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How does Smoking Affect Your Brain?

Smoking cigarettes affects each and every part of the human body, starting from the brain to the toe, and this is a researched truth. In this article we will look into the effects of smoking on the brain.

Cigarettes are addictive in nature because of the effect they have on the brain of a smoker. Nicotine, present in the cigarettes, travel to the brain within 8 seconds of the first inhalation.

Since a nicotine molecule is shaped similar to a neurotransmitter, it gets lodged onto the brain receptors and activates areas of the brain involved in producing feelings of pleasure and reward. This is how the addiction starts.

With time the brain develops a resistance for the nicotine levels by reducing the number of receptors. So the smoker feels the need to up his quota of cigarettes to feel the same level of pleasure. People who start out initially with 2 cigarettes a day end up with a pack a day within a year’s time due to this addictive pattern caused by nicotine.

What can smoking do to your brain?

Here are a few effects that smoking has on your brain:

Smoking reduces your IQ – Several researches have been conducted using a sample space of adults and teenagers, to determine that smoking cigarettes does reduce the IQ level on an individual. If you are a smoker, you would have realized that your capacity to work with analytical problems reduces after smoking. This reduction in mental capacity is attributed to the reduced oxygen supply to the brain and increased presence of carbon mono-oxide in the hemoglobin.

Smoking induces lack of concentration – The reduced oxygen supply to the brain also causes fatigue to creep in. It’s a common myth to believe that smoking enhances your ability to focus – the truth is quite the opposite. A smoker is bound to feel restless and fidgety due to impure or low oxygenated blood passing through the brain.

Cigarettes reduce your sex drive – It has been proven that smokers have a...