Does smoking help with anxiety, stress
It is the biggest lie about smoking that has been propagated. People smoke to deal with stress. But smoking creates stress and then intensifies your stress too.
The fact is that smoking creates additional stress in the form of cravings and intensifies your real stress. A balanced supply of nicotine in the blood is the normal state for a smoker. The level of nicotine reduces by half in an hour from smoking your last cigarette and so you crave nicotine again. Your craving to smoke is stressful to you, and you deal with this stress by smoking a cigarette. Smoking solves the problem for you it itself creates. The relief that you feel from smoking is actually the relief of your stress from the craving, but the real stress that you have in your life is still there. The reason for your stress can be your troubled relationship or the challenges at your job. Smoking doesn’t solve those problems. Smoking gives you an illusionary escape, but the stress keeps coming back as long as you do not treat the actual cause of your stress. Everyone has stress in life irrespective of being a smoker or a non-smoker. However, compared to a non-smoker, the smoker gets the illusion of the real stress getting relieved when it is actually the relief for the satisfaction of the craving.
Moreover, we breathe deeply during smoking which opens up the lungs and the heart a bit and our body gets relaxed for deep breathing and you get the illusion of relaxation.
Now let’s look at the biological process of stress. Stress is a state when the body releases hormones that increase our blood pressure, heart rate, and constrict the veins. What happens in the body when we smoke? Once inside the smoker’s bloodstream, the nicotine stimulates the body’s adrenal glands to produce more adrenaline. The adrenaline creates a “rush” that increases the smoker’s blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, respiration, and pulse rate and constriction of arteries takes place. You see, smoking is adding to the state of stress by increasing the temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, etc.
What a genius of a product this cigarette is that intensifies your stress in reality but gives you the illusion of relief. To conclude, smoking only adds to your stress and creates anxiety.
