Nicotines Effects on the Brain & Body & How to Quit Smoking or Vaping

This explains the decrease in penile girth effect of nicotine—in particular, nicotine ingested by smoking or vaping. That's right, smoking and vaping reduces penis size and also will have damaging effects on the blood lining endothelial tissue. So, over time, it actually is impairing blood's ability to get to the penis chronically as well as to other organs in the body.

Nicotine triggers the release of dopamine from the nucleus accumbens. This is what gives nicotine its rewarding properties. It increases motivation. It tends to give a not-so-subtle but very transient increase in feelings of well-being and alertness and motivation. And that's because of the increase in dopamine caused by nicotine directly within the nucleus accumbens.

Dipping, or chewing tobacco, is known to cause a 50-fold—yes, 50-fold—increase in mouth cancers, things like leukoplakia, and is just, generally, terrible for your health...

For every pack of cigarettes smoked per day, we can reliably estimate a 14-year reduction in lifespan.

One of the major important differences between vaping and cigarette smoking is that the onset of dopamine release from vaping is faster. And even a subtle increase in the rate at which dopamine increases in the mesolimbic reward pathway can make a given amount of nicotine much more habit-forming and addictive.

When you ingest nicotine by smoking nicotine-containing tobacco, or if you place tobacco in contact with the mucosal lining of the nasal passages of the mouth, it takes about 2-15 minutes for that nicotine to enter the bloodstream. Smoking hits the bloodstream faster, vaping even faster ... Placing tobacco directly in contact with the mucosal lining is going to be the slowest.

If we were to zoom out and just think about the effects of nicotine, we now have a very clear picture: Reward pathways are turned on, attention is turned on, alertness is turned on, you feel better than you felt a few minutes ago, your blood pressure is up, your heart rate is up, your preparedness for thinking is elevated as well, and yet, your body is somewhat relaxed.

Using a specific form of hypnosis, people can achieve complete and total cessation of cigarette smoking—and there's no reason to believe this doesn't also carry over to vaping—through one single hypnosis session.

Alpha GPC taken in 300mg form 10-30 minutes before a bout of cognitive work or a bout of physical work will increase your focus by way of increasing acetylcholine and, to some extent, increasing epinephrine as well.

He also pointed out that the data on nicotine, specifically, are pointing to the fact that nicotine can be, can be, protective against certain forms of cognitive impairment. And that is why he continued to chew nicotine-containing gum. And he swore by the focus-enhancing and motivation-enhancing effects of nicotine-containing gum.

Indeed, nicotine will increase metabolism and reduce hunger in large part by binding to this alpha-4 beta-2 receptor ... If you've ever heard that nicotine kills the appetite, indeed it does.

Nicotine increases acetylcholine and, thereby, focus and concentration and mental performance—not by changing the neural circuits that are activated per se but rather by making more acetylcholine available at those release sites.

Typically, the effects of nicotine will come on in about 2-15 minutes as I mentioned before and then will last anywhere from about 30-45 minutes.

There may, in fact, be some benefit to ingesting nicotine from time to time provided that you are not still developing your brain ... Certainly for people before puberty, during puberty, and probably for the next 15-20 years after puberty, avoiding nicotine is probably a good idea.

It has been estimated that cigarettes contain anywhere from 4,000 to 7,000 toxins.

It's very, very clear that smoking, vaping, dipping, and snuffing are among the worst things that we can do for our health. They are among the leading causes of preventable death and debilitating life conditions.

Nicotine is not the cause of cancer. Nicotine is not the carcinogen; it's the other things in tobacco or associated with the nicotine delivery device that are causing cancer...

The success rate of quitting smoking when people try to go just cold turkey, just quit with no assistance whatsoever... is exceedingly low. It's 5%.

Nicotine can be very powerful as a mood modulator, and any people who have tried to quit nicotine, mainly through the form of smoking, will find that their mood can drop substantially.

Nicotine is... also used as a pesticide because it can dramatically disrupt the nervous system of insects. It can render them infertile, which is not to say that it renders humans infertile ... It can make certain insects infertile. It can actually disrupt their motor function and their brain function.

I think we can really place nicotine right up there at the top right next to caffeine as the molecule that has fundamentally changed human evolution, human consciousness, and human experience.