Why Are Cigarettes So Addictive?

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Lots of people swear they’re going to give up cigarettes for good.

Maybe it’s a New Year’s resolution or just a desire to get healthier, stop spending so much money or have better breath.

Yet, despite just over 55% of smokers saying they had tried to quit smoking in the past year, only 7.5% were successful, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The willpower to give up cigarettes, for many, is ultimately overridden by cravings or habit, the CDC noted.

Why are cigarettes so hard to quit? They’re actually addictive, according to the CDC, triggering the release of feel-good chemicals while changing your brain over time.

Why are cigarettes so addictive? The main culprit is nicotine, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

“The measure of a drug’s addictiveness is not how much pleasure [or reward] it causes but how reinforcing it is — that is, how much it leads people to keep using it,” NIDA Director Dr. Nora Volkow said in a recent blog post.

“Nicotine does not produce the kind of euphoria or impairment that many other drugs like opioids and marijuana do,” Volkow added. “Yet nicotine’s powerful ability to reinforce its relatively mild rewards results in 480,000 deaths annually.”

Smoking cigarettes is connected with such health issues as cancer, lung disease and heart problems, according to the CDC.

1. What is nicotine? Is nicotine a stimulant?

Ashtray and cigarettes. Tobacco smoking. Nicotine addiction

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Yes, it is, according to the Alcohol and Drug Foundation, which called it the “main psychoactive ingredient in tobacco.”

Nicotine is a chemical compound found in the tobacco plant, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

All tobacco products contain this compound, from cigarettes to smokeless tobacco to cigars, according to the FDA. E-cigarettes can also contain nicotine.

Giving those up can cause the brain to react by feeling anxious or upset, and finding concentration or sleep more difficult.

Nicotine reaches the brain within seconds after inhaling it, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS).

Cigarettes can also become a part of a person’s daily habits, according to the CDC, layering on this emotional component to the addiction. That might look like thinking you want to smoke while having coffee, after your meal, while feeling stress or when feeling relaxed, the CDC noted.

Symptoms of withdrawal can include sadness, grouchiness, slower heart rate, weight gain and hunger, having trouble thinking clearly, difficulty sleeping and feeling restless, according to smokefree.gov.

2. How to stop smoking cigarettes

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Fewer people have tried to quit smoking during the pandemic, according to an ACS report recently published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

"These results remind us how critical it is for clinicians and health care systems to support persons who smoke with evidence-based quitting strategies," Dr. William Dahut, chief scientific officer at the ACS, said in a news release on the study.

One future solution to quitting smoking may be switching to a cigarette that has less nicotine.

How much nicotine is in a cigarette? One that has the usual amount of nicotine contains 11.6 milligrams (mg), according to a study that was published recently in the journal PLOS One.

A low-nicotine cigarette, as studied by researchers including Jonathan Foulds, a professor of public health sciences and psychiatry at Penn State University School of Medicine, contained just 0.2 mg of nicotine.