Marian farrell smoking is not addictive

As a former smoker, Hypnotherapist and Smoking Cessation Facilitator with the Ontario Lung Association in Toronto, I want to bring to light that little known fact in the headline above. There are some things we have come to believe about cigarettes and tobacco which are simply not true. The first one, is that tobacco is addictive – I personally believe that it is not physically addictive (reasons in a moment).

A major study by Israeli scientists has determined that craving for cigarettes is more to do with the mind than the addictive influence of nicotine. In other words, it is the psychological element of smoking that makes one addicted to cigarettes. There are many researchers and scientists who have looked for something that is the addictive key that nicotine or the components of tobacco has on the physical body and they’re unable to actually find something that creates a physical addiction in tobacco.

So why is it so difficult for people to stop smoking? The first thing you need to know is the true nature of an addictive substance. An addictive substance will create a condition in the body where it (the body) cannot function normally without that substance. In other words, if someone stops taking certain painkillers, the body just can’t function because it was addicted; it had to have that chemical in order to perform at a normal level.

Many truly addictive substances are that way, but with nicotine it just doesn’t hold true. As a Hypnotherapist, if I help someone to stop smoking and they instantly quit, they will function more or less normally. They may have some emotional or psychological challenges relating to conditioned responses and triggers, but physically, their body will function fine.

Some people stop smoking with absolutely no cravings or withdrawals and if tobacco was an addictive substance...truly addictive...it wouldn’t be possible for people to just stop. They would need something as a replacement, or something to do with a withdrawal programme so that their body could function normally.

An addictive substance requires that you increase the intake of it over time because your body develops a resistance or becomes accustomed to it. So in order for you to function normally, you have to increase the intake. Smokers might smoke 10, 20, 30 a day or smoke only at weekends with a few drinks or socially and they stay at that level for years. They don’t increase the dosage, they don’t follow an addictive pattern.

Most people sleep between six and eight hours a night and don’t have nicotine in their systems for that length of time. If tobacco was physically addictive, you wouldn’t be able to stay asleep because your body would crave it, the withdrawal would be too powerful and it would physically wake you up.

According to Dr. Reuven Dar of Tel Aviv University's Department of Psychology “the psychological element of smoking is the key factor deciding the intensity of craving for cigarettes in a smoker compared to the physiological effects of nicotine as an addictive chemical. These findings might not be popular with advocates of the nicotine addiction theory, because they undermine the physiological role of nicotine and emphasize mind over matter when it comes to smoking," says Dr. Dar, in his new study published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. So it’s not the nicotine that you need.

If it were a physical addiction, in four days, boom, the nicotine is out of your system and you’d be home free. It’s the process of conditioned responses that are so powerful in our subconscious and they do a hardwiring in our brain. When you can change this hardwiring with hypnosis, you will get a different conditioned response.

So once you learn about the true nature of tobacco, then you have a choice of how you’re going to teach your brain to respond to the old triggers or conditioned responses. One of the reasons that hypnosis has such a high success rate with regard to smoking cessation is because hypnosis actually changes the way the brain reacts to these triggers and responses.

In order to get a different result, you’re going have to do some things differently. Hypnosis can definitely make the commitment stronger for all the right reasons. Hypnosis for some people makes it extremely easy to stop smoking.

Craving for cigarettes is more to do with the mind than the addictive influence of nicotine. In other words, it is the psychological element of smoking that makes one addicted to cigarettes, a new study conducted by Israeli scientists has revealed.

It is not that nicotine plays no role. The chemical does have a physiological role in increasing cognitive abilities such as attention and memory, it's not an addictive substance like heroin, which creates true systemic and biologically-based withdrawal symptoms in the body of the user, Dr Dar says.

A similar study conducted in 2005 amongst religious Jews, forbidden by their religion to smoke on the Sabbath, also found nicotine to be not addictive as physiological addictions are usually defined.