The Two Faces Of Tobacco Dependence (chemical And Psychological)
The desire to smoke typical of those who are trying to quit tobacco have been labeled with a generic word: the “bun “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 in nature play a role: habits, friendships, etc. He nicotinic withdrawal syndrome. For this reason, tobacco dependence is a biopsychosocial phenomenon.
Let’s think, for example, about 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 tobacco. During the first puffs, the chemical addiction to tobacco has not yet been consolidated, but we could already begin to talk about a certain psychological need to smoke which can take several forms:
Of course, these motivations do not have to be directly accessible by consciousness and formulated as explicitly as in these sentences. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Every year, tobacco companies put a lot of marketing effort into creating these invisible forces of attraction towards tobacco. These organizations claim to be governed by a logic of profit and loss, and would not spend such large amounts of capital if advertising did not 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 uncontrollable desire to smoke a cigarette) but Its causes are of a different nature In fact, the withdrawal syndrome caused by chemical factors disappears long before the desire to smoke with psychological roots.
This is because, although the body’s cells have learned to readapt to the absence of nicotine, the habits associated with tobacco consumption and ideas related to the idea of smoking (created in part by Big Tobacco marketing teams) It takes years to start forgetting
The importance of context
Someone who is pessimistic might believe that the existence of a psychic aspect of the withdrawal syndrome is bad news, judging by how long it lasts, but the truth is that the opposite is true. All addictions with chemical causes also carry psychological factors that make the task of disengaging difficult but this does not happen the other way around, that is, addictions with 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 by intervening in the psychological and behavioral sphere it is easier to cope with the chemical addiction to tobacco.
Precisely for this reason 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 afternoon of quitting tobacco, and can be combined with the use of patches or gum that act on the acute effects of the withdrawal syndrome at a cellular level.
In other words, taking into account the contextual and cognitive factors typical of people who suffer from tobacco dependence is a great help when it comes to quitting smoking. Since cigarette manufacturers know the psychological side of addiction to sell their product, it is only fair that the consumer can also take advantage of this same knowledge.
