Many sites claim that nicotine affects mental health negatively, but The same sites say that nicotine helps with stress short term. How does it make it worse in a long run if we don’t count something like you get diagnosed with cancer because of smoking (that diagnosis will definitely affect mental health).
I’m not claiming it doesn’t. I have personally noticed it but I don’t know why and I don’t have enough english vocabulary to get through very complicated studies.
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Nicotine almost certainly helps with mental health over time on a mechanistic level
Are you talking about smoking or just nicotine? Smoking has lots of stuff in there besides nicotine of course much of which is damaging to the body. When the body gets damaged it can become inflamed and can potentially negatively affect mental health. Nicotine in the form of gum or a patch can have beneficial effects on mental health but tolerance builds so it is not a long term solution.
Like all addictive substances, nicotine stimulates the release of chemicals (mostly endorphins and serotonin) that in turn trigger a state of relax/happiness in your brain.
Problem is, our bodies learn to adapt to many substances and react less if they’re exposed to them over a long period of time. Meaning that when the body is repeatedly made to produce massive quantities of those substances, it will “adapt” by producing less of them in general.
This will apply not only to the chemicals released by assuming nicotine, but those released in other ways too (such as experiencing pleasant sensations or even your normal serotonin production your brain uses to regulate mood), meaning you will eventually feel worse and will need nicotine to get back to your new “normal” level of mental stability.
I doubt nicotine improves stress in the short term. This is only true if you’re already addicted, then it improves the stress caused by the addiction itself(withdraw symptoms).
Nicotine patches are currently being tested on people with Alzheimer’s disease because nicotine appears to help cognition. Definitely not the nicotine you get from smoking however; smoking definitely damages your health.
Because its detrimental for your health it shortens and constricts your arteries. You develop a physical addiction and without it it becomes harder to manage stress.
Using anything as a crutch to stop anxiety or stress that doesn’t require addressing the root of the problem will eventually make your stress worse. When you avoid the root of your problems they tend to snowball and get worse and less manageable
It can help short term, but like just about chemical you introduce to your body that isn’t just calories to burn, you can build a tolerance and need more, or worse a dependency where you need it all the time just to stay in place.
If you’re a month in to smoking and do at most two a day, yeah that cigarette can make you feel a lot better. But if you’re three years in and are smoking a pack or more a day, going an hour without one will drive you nuts and make you feel so much worse than if you didn’t smoke at all.
I learned in therapy that your anxiety may drive you to smoke, but then withdrawals make you more anxious than you started necessitating more smoking and it all just snowballs until your condition is worse than if you’d never started smoking.Â
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I’m not sure if it hurts physically for mental health. I know it hurts your body physically in other ways. I use smoking to help my mental health to be able to distance myself from crowds when things get too overwhelming, or as an excuse to get myself out of certain situations.
Ex a house gets too loud and I get overstimulated I can excuse myself to go outside and have a smoke.
It doesn’t if your mental health is really bad. There are a ton of mental health issues that degrade an individuals quality of life to the point where they can’t keep a job, a roof over their head, or obtain food legally. Sure, nicotine may make it more difficult to produce certain chemicals on its own, but if it already doesn’t make those chemicals then you’re screwed anyway. Therapy can easily run you $800 per month or a minimum of $200. Plus, there’s the cost of medicine which can be obscene. Nicotine is cheaper than either while also allowing us to work more reliably. Unlike prescription medications you never have to worry about an insurance company no longer covering it, the company going out of business, costs rising uncontrollably, your doctor suddenly not prescribing it anymore, or your body having serious adverse side effects such as suddenly having a stroke.
Basically, if you have severe mental health issues, nicotine won’t cause more harm than good other than the obvious cancer stuff. It’s also the best mental health available throughout the U.S.
In my experience – the only stress that nicotine helped with was the he stress of nicotine withdrawl as your blood levels drop. It creates the stress through the addiction mechanism, you relieve that stress with the application of more nicotine.
It’s addictive and deceptive, best to just stay away.
Cigarettes make mental health worse.
Vaping makes mental health worse too.
But where did you hear that nicotine itself is harmful?