All stages of the psychological nicotine addiction take place in the same part of the brain, the so called Nucleus Accumbens – The brain’s "Reward Centre". In this article we are going to explain, how nicotine manipulates your brain, just to make it think that your body desperately needs it.
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The reward centre in the brain associates vital activities in our body like for example eating, drinking and sex with a feeling of pleasure. To make one feel those feelings the brain produces different messengers, especially dopamine. Nicotine increases the production of dopamine. The reward centre associates the circumstance of the nicotine consumption with its specific effect – the release of dopamine into the body. So nicotine elicits high activity in the reward centre of the brain. A cigarette makes a smoker happy just like a good meal or a kiss. |
The good feelings which are a reward for doing certain things is directly being associated with the smoking activity. The regular smoker does always repeat his experience that smoking is something that makes him feel much better. This information is being saved in the subconscious mind and causes the so called "addiction memory". This memory becomes active whenever the level of of effective substances in the reward centre decreases, or when the smoker sees another person smoking. This is when a smoker starts feeling the urge to smoke another cigarette.
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Another aspect is the increase of the amount of nicotine receptors in the reward centre. Studies on brains of deceased smokers have shown that smokers have double as many of those receptors as non-smokers. One assumption of those studies was that smokers have as many to make it possible to produce enough dopamine for being able to react on the nicotine consumption. This phenomenon is reversible: When a smoker quits smoking the amount of those receptors in the brain decreases back to normal. However the addiction memory seems to have an irreversible component which can explain the difficulty of a withdrawal. Commensurate to the level of the addiction the amount of receptors in the brain increases and the receptors become more and more impassible. Then the brain needs more of the drug. |
It is obvious, that the brain is being cheated by nicotine and that nicotine makes it think and do things, it usually wouldn’t. Those effects are very characteristic for drugs.
For a successful smoking cessation the behavioural patterns have to be changed to make it easier for your brain to keep your addiction memory inactive for as long as it takes to get out of the smoking habit. Studies have shown that the chance for a successful smoking cessation increases dramatically when a smoker knows exactly what happens in his body and what nicotine does to his brain.
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