The two faces of tobacco dependence (chemical and psychological)

Cigarette addiction has two sides: chemical and psychological.

The urge to smoke typical of those who are trying to quit Smoking have been labeled with a generic word: "monkey".monkey". However, the craving caused by the absence of tobacco cannot be reduced to something so simple. Among other things, this is because both chemical processes chemical processes that regulate the functioning of our body play a role, as well as those that are psychological and contextual in originhabits, friendships, etc. The nicotinic abstinence syndrome. For this reason, tobacco dependence is a biopsychosocial phenomenon.

Let us think, for example, of the motivations of someone who tries tobacco for the first time. It is very likely that he will not like the experience at all, and yet that will not prevent him from even deciding to spend money on another pack of cigarettes. During the first few puffs the chemical addiction to tobacco has not yet taken hold, but we could already start talking about a certain psychological need to smoke. psychological need to smokewhich can take various forms:

• All my friends do it.

• I don't like waiting around with nothing to do.

• I use it to look interesting.

• I am always being offered cigars and it has ended up arousing my curiosity.

Smoking: many factors at play

Of course, these motivations need not be directly accessible by consciousness and formulated as explicitly as in these sentences. However, that does not mean that they do not exist. Every year, tobacco companies devote a great deal of marketing effort to creating these invisible forces of attraction to tobacco. These organizations aim to be governed by a profit and loss logic, and would not spend such large amounts of capital if the advertising did not work. The causes of tobacco dependence exist in the smoker's body, but also beyond the smoker's body.

It is important to keep this in mind because these two aspects of addiction have a similar result (the irrepressible desire to smoke a cigarette) but their causes are of a different nature. their causes are of a different nature. In fact, the withdrawal syndrome caused by chemical factors disappears much sooner than the psychological urge to smoke.

This is because, although the body's cells have learned to readapt to the absence of nicotine, the habits associated with tobacco consumption and the ideas related to the idea of smoking disappear much sooner. and ideas related to the idea of smoking (created in part by (created in part by Big Tobacco's marketing teams) take years to begin to be forgotten. take years to begin to be forgotten.

The importance of context

A pessimist might believe that the existence of a psychological side to withdrawal is bad news, judging by how long it lasts, but the opposite is true. All addictions with chemical causes also bring with them psychological factors that make it difficult to disengage from the drug.However, this does not happen the other way around, i.e., addictions with social and contextual roots do not necessarily translate into addiction explained by biology.

This means that what aggravates the depth of the addiction in the case of tobacco is not the psychological factorwhich is always present in cases of substance dependence, but the chemical one. It also means that by intervening on the psychological and behavioral level it is easier to cope with chemical addiction to tobacco.

This is precisely why there is cognitive-behavioral therapy applied to cases in which someone wants to quit smoking, or other new methods and approaches of psychological intervention to end tobacco dependence, such as the one we saw in this article). Intervention methods focused on psychological factors help a lot in the late cessation of smoking, and can be combined with the use of patches or chewing gum that act on the acute effects of withdrawal at the cellular level.

In other words, taking into account the contextual and cognitive factors typical in people suffering from tobacco dependence is a great help in quitting smoking. Since cigarette manufacturers know the psychological side of addiction in order to sell their product, it is only fair that the consumer should also be able to take advantage of this same knowledge. of this same knowledge.

Bibliographical references:

• Batra, A. (2011). Treatment of Tobacco Dependence. Deutsches Arzteblatt, accessed at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3167938/.