The two faces of tobacco dependence
The desire to smoke typical of who is trying to quit tobacco have been tagged with a generic word: the "monkey". However, the anxiety caused by the absence of tobacco cannot be reduced to something so simple. Among other things, because in tobacco addiction Both the chemical processes that regulate the functioning of our body and those that are psychological and contextual play a role.: habits, friendships, etc. The nicotinic withdrawal syndrome. For this reason, tobacco dependence is a biopsychosocial phenomenon.
Consider, for example, the motivations of someone who tries tobacco for the first time. It is very likely that you will not like the experience at all, and yet that will not prevent you from deciding to even spend money on another pack of cigarettes. During the first puffs the chemical addiction to tobacco has not yet been consolidated, but we could already start talking about a certain psychological urge to smoke, which can take several forms:
All my friends do.
I don't like to be waiting with nothing to do.
I use it to look interesting.
They always offer me cigars and it has ended up arousing my curiosity.
Smoking: many factors at play
Of course, these motivations do not have to be directly accessible by consciousness and be formulated as explicitly as in these phrases. However, that does not mean that they do not exist. Every year, tobacco companies put a lot of effort into marketing to create these invisible attractive forces towards tobacco. These organizations pretend to be governed by a profit-and-loss logic, and would not spend such large amounts of capital if advertising didn't work. The causes of tobacco dependence exist in the smoker's body, but also beyond it.
It is important to take this into account because these two aspects of addiction have a similar result (the irrepressible urge to smoke a cigarette) but its causes are of a different nature. In fact, the abstinence syndrome caused by chemical factors disappears long before the urge to smoke with psychological roots.
This is because, although the cells of the body have learned to readjust to the absence of nicotine, the habits associated with the consumption of tobacco and ideas related to the idea of smoking (created in part by the marketing teams of Big Tobacco) take years to start to forget.
The importance of context
Someone pessimistic might believe that the existence of a psychic aspect of the withdrawal syndrome is bad news, judging how long it lasts, but the truth is that it is the opposite. All addictions with chemical causes also carry psychological factors that make it difficult to disengage, but this does not happen the other way around, that is, addictions of social and contextual roots do not have to translate into addiction explained by biology.
This means that what aggravates the depth of addiction in the case of tobacco is not the psychological factor, which is always present in cases of dependence on a substance, but the chemical. It also means that intervening in the psychological and behavioral realm makes it easier to cope with chemical addiction to tobacco.
That is precisely why the cognitive behavioral therapy applied to cases where someone wants to quit smoking, or other new methods and approaches to psychological intervention to end tobacco dependence, such as the one we saw in this Article). Intervention methods focused on psychological factors are very helpful in the afternoon of quitting, and can be combined with the use of patches or gums that act on the acute effects of withdrawal syndrome on a scale mobile.
In other words, taking into account the contextual and cognitive factors typical in people who suffer from tobacco dependence is a great help when it comes to quitting smoking. Since cigar manufacturers know the psychological aspect of addiction to sell their product, it is only fair that the consumer can also take advantage of this same knowledge.
Bibliographic references:
- Batra, A. (2011). Treatment of Tobacco Dependence. Deutsches Arzteblatt, consulted in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3167938/
