But it is not! I never tried morphine but I imagine it should have a much stronger high than I used to get from e-cigarette. Face it, nicotine is just not that strong of a stimulant. That doesn’t make it less addictive but realizing this will help you quit.
If you ever had hallucinations due to smoking please let me know but I never experienced that. The only way vaping will make you hallucinate is if you get dehydrated to a dangerous level.
But that was not the question. The question was why e-cigarette is so addictive. Nicotine is not as strong of a stimulant to get you hooked only on the merit of being a drug so it must be something in addition to that.
As you smoke day after day, year after year you form the second ingredient – the habit.
My day used to start with a e-cigarette. That was my morning ritual and that's how I told myself and my body that the day has started. At work it was the same story.
At regular time intervals I would stand and go for a smoke. The immediate question when planning on quitting was “So, now what? I won’t do brakes?”. Should I now work without taking a brake as it seemed that there was not much else to do except to have a smoke.
Every habit is formed by you and you can stop any habit you have or create a new one. To tell you the truth, it felt weird for the first few days not to vape at work.
It does take willpower to break the habit. I substituted smoking with a carrot. Think of what you could substitute your habit with.
By the way, carrot was a short term solution. Now I just make a cup of tea or chat with colleagues.
It is very common to get an advice to come up with a habit that will replace old habit but don’t force anything. For a habit to stick you need either to use a lot of your will power or for that activity to feel easy and natural.
As a portion of your willpower is used up by quitting I recommend looking for something that is easy, enjoyable and won't require you to fight yourself to do it.
Sport is a habit that requires willpower. As you start doing exercises your whole body is resisting this “torture”. It takes time and effort for it to become at first comfortable and even more time to get pleasure from doing it.
Smoking and later vaping became a habit because it was easy. But is it really comfortable and does it really give you any pleasure?
Let’s look at comfortable. On a nice day it is comfortable but even when the conditions are great you still experience discomfort as you are not allowed to use e-cigarette in public spaces. How comfortable is it to stand in a cold of winter, in a rain or while sun is burning you?
I’m an ex-smoker and trust me – it is fun to watch smokers during bad weather. If you’re having bad weather right now look at those poor bastards. See how funny and pathetic it looks when you look at it from a side. It’s cold or it’s raining and you sit comfortably as you watch a smoker fight the elements.
The only thing that makes such moments a bit less fun is the thought: “Damn, I used to be one of them. Why was I doing that to myself? “.
So, smoking is not comfortable but what about the pleasure. You can find tons of publications that prove that nicotine is a stimulant that works like cocaine.
Yes, nicotine does affect the brain in a similar way to opiates. But that’s meaningless. My body works same as the body of Michael Phelps. My car works the same way Nascar car does. One is more powerful than the other.
If eating donuts would give me an orgasm and a piece of cake would make me feel happy – I would have a much harder time giving up donuts. Nicotine is just not that strong.
Effects like better ability to concentrate and pleasure which are attributed to nicotine are very short term and those aren’t even actual positive effects at all.
I mentioned that I felt that smoking wasn’t about feeling good but about not feeling bad. This is a huge difference. One thing is to do something because you enjoy it and completely different to do it because you don’t want to feel bad.
Smoking is the latter. As soon as you finish vaping, withdrawal kicks in. For you this is good and bad news.
Good, because when you quit it takes on average only three days for your body to get rid of all nicotine. Bad, because as long as you keep on vaping this means that you need to smoke very regularly.
Remember, you need to do this not to "calm down" or experience pleasure. You need to smoke regularly to temporarily stop the cravings.
E-cigarette doesn’t increase your ability to concentrate or improve your mood. Nicotine just temporarily removed the symptoms of withdrawal which are caused by nicotine itself.
Nicotine only perpetuates the addiction. It doesn’t give you anything positive in return. Quit and stop being a slave to this habit.
Finally we arrived at the answer to the question of this chapter. Nicotine is addictive because it keeps you on a short leash making you consume nicotine very regularly thus forming a strong habit.
This is very good news. It makes quitting so much easier because that short leash means that you won't have to run far to get away.