For many smokers, it is the nicotine hit that causes them to smoke their cigarettes and ignore all warnings about the dangers of smoking. For others, the root of their smoking habit might be more complex. Personally as a smoker, I believe the word “habit” to be important here. The addictive nature of nicotine (which also happens to be a poison) is so well documented that it has to be taken as fact, but are there other reasons for being a confirmed smoker?
Non-nicotine Reasons For Smoking
- Peer pressure, usually only applicable to younger persons and possibly on the decline as more people adopt the lifestyle of never starting to smoke.
- Something to occupy your hands, getting out the pack and opening it to extract a cigarette. Then, lighting it and holding it while you smoke it – may be better than fiddling something in your fingers while in the company of others.
- Satisfaction from inhaling; a cigarette replaces the security factor of that pacifier that, perhaps, conditions us to find an unwarranted sense of comfort and security in an action.
- Simple enjoyment and a perceived liking for the taste, which help you remain calm and relaxed – all of which could be referred back to a craving for the nicotine hit.
Alternate Ways To Obtain The Nicotine Hit
A number of the best quit smoking products involve saving you from the pollutants, carcinogenic and toxic substances known to be in tobacco smoke without trying to wean you away from nicotine itself. The theory being that it’s not the nicotine that kills you, it’s all the other “stuff” in a cigarette.
However, smoking substitutes like nicotine patches do not replace the other “things” that smokers feel they get from their cigarettes. Getting your hit from chewing nicotine gum possibly requires you to be a bit of a gum addict to start with. Sucking on a mock cigarette holder to extract nicotine from a reservoir inside, it does give a little more than straight nicotine alone; a factor appreciated by followers of the current cigarette replacement craze; where one substitutes tobacco smoke with a nicotine laced vapor that can be sucked out of the so called electronic cigarettes (which provide, possibly, the closest substitute for smoking a real cigarette).
