The problem with smoking is that it's kind of amazing – this is an irresponsible
thing to say – but if we’re going to talk about it we might as well do so honestly.
Smoking creates a temporary problem and offers an instant solution. Once
your brain is used to nicotine, for up to 72 hours you are itchy,
nervous and stressed – but one drag and instantly, you feel really good.
But it's way more than just a physical addiction.
Smoking helps you focus at work and is an excuse to take regular breaks,
which is good for you mentally. It's a tool against boredom, it suppresses your appetite,
it makes bad moments feel less bad and good moments better. It's social,
fun together and a good way to make friends as smokers always group up. Your lips are one of the
most sensitive parts of your body and putting something between them is deeply satisfying.
So now that we've given smoking an honest introduction, let's smoke a cigarette together
to see why it makes you feel so good and what exactly happens inside your body when you do it.
The Best Worst Thing
A cigarette is dried tobacco leaves mixed with chemicals that make it burn slowly,
helping you to absorb nicotine, and flavours that make the smoke less harsh. Let’s light it.
Cigarette smoke is 95% gases like carbon dioxide and water vapour. The remaining 5% are particles
called tar and they contain the magic sauce: carbon or nitrogen compounds filled with nicotine.
As you inhale, billions of particles interact with everything they pass through,
getting stuck on your throat, tongue and trachea. Your lungs are like big inflatable sponges and
have a filter and barrier; the cilia cells with hair-like extensions covered by a layer
of mucus. They trap dust or bacteria to be swept away in a sort of dance. Tar particles
land in the mucus and turn into a sticky brown substance that stops the dance and paralyses
the cilia – allowing them to get deeper into your lungs: to the alveoli. Alveoli are
little air sacs and here is where your actual breathing happens. They have very thin walls,
so that the oxygen can transfer to your blood and carbon dioxide can leave.
Now the magic is released. Nicotine passes through the thin walls and enters your bloodstream,
reaching your brain so fast that it feels instant. The positive effect arrives right away.
If your brain had a control board, smoking would be like pressing all the buttons at once,
releasing loads of transmitters and hormones that affect your whole body. Epinephrine and
cortisol make your heart beat faster and your body ready for action. Dopamine makes you feel
happy and relaxed and reduces your appetite. Beta-endorphins reduce pain and stress. Nicotine
excites and calmes you at the same time. You become more alert and able to focus. Your
nerves become more sensitive to pleasant sensations, then your whole body relaxes.
Together all of these effects just feel great.
But your brain immediately tries to return to normal and pushes back against the effects
of nicotine. Which is fine as long as you have nicotine inside your blood. But once its effects
wear off, your body is left overcompensating, creating a massive imbalance within itself.
The more you smoke, the harder your body tries to push back,
which is why nicotine is so addictive: You stop feeling like yourself without it.
It's still great, but now you also need it just to feel normal.
If that was all smoking did, well that would be kind of ok.
Nicotine comes with thousands of different chemical buddies. Cadmium,
lead, arsenic and cyanide, hydrogen peroxide or nitrogen oxides cause
damage wherever they end up. Carbon monoxide reduces how much oxygen your blood can carry.
In your lungs your cilia cells struggle. It's hard to push mucus clogged up with tar
and some of your cilia cells die. Your alveoli are super sensitive and can’t handle this sort
of stress. A few of your tiny air sacs pop like balloons, causing irreparable damage. Your body
needs to get rid of all of this tar immediately! Goblet cells pump out extra mucus to compensate,
which makes breathing harder, so you start coughing to get the tar and mucus out.
Your immune system activates and macrophages begin eating up tar particles. Smokers have way more of
these clean up cells here because their lungs are literally full of dirt. But the nicotine makes the
macrophages sluggish and inefficient. Worse, they vomit chemicals that dissolve your lung tissue
and cause tiny wounds that turn into scar tissue. Scars in your lungs are bad if you like breathing.
Nicotine raises your heart rate while ordering blood vessels all over your body to constrict.
Meanwhile toxic chemicals get stuck, causing countless tiny wounds all over your body
that will turn into scars. Those scars leak proteins that create random blood
clots making your blood vessels even narrower. Constricted and narrow vessels put a lot of
stress on your heart muscle that has to work much harder to keep blood flowing.
Inside your skin, the chemicals trigger enzymes that break down collagen,
the protein that makes your skin elastic and smooth. This creates
folds and wrinkles. Your skin ages much quicker and you look older sooner.
But maybe the worst thing is what happens to your immune system: All over your body it reacts to
tiny wounds and activates, fighting an invisible enemy, damaging healthy cells in the process.
While at the same time the nicotine makes it slow and sluggish. Worse at fighting actual diseases.
We could go on like this, but this is getting old.
In a nutshell every single one of your organs is highly stressed
and suffers some kind of permanent damage.
Over time fats get stuck in the scars inside blood vessels, which get narrower and narrower,
until they start to suffocate your organs. Your overworked heart beats even harder to
push blood through the extra resistance and your blood pressure rises. So hard that fluids seep
out of blood vessels into your lungs, which makes breathing even harder. The likelihood
of a blood clot blocking a critical passage in the body rises enormously,
which can eventually cause a heart attack or a stroke.
Almost all smokers eventually get Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease – so many of
your alveoli are irreversibly destroyed that you are always short of breath,
never able to breathe freely. Once you have it, it can only get worse, never better again.
Finally there is cancer. You get a sort of double whammy. On the one hand you
flood your whole system and especially your lungs with at least 70 highly cancer-causing
chemicals. And on the other hand you paralyse the part of your immune system
that kills and prevents cancer. This is why cancer is so likely in smokers.
Ultimately, smoking is uniquely dangerous among the things you are legally allowed to do.
The average smoker loses 10 years of life. Which means that some lose like 5 years and others more
like 25. You don’t know which one will be you. But it cuts into your health
span even more – making a much larger part of your life spent being chronically sick.
Ooooof
So why don’t smokers not just like, stop doing it?
Smokers are often seen as unhinged or without discipline which is unfair.
Nicotine is one of the most physically and psychologically addictive substances known
to humanity. If you ever start using it, you'll likely struggle with it for the
rest of your life. The physical addiction lasts around 3 days – but the psychological
addiction is much harder to overcome, because you form strong habits and it's
connected to many social cues, like hanging out with friends or winding down from work.
The perverse thing is that almost everybody who starts smoking starts smoking as a teenager.
The tobacco industry has to target vulnerable brains and get them hooked on the pleasurable
effects of nicotine or it would go away. Today about a billion people will light a cigarette,
which is a lot but at least the trends are looking good. In 2000 34% of adults were smoking,
in 2020 it was only 23%. Still, in 2023 about 8 million people died from it.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. There are many successful strategies for quitting, we’ve put
links to some in the video description. People who stop smoking by the age of 35 on average don’t
die earlier than non-smokers. If you are older than that, even quitting late can add years to
your life! It's a bit like with climate change – every bit counts even if damage has already been done.
We're not the morality or health police. You do you – but at least be aware what
exactly you are doing and why you are doing it – most of you watching this don’t smoke,
so, well, just maybe never try it. Smoking only really solves a temporary problem – but
it creates loads of permanent ones.
Good thing I never started – but it’s
not like I never do things I know I shouldn’t. Like using sketchy
free WiFis or downloading files without double-checking the source – cough cough.
We tried out NordVPN to relieve some of our existential dread. Go to NordVPN.com/Kurzgesagt
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Habits can influence your life in a major way.
They are basically hard-wired shortcuts your brain uses to save energy and make decisions faster.
So why not use this shortcut-method to influence your life in a positive way?
We created this Habit Journal to help you do exactly that. It contains scientific explanations,
tutorials and colorful illustrations to help you build the habits you want in your life.
To be honest, we created it as much for ourselves as we did for you.
We use it in our lives to help us implement habits like working out
regularly, eating healthy, learning a language,
reading more or simply actually doing our hobbies instead of browsing reddit.
And we also included a few tips on how to reroute habits you want to get rid of – like smoking.
Get it now from our shop, improve your life in a science-backed way
and support everything we do on this channel.