Dopamine & Addiction
I been send this video on Dopamine & Addiction https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=J_3CRmd5pTo by a friend, the link was youtube, I changed it to invidious. Very informative video : the Dopamine hormone got me worried : I'm addicted to tobacco and spicy food - never knew it has direct relation to the Dopamine, smoking increases the Dopamine level by 250% for short duration of time. I'm trying to quit smoking for the last 8 years.
I am a member!
Hi, Hikaru I am glad you shared this with the community.
I understand the struggle, as I am an asthmatic who tried many many times to quit smoking over the years.
Now I am smoke free for a little over three years. Even today sometimes I feel the need to smoke... After many attempts I know now how difficult it is.
What help me was that I started to cycle and exercise daily, mostly doing yoga (maybe this was replacing dopamine?). Also I attended support groups and talk with others who had a smoking addiction problem like me. First I quit smoking in the house, next I went outside the building to smoke. As I was making it more difficult for me to smoke, I went from 35 cigarettes per day to 8 then 4. Sometime I went up, but I was fighting it everyday. Like you in the past 8 years.
I believe that this is the trick, to keep fighting :)
Good luck
Thank You!
What help me was that I started to cycle and exercise daily, mostly doing yoga (maybe this was replacing dopamine?).
If you put your mind into displeasure by doing physical activity, your brain will compensate afterwards by releasing Dopamine : a pleasure hormone. If you artificially increase Dopamine level by smoking, your brain will compensate afterwards by stopping releasing Dopamine. I smoke from 15 to 20 cigarettes per day, eat spicy food - causing me heartburn - can not resist doing it. I will be buying Anna's book on Dopamine.
Did not smoke for 1 day then smoked 6 cigarettes in a row. Does not feel right.
It took me several attempts before I managed to quit smoking. The last failed attempts let me clueless about why I would eventually go to the pub get that beer and that fateful cig, so I dug deeper into the literature about quitting smoking (there is a lot, we are not alone here) and concluded that what was sending me back to those drugs was less the nicotine shot than the longer lasting effects of two anti-depressant molecules produced by incomplete combustion (armane and norarmane, say hello if you meet them). If you kick those anti-depressants, the serotonin reuptake mechanism will take time to adjust, which will create a slump in your serotonin levels, and possibly cause depressive symptoms.
So I took to running, following a program that takes you from a half-an-hour walk twice a week, all the way up to running 45 minutes every other day. That was about ten years ago, now I feel a complete stranger to smoking, it is just what some other people do. At the time, I would never have bet on ever succeeding quitting the habit, it just felt too strong an addiction.
Of course, getting the dopamine shot through exercizing also helped, to the point that I could feel my body asking for it as I was progressing through the jogging program, but the serotonine balancing proved to be the crucial factor in my case. We need to inform ouselves fully, and to learn to know ourselves better. No two people have the same sensitivity to various molecules, some people just quit smoking cold turkey never to smoke again.
I was never a successful smoker. Every time I would try to smoke I would almost immediately get a horrible throat infection for 2-3 weeks. So, my choice was not to smoke or die, basically. By the time I was about 19 years old I was pretty well done with trying.
>"So I took to running, following a program that takes you from a half-an-hour walk twice a week, all the way up to running 45 minutes every other day. That was about ten years ago, now I feel a complete stranger to smoking, it is just what some other people do."
I think this may have had something to do with it for me. I was always a long distance runner since I was about 10 years old, running several miles most days by the time I was in high school, and my lungs were used to taking in as much oxygen as I could manage. I think that's why I would get so sick when I would try to smoke - my lungs were looking for oxygen and were strongly rejecting the smoke.
That thing is total rat poison, your body's reaction was the correct one: panic mode.
Thank You!