What is smoking Addiction?

As soon as we hear this word "addiction" we get the idea of something which describes smoking or some other behavior which gives drives for taking it. while addiction is most of the time used for obsessive behaviors like drinking coffee, having sex, eating chocolate, shopping and watching television soap operas and other. Some other unusual behaviors are also reported as addiction.

Meaning of word Addiction:

The precise meaning of the word addiction is some kind of relation which has been developed for good or bad with substances, objects, events and people.

The substance which gives your addiction in smoking:

The substance which gives you addiction while you smoke is "nicotine". Nicotine in cigarettes which if kept on using makes your body addictive to it. Which means your body starts depending on this substance.

Apart from Nicotine, psychological factors make you dependant over smoking to greater extent.

What does psychology says about "smoking Addiction"?

The way cigarette triggers you to smoke is explainable through the work of a psychologist named as Ivan Pavlov. He was a Russian scientist who used to study behaviors and changes associated to them. One of the major researches done by him is still up held and is named as "conditioned response". In which he says that if some behavior is associated with some other thing, the other thing gets tied to it and whenever the thing appears in front of the conditioned individual he remembers or associate that thing with that specific behavior.

The same is the "conditioned response" of the cigarette. This means that if you associate cigarette with some behavior then you get in habit to have the behavior with the cigarette what does this means precisely?

Let us consider a situation: if a person is use to of smoking a cigarette after getting out of bed and he keeps the habit for long then whenever he gets out of his bed he feels the need to smoke a cigarette. This means that if long time after you quit smoking you get the temptation to smoke after you get out of your bed.

Some people do keep the habit of smoking as they find it difficult to move against their psychological need. Their mental state asks them to keep smoking. Some people keep smoking for they cannot give up their habit of holding a lit cigarette in their hand. Keeping in view this psychological need of smokers, the nicotine inhalers were introduced in the nicotine replacement therapy.

If you want to quit smoking then you would not only have to fight back the withdrawal symptoms which are the results of nicotine supplies but also get out of that conditioned response. You might have conditioned your smoking habit with driving or drinking. In most cases people do smoke while they sit in the toilet.

Psychological conditioning and withdrawal symptoms are equally important to cope with if you want to quit your habit of smoking. Smoking can be injurious to health and you have to make your way out of it.

 

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