Nicotine Withdrawal Symptoms and Recovery
Nicotine Is a Very Powerful Drug!

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Causes, Incidence and Risk Factors...

Almost all people who try to quit have some form of nicotine withdrawal. Generally, the longer one has been a smoker and the more nicotine and higher number of cigarettes consumed, the more likely it is that withdrawal symptoms will occur and the more severe they are likely to be. Furthermore, people who are regular smokers tend to have particularly strong cravings and worsening of withdrawal symptoms at certain times, places, or situations associated with smoking. Tobacco contains nicotine, an addictive drug, and smokers become addicted. If you quit abruptly, you will go through the physical and psychological effects of drug-withdrawal, These may include intense food cravings, jittery nerves, anxiety, short temper, depression, and sleeplessness. The addiction-withdrawal symptoms will be worst the first week and less severe during the second. After a month, most of the withdrawal symptoms will be gone, If you quit gradually, the withdrawal may be less intense but more prolonged, This is why many experts recommend quitting abruptly!

Symptoms:

The common symptoms include an intense craving for nicotine, tension, irritability, headaches, difficulty in concentrating, drowsiness and trouble in sleeping, increased appetite and weight gain. A milder form of nicotine withdrawal involving some or all of these symptoms can occur when a smoker switches from regular to low-nicotine cigarettes or significantly cuts down.

Treatment:

There are several strategies for treating nicotine withdrawal. Nicotine supplementation in the form of gum or patch can be helpful. A variety of other agents have also been used with some success in maintaining abstinence and reducing withdrawal symptoms.

These agents include clonidine, antidepressants such as fluoxetine (Prozac), and buspirone (Buspar). Bupropion (Zyban) was approved in 1996 by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for nicotine dependence. Using buproprion or nicotine replacement therapies alone doubles the odds of successful quitting. Using a combination of these methods increases success rates even more. Buproprion and other antidepressants are not habit-forming, and may help reduce the possibility that nicotine withdrawal may lead to depression. Since nicotine itself has antidepressant effects - and many smokers unknowingly smoke to self-medicate depression - use of antidepressants to relieve withdrawal may be particularly helpful. A screening for depression may also be helpful to ensure proper treatment and increase the odds of maintaining abstinence. People trying to quit smoking often become discouraged when they don't succeed at first. Research shows that the more times you try, the more likely you are to succeed - so don't give up!

Expectations (prognosis):

Nicotine withdrawal is short-lived and should pass in time. While withdrawal is the most uncomfortable part of quitting, the real challenge is beating long-term cravings and staying abstinent.

Complications:

The most likely complication will be a return to smoking. Weight gain due to increased eating also may occur. This is much less unhealthy than continuing to smoke, and those with concerns about weight should address them while quitting so that they do not undermine their attempts to stay away from cigarettes.

Calling your health care provider:

See your health care provider if you wish to stop smoking, or have already done so and are experiencing withdrawal symptoms. Your provider can help provide treatments, some of which are only available by prescription.

Have You Ever Wonder Why it is So Hard To Quit Smoking?

Why Do a Lot of Smokers Fail to Quit Smoking?

About 25% of adults continue to smoke, about 70% of them want to quit. In one study, of the women smokers who said they wanted to stop smoking, 80% of them were unable to. Nicotine is a psychoactive drug, and some researchers feel it is as addictive as heroin; in fact, nicotine has actions similar to cocaine and heroin in the same area of the brain.

Depending on the amount taken in, nicotine can act as either a stimulant or a sedative. Most smokers have a special fondness for the first cigarette of the day because of the way brain cells respond to the day's first nicotine rush. Rat studies show that nicotine increases the activity of dopamine, a chemical in the brain that elicits pleasurable sensations -- a feeling similar to achieving a reward. The first nicotine intake of the day is particularly effective in enhancing the activity of dopamine-sensitive neurons. During the day, however, the nerve cells become desensitized to nicotine; smoking becomes less pleasurable and smokers may be likely to increase their intake to get their "reward". A smoker develops tolerance to these effects very quickly and requires increasingly higher levels of nicotine.

Withdrawal is a difficult process. Even after years of nonsmoking, about 20% of ex-smokers still have occasional cravings for cigarettes. A study in 1986 reported that 68% of all smokers wanted to quit, and in that year a third of them tried seriously, but only 6% of all smokers succeeded. People who keep trying, however, have a 50% chance of finally quitting, and in any case the attempts to quit are never a waste of time, since the amount of smoking is reduced during these periods.

Researchers have been trying to discover those conditions or sets of behaviors that can help predict why so many people fail to quit. From one study to the next, however, no consistent factors have emerged; these include gender, number of cigarettes smoked, levels of nicotine in the blood, length of time smoked, or the intensity or severity of withdrawal. A 1994 study, however, did find one consistent predictor for failure to quit: almost anyone who cheated during the first two weeks of withdrawal, even if they were wearing the patch, was smoking again in six months. On the other hand, nearly half of the people who didn't cheat during the first two weeks were still not smoking after sixth months.

A recent study indicates that smokers who quit and start again may damage their lungs even more severely than people who have not yet made an attempt to quit. Some experts suggest that those who relapse may have been at high risk for poor lung function in the first place or that those who start smoking again are more strongly addicted than other smokers and may inhale more deeply and hold the smoke in their lungs longer. The message here is not that quitting smoking is more dangerous than not quitting; the emphasis is on not starting again.

Copyright * 1998 Nidus Information Services, Inc. Well-Connected Report: Smoking. September 1998. (Online)

Nicotine Withdrawal Symptoms After You Stop Smoking

If a person has smoked regularly for a few weeks or longer and abruptly stops using tobacco or significantly reduces the amount smoked, withdrawal symptoms will occur, usually within a few hours of the last cigarette and peak about 48 to 72 hours later. Withdrawal symptoms can last for a few days to several weeks.

Addiction and Withdrawal

Billions of dollars have been spent in the United States fighting over whether or not nicotine is addictive. The position of the medical and scientific communities is that nicotine is most definitely addictive. Nicotine meets both the psychological and physiological measures of addiction:

• Psychological - People who are addicted to something will use it compulsively, without regard for its negative effects on their health or their life. A good example would be someone who continues to smoke, even as they use an oxygen tank to breathe because of the damage smoking has done to their lungs.

• Physiological - Neuroscientists call anything that turns on the reward pathway in the brain addictive. Because stimulating this neural circuitry makes you feel so good, you will continue to do it again and again to get those feelings back.

Nicotine's effects are short-lived, lasting only 40 minutes to a couple of hours. This leads people to smoke or chew tobacco periodically throughout the day to dose themselves with nicotine. Add to this the fact that you can become tolerant to nicotine's effects -- you need to use more and more nicotine to reach the same degree of stimulation or relaxation -- and you can see how people would quickly move from smoking one cigarette to a pack a day habit.

What happens when smokers abruptly stop using nicotine? While you're using nicotine-containing products, your body adapts the way it works to compensate for the effects of the nicotine. For example, neurons in your brain might increase or decrease the number of receptors or the amount of different neurotransmitters affected by the presence of nicotine. When you no longer have nicotine in your body, these physiological adaptations for nicotine remain. The net result is that your body can't function the same way in the absence of the drug as it did before, at least in the short term. People trying to quit nicotine experience this as:

• Irritability

• Anxiety

• Depression

• Craving for nicotine

Over a period of about a month, these symptoms and the physiological changes subside. But for many smokers, even a day without nicotine is excruciating. Every year, millions of people try to break the nicotine habit; only 10 percent of them succeed. Most people throw in the towel after less than a week of trying, because the way that nicotine rewires the reward system in the brain makes nicotine's pull irresistible.

Click Here For a Detailed List of Nicotine Withdrawal Symptoms

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