What A Cigarette Does To You

People have been smoking tobacco for centuries firstly because they thought it was a medicine that was good for them and then because of it’s mood-altering ability. You can also chew tobacco and smoke it in cigars or a pipe but the most common for of smoking nowadays is through cigarettes.

Tobacco contains over 4,000 different chemicals and elements, these are taken into the body when it’s burnt/smoked and inhaled, these chemicals have the mood-altering affect on the body but many of them are harmful. When the smoke cools inside you, it is in your lungs and here it condenses and forms a brown tar, which contains carcinogens that can cause cancer. It also contains poisonous stuff like carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide.

On average the five minutes it takes you to smoke a cigarette, your life will shorten by the same amount.

If you think about this and also the other disease that smoking causes (see article…how smoking affects the body) you begin to wonder why you or anyone else would ever smoke. Well it’s the evil and vicious chemicals, you see, they produce feelings and sensations that can be pleasurable. If you smoke you find you can get two differing sensations when you’re puffing away, sometimes it can be relaxing and can make you less anxious whilst at other times it can be bracing and enlivening. This is down to most addictive of these chemicals, the drug nicotine.

Nicotine, chemically, is a poisonous alkaloid (other alkaloids include cocaine and morphine), which when inhaled in cigarette smoke has the major effects on your mood. When you drag back a cigarette, the smoke goes into the lungs and here the nicotine diffuses into the blood causing tingling all over the body. It’s also the substance in cigarettes that gets you hooked as it produces these pleasurable effects and when you stop having it in you, by quitting smoking, you receive nasty withdrawal symptoms, which make you wanna smoke again.

The beauty of Nicotine’s ability to suck people in comes in three ways; if you inhale a cigarette in short puffs nicotine acts as a stimulant giving you that extra ‘go’ and ‘buzz’, whilst slowing dragging on a cig makes it act as tranquilliser, making you calm, relaxed and less anxious, add to that it suppresses your appetite making the you eat less, and some see it as a way of losing weight. The problem with this is that nicotine stimulates the central nervous system, raising your blood pressure and heart rate, whilst boosting adrenaline production and affecting your overall metabolism. In the long run this harms your nervous system, heart and blood vessels and causes high blood pressure, which is bad news for your body and you health. Also relying on cigarettes as a means of losing weight is extremely dangerous and should definitely be avoided.

So although it has these brief pleasurable side effects, judging by the harm we have seen here and also in the long-term effects article, is it really worth puffing on the cigs?

If you or anybody you know are having problems with smoking try the following places for help and support @ the Addictions Links Page.

by ChrisM