Dopamine & Addiction

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

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.