Word of the Day: Mercy - Compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one's power to punish or harm. Health Cookie #15: Tobacco and Nicotine can be a complex topic. On the one hand, Cigarettes and Cigars are objectively bad for people, as smoke causes damage to the body and brain. But on the other hand, neuroscientists have proven that Nicotine has a neuro-protective effect on the brain, improving plasticity, cognition, learning, memory, and overall brain function. But Nicotine itself is also extraordinarily addictive, which is going to reduce your neurological integrity to some degree in how it manipulates your emotional mapping and dopamine systems, and compels you toward a chemical dependence of it. Truth is there are many ways of improving neuroplasticity and boosting your cognition, memory, learning and overall brain function; Cold Showers, Fasting, Meditation and Exercise come to mind, only they come without the added caveat of inducing a chemical need within you that can negatively impact how you treat people whenever you're going through withdrawals. Not only does Nicotine make you withdrawal when you go without it for a prolonged period of time, which adversely effects your social interactions and may make you less kind toward family and friends at times, it also has a negative impact on the Autonomic Nervous System, which is responsible for involuntary biological functions such as Heart Rate, Blood Pressure, Respiration, Digestion, and Sexual Arousal. That is to say, if you go without Nicotine for a while, and you're craving it, then your heart rate becomes irregular, your blood pressure destabilizes, your digestion becomes inefficient resulting in excessive gas, burping and softer stools, and you'll be less intimate with your partner, as well as more emotionally irritable and more inclined to be harsh or rude towards other people even if you ought not be - even if you don't want to be. As a result of this, most people view the decision to quit smoking as a nigh insurmountable task, because it would effect too many various aspects of their personal and professional lives if they merely attempted it - and they might fail the attempt, making it all for naught in the end. But this is why Nicotine, in and of itself, is a horrible thing for you: Not only can you can get whatever Nicotine gives you by other, frankly healthier means, but once you're Nicotine's prisoner, it's extraordinarily difficult to break out of that perdition. In a previous Health Cookie we covered BDNF, Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (Health Cookie #2). BDNF is much in the same vein as Nicotine regarding Neuroplasticity and mental improvement, so there's really no upside to using Nicotine instead of using a Cold Shower, Intermittent Fasting, Meditation or Exercise to achieve the same result of acquiring greater neurological capability. You're simply shooting yourself in the foot by smoking instead, and reducing your capabilities in life. I say this as somebody who has struggled with cigarette use since my teen years. I often smoke for 3-4 months of every year, then I have to endure multiple pain-staking attempts to quit, and it's not painful for just me but also for my wife, too. The difficult part for me is that my mom is apathetic about smoking, and always has cartons upon cartons of cheap smokes in the house that I'm permitted to take, so I have unlimited access, and although I can temper myself and discipline myself for a significant chunk of every year, I always seem to break eventually. I'd much rather have never entered this Nicotine-centric prison in the first place, and I pray for the day that I find the strength to just stop for good and never go back. When I do smoke, I keep my numbers low, usually only having an average of 3 cigarettes per day, depending on the day, but that's the best I can do for myself and my health sometimes. The best number is absolute zero, where cigarettes-per-day are concerned. I can quit weed within one week, cease my desire of it and feel better for it in extremely short order; But quitting cigarettes literally requires months of physiological, gastrointestinal and psychological upset, even when you only smoke an average of 3 per day. Yet despite everything it takes away from me, I always eventually end up wanting to go back to smoking, once life has felt too arduous for too long of a stretch. If there's one piece of advice that I need young readers to take from this, here it is: Never smoke, because your life remains much easier if you never do, and once you do smoke, it's forever; You will struggle in perpetuity with the desire to continue doing it for the rest of your life, and even people who've quit cigarettes for 10+ years still daydream about how good it felt.
Word of the Day: Mercy - Compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one's power to punish or harm.
Health Cookie #15: Tobacco and Nicotine can be a complex topic. On the one hand, Cigarettes and Cigars are objectively bad for people, as smoke causes damage to the body and brain. But on the other hand, neuroscientists have proven that Nicotine has a neuro-protective effect on the brain, improving plasticity, cognition, learning, memory, and overall brain function. But Nicotine itself is also extraordinarily addictive, which is going to reduce your neurological integrity to some degree in how it manipulates your emotional mapping and dopamine systems, and compels you toward a chemical dependence of it. Truth is there are many ways of improving neuroplasticity and boosting your cognition, memory, learning and overall brain function; Cold Showers, Fasting, Meditation and Exercise come to mind, only they come without the added caveat of inducing a chemical need within you that can negatively impact how you treat people whenever you're going through withdrawals. Not only does Nicotine make you withdrawal when you go without it for a prolonged period of time, which adversely effects your social interactions and may make you less kind toward family and friends at times, it also has a negative impact on the Autonomic Nervous System, which is responsible for involuntary biological functions such as Heart Rate, Blood Pressure, Respiration, Digestion, and Sexual Arousal. That is to say, if you go without Nicotine for a while, and you're craving it, then your heart rate becomes irregular, your blood pressure destabilizes, your digestion becomes inefficient resulting in excessive gas, burping and softer stools, and you'll be less intimate with your partner, as well as more emotionally irritable and more inclined to be harsh or rude towards other people even if you ought not be - even if you don't want to be. As a result of this, most people view the decision to quit smoking as a nigh insurmountable task, because it would effect too many various aspects of their personal and professional lives if they merely attempted it - and they might fail the attempt, making it all for naught in the end.
But this is why Nicotine, in and of itself, is a horrible thing for you: Not only can you can get whatever Nicotine gives you by other, frankly healthier means, but once you're Nicotine's prisoner, it's extraordinarily difficult to break out of that perdition. In a previous Health Cookie we covered BDNF, Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (Health Cookie #2). BDNF is much in the same vein as Nicotine regarding Neuroplasticity and mental improvement, so there's really no upside to using Nicotine instead of using a Cold Shower, Intermittent Fasting, Meditation or Exercise to achieve the same result of acquiring greater neurological capability. You're simply shooting yourself in the foot by smoking instead, and reducing your capabilities in life. I say this as somebody who has struggled with cigarette use since my teen years. I often smoke for 3-4 months of every year, then I have to endure multiple pain-staking attempts to quit, and it's not painful for just me but also for my wife, too. The difficult part for me is that my mom is apathetic about smoking, and always has cartons upon cartons of cheap smokes in the house that I'm permitted to take, so I have unlimited access, and although I can temper myself and discipline myself for a significant chunk of every year, I always seem to break eventually. I'd much rather have never entered this Nicotine-centric prison in the first place, and I pray for the day that I find the strength to just stop for good and never go back. When I do smoke, I keep my numbers low, usually only having an average of 3 cigarettes per day, depending on the day, but that's the best I can do for myself and my health sometimes. The best number is absolute zero, where cigarettes-per-day are concerned. I can quit weed within one week, cease my desire of it and feel better for it in extremely short order; But quitting cigarettes literally requires months of physiological, gastrointestinal and psychological upset, even when you only smoke an average of 3 per day. Yet despite everything it takes away from me, I always eventually end up wanting to go back to smoking, once life has felt too arduous for too long of a stretch. If there's one piece of advice that I need young readers to take from this, here it is: Never smoke, because your life remains much easier if you never do, and once you do smoke, it's forever; You will struggle in perpetuity with the desire to continue doing it for the rest of your life, and even people who've quit cigarettes for 10+ years still daydream about how good it felt.