What Does Nicotine Do To Your Body?

Transcript

How does nicotine affect your body and what side effects does it have on your health?

Hi this is Nasia Davos, and in this video I will show you how nicotine affects different parts of your body, what side effects nicotine has on your brain, and how your heart, lungs and blood circulation react to nicotine. Not what smoking or vaping does to your body, but what nicotine as a substance does to your body, so stay tuned.

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So let’s see how nicotine affects the body. Nicotine as a substance affects every part of your body; it affects your brain, cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, renal and reproductive systems of the body.

Let’s start with the brain. One of the most significant dangers of nicotine addiction on the brain is that, it throws your brain chemicals out of balance. It throws your neurotransmitters like dopamine and endorphin out of balance.

Dopamine makes you feel rewarded. And over time, a smoker’s brain relies on nicotine to release dopamine. So smokers do not release dopamine when they feel genuinely happy or rewarded, they release dopamine when nicotine is present. So your brain is basically saving dopamine so it can release it when nicotine is present, and that’s how nicotine controls your feelings in a way. And the thing is, that the more you smoke, you build tolerance so you need more and more nicotine to have a dopamine effect. And after a while, you just smoke to feel normal. And that’s how nicotine depletes your neurotransmitters and changes the structure of the brain.

Some side effects of nicotine on the brain of adults are dizziness, disrupted sleep patterns, and blood flow restriction. And some side effects of nicotine on the brain of teenagers and young adults, is that nicotine creates unfortunately lasting impairments in memory attention and learning because the brain changes until the age of 25. So nicotine addiction can have a negative impact on that change.

Now I know that most of us who are watching this video are past this age, but all we can do is warn younger people and lead by example, lead by being non-smokers.

Now let’s see how nicotine affects the body. First of all, nicotine affects your blood circulation, and your heart. Nicotine causes plaque on the artery walls known as atherosclerosis, which may lead to heart attack.

Also because of nicotine, your blood vessels lose their elasticity which limits how much oxygen can go to your organs. And because there is not enough oxygen, your heart rate increases because your heart is trying to take in more oxygen. And this puts you at risk of high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and stroke.

Nicotine also affects your insulin levels contributing to the risk of diabetes because nicotine stimulates the adrenal gland to release adrenaline. Adrenaline is a hormone that speeds up your heart rate. And while this makes you feel more alert and more energetic in the moment, this puts a lot of burden on your heart.

Adrenaline also makes your body release more glucose into your blood which slows the release of the insulin from your pancreas. What does that mean? What’s the result of this? Its that, you have higher sugar levels in your blood and insulin resistance which contributes to diabetes.

Nicotine also affects your respiratory, your breathing system and the lungs. It can contribute to emphysema, pneumonia. It affects the central nervous system. It’s linked to reflux disorder where acid from the stomach leaks up to the esophagus and causes heartburn.

Nicotine also causes peptic ulcer disease. When you have ulcers in your stomach, it causes dry mouth, heartburn and nausea.

Nicotine also affects your pregnancy. The American Lung Association tells us that nicotine during pregnancy can harm the brain and the lung development of the fetus. And it affects the physical and mental health of the mother causing low birth weights, premature birth or even still birth.

And research shows, listen to that research, shows that nicotine can cause obesity, hypertension, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, problems with brain and behaviour development and even respiratory failure to the child. So that’s what nicotine does to your body.

And it’s important that you know that because some people and some organizations treat nicotine as harmless, and it’s not.

Nicotine causes addiction, so being addicted in and of itself, it’s not a good state to be in now on top of that. Nicotine affects your health like you saw.

A common question I get asked is does nicotine cause cancer? And the truth is that we don’t know for sure, although nicotine is not considered a carcinogen yet. There is research that shows that nicotine can promote the genesis of tumors. So if you’re addicted to nicotine, know that you can break free and you can live happily without it.

The nicotine addiction is physical and mental. It’s 20% physical and 80% percent of it is mental. The mental addiction is how much you believe you need it and enjoy it. It’s how much you believe it adds value to your life. It’s your triggers and your routines all those things are the mental addiction.

So the key to overcoming the nicotine addiction is overcome to the mental part. So if you don’t know how to do that please make sure you get the foundational video of the CBQ method.

The CBQ method is a psychology based method that has 4 quit smoking stages. It has no drugs, no medications and it has helped thousands of people break free from addiction. It is the same method I talked about in my TED talk and it works because it changes how you think about nicotine, how much you believe you need it, how you see it and it helps you break the habit. So go get the video, the link is in the description in the video. I’ll show you what are the 4 stages of the CBQ method and how they work together to help you break free. I’ll show you how you became addicted to nicotine and how you can use the same process to reverse the addiction and you’re going to get a great overview of your journey.

And after this video you’re going to realize that quitting smoking does not start by quitting smoking, it starts by preparing. So this video is going to help you start preparing, so go watch it now and let me know in the comments if you think nicotine is bad for you.

And if you like this video, give it a thumbs up. And subscribe to this channel to get more videos like this. Thank you so much for watching and I’ll see in the next video.