"I don’t smoke that much, I just like the buzz"

That’s what a 50 year avid smoker used to say when he started smoking at 14 , it was the buzz that lured him into 50 extra years of smoking.

When you first started smoking maybe you smoked lightly like one cigarette a day or couple a week and with every cigarette you experienced a buzz which is a feeling of pleasure and energy. The buzz happens when nicotine causes the brain receptors to release dopamine and adrenaline, those are feel good hormones.

But why you moved from smoking two a week into two a day then you found yourself at the pack a day mark and you didn’t know how you got there?

When you first smoked at the same minute your body got that poison your body also received pleasure and so your brain connected that poison to pleasure and worked on building up tolerance to it .Tolerance means that it takes more nicotine to get the same effect that we used to get from fewer cigarettes and as that happened it became difficult to maintain your current nicotine intake, you needed more nicotine in order to sustain the good feelings so you needed to smoke more cigarettes to get that same buzz.

you blindly got into the cycle of the smoking habit, in order to continue feeling pleasure from smoking, you must continue to smoke more cigarettes, more frequently, and it became like the more you smoke the more you want to smoke and the less you smoke also the more you want to smoke.

keep in mind that repeated nicotine use caused the brain receptors to become less sensitive over time so your brain created more of them as a response and when you quit smoking and due to having a lot of extra receptors that didn’t get their nicotine fix, you could feel a loss of energy and lack of focus but the good news is as you quit smoking your brain gradually gets re-wired and The number of nicotine receptors in the brain will return to normal after approximately a month of quitting and those withdrawal feelings disappear.

To sum it up solutions like smoking less instead of quitting is never a long term solution , it’s against your body nature. It may make it less poisonous for your body in the short term but that won’t last long , soon enough your body will build tolerance to it and you find yourself gradually regressing to your former number of cigarettes you used to smoke.