Nicotine’s Effects on the Brain & Body & How to Quit Smoking or Vaping
01:50:24 Share

Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm injured huberman, and i'm a professor of neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today we are discussing nickey.

Nickey is one of the most commonly consumed substances on the entire planet. There are literally billions of people that ingest nickey on a daily basis. Most of those people consume nikon via smoking, and in particular, smoking tobacco.

Tobacco contains nickey, and that contains a bunch of other things as well, which we will talk about. And the burning of tobacco liberates, nick tino makes accessible to the various cells and tissues of the body. But of course, there are other sources of nicotine as well. Some people consume through dip, that is, placing tobacco on the inside of the lip or in the cheek.

Some people consume niki via snuff, which is literally the shopping of tobacco leaves up the nostrils and allowing the tobacco to access the nervous system in other areas of the body by permanent into the costal membranes, as is the lining, the soft lining of the nasal passages. And of course, there are nickey patches, nickey gum. There's nickel and pills.

M their toothpicks dipped in nicotine sea. Today, we are going to separate our discussion of nickey from a discussion of smoking and vapor and the other forms of delivery for nickey. We will be talking about smoking and vegan in other routes of negative administration, both for sake of highlighting their detriments to health and believe that are not in certain cases.

Keep in mind, very specific, certain cases the possible health benefits of delivering negative through specific modalities. Turns out those modalities do not include smoking cigarettes or vapor. And we are going to pay particular attention to vapor today because wapping use is on the rise, in particular in Young people and vapors use.

And the fact that most tobacco that consumed through vapor includes quite amount of nickel ine has created a scenario where nickey, because of its ability to change certain chemicals in the brain, can actually lead to addiction for a number of other substances related to raping and raping associated behaviors. If all of that seems like a lot to get your arms and your mind around right here at the outset, don't worry, i'll walk you through this regardless of whether not you have a background in biology or not. I promise that you'll come through the end of the episode with a deep understanding of how nickey works in the brain and body, some of its benefits, some of its potential drawbacks.

And you have clear optics as to wise smoking and raping and other forms of nicotine delivery have the effects that they do on your biology and psychology. Before we go any further, I just want to highlight a key take away from a previous episode, which is our episode on focus, and in fact, was a tool kit for focus. So during the tool kit for focus episode, we talked about a large number of behavioral, pharma, logic and other interventions that you can use to increase level of concentration and focus for whatever purpose, cognitive endeavors, learning languages, focusing in school, on work, at seta or physical pursuit.

Now one of the key takeaway is that there are really two key protocols that I believe everyone should understand and know about and why they work because they are so effective and also because they dove tail nicely with some of the information that we're going to talk about today, which will explain why nickey is so effective in the increasing focus. These two protocols are as follows, data based on studies done in when he suzuki's lab at new york university, of course, when he was a guest on this podcast. So you can check out that epo de, if you like, but studies done in her laboratory point to the fact that a daily, very brief, in fact, only thirteen minute meditation can vastly increase focus and focus ability, not just immediately after the meditation practice, but at all other times as well.

So again, this is a meditation practice done daily for just thirteen minutes. It's a very simple meditation practice where one sits, realized, down, closes your eyes and direct your attention to a place just between your two eyes and write above its on your forehead, but just inside of that. And please understand that your brain does not have sensory receptors.

So unlike focusing on your fingertips in the sensation there, if you focus on your brain, you can't actually sense anything in your brain except your thoughts. So the idea then is that you continually bring your focus back to that location, just about an inch behind your forehead over and over again. And it's the refocusing of your attention to that location after a drifts that succeeds in increasing your focus ibt again, not just during the meditation and afterward, but at other times as well.

So the thirteen minute day mediation is excEllent ingy, simple and exceedingly effective. IT should be performed every day, but if you miss a day, just go back to doing IT don't just spare too much and you will see these positive effects, say the data also increase of x on mood and other positive active mental health and performance. So that's the first tool in protocol.

The second tool in protocol relates to the general, what I called ero, model of focus. This was a model that I created in order to simplify the vast amounts of data on focus and concentration and how they are created by the various chemical systems within your brain. We're going to hear a lot about these chemical systems, again today in the context of nicotine.

And they are as follows. You can think about focus on any goal or any endeavor as an arrow. So just imagine an arrow which has an arrow head and a shaft and allow a third component to IT in a moment.

The head of the ero, meaning the direction of your focus, is largely set by a seto coin, which is a chemical in the brain. The shaft of the ero is set by a chemical called a journal and also called up. And if from those are the same thing, in the brain, typically it's refer to as epiphone, and in the body it's more commonly refer to as a drennen.

But those are the same neo chemical epa slash. A jennen represents the shaft of the ero, and it's providing the energy for which to focus. And then we can put behind that era a little propeller or a motor, if you like.

And the propeller motor, in the context of this newer chemistry model, is doping, which provides ongoing motivation. IT pushes that arrow forward continually as you strive to focus on a particular thing. This particular ero model, that is, your ability to increase your focus can be enhanced, therefore, by increasing a seater calling and dopamine simultaneously.

And there are a lot of different ways to do that. But one of the more effective ways to do that via supplement protocols is so called alpha gpc. Alpha gpc, taken in three hundred milligram form ten to thirty minutes before about of cognitive work or about of physical work, will increase your focus by way of increasing a seattle calling and to some extent appan append as well.

The dopamine an increase will have to be achieved either through cogent processing that is telling yourself doing a good job and moving forward because thoughts really do impact your levels of dopamine or some others sort of pro depine or dopamine increasing protocol also discussed in the tool kit for focus on our episode on dopamine for motivation and drive. So the key thing here to understand is that the thirteen minute day meditation is a very effective way to increase focus capacity. And then in the short term, if you want to provide a boost now and again to focus three hundred milligrams of alpha gpc can be very effective.

They're very sources for that. Then we link to one of them in the show note captions by know me into my saying that you need to take alpha gpc. A number of people will certainly up not to.

And a number of people might be saying, well, i've heard that alpha gpc can increase focus by way of increasing a seal calling in north and offer an or epa. But I can also increase tmo, which is a kind of a negative marker of cardiac health and cardiovascular health. For that reason, I and many others will take six hundred milligrams of a garret capture, which can offset that tmo increase.

IT remains uncertainty to how much alpha gpc one needs to take before creating ta levels to a point where it's a concern that you would even need to take the garage capture. But I just mention that in any case, because it's a pretty simple fix, garlic has other health benefits too, of course. And for most people, three hundred milligrams of alpha gpc taken every once in a while.

I certainly don't encourage people to take alpha g gpc every time they want to focus. I always emphasize behavioral tools first, then focusing on nutritional tools, and on occasion, using supplement based s to encourage increased levels of focus. And then, of course, there are a number of different prescription compounds that if you're working with a board certified physical, they could prescribed you if you need additional tools for focus.

Things like riddle, aero, modano, viands at sea for many people are going to be important, maybe even necessary, or people with A D H D eta. But that's a category into itself. And as I would say, i'm a physician, so I don't prescribe anything.

I'm a professor, profess many things. And today I just want to pass along or redirect attention to that episode on focus and highlights. Two tools, the thirteen minutes a day meditation and three hundred milligram alpha gpc for increasing focus capacity and for acutely, that is temporarily giving an additional boost for about a focus.

And of course, if you choose not to use those protocols, that's perfectly fine to there are certainly no obligation. They are simply available to you should you choose to try them. And if nothing else, you now have in mind the neurochemistry of a seto Colin, a penetrant slash, a drennen and doping.

And that will really set the stage for understanding just how effective and why nicotine is so effective at increasing focus, motivation and even as you'll soon here, working memory and cognitive active. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research erles at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related rules to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electronic light drink with everything you need and nothing you don't.

That means plenty assault magnesium in peason, the so called electorate, and no sugar. Now, salt, magnesium and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrical lights need to be present in the proper ratios.

And we now know that even slight reductions in extra light concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits. And cognitive and physical performance element contains a science back to electronic ratio of one thousand milligrams, that one gram. Of sodium, two hundred milligrams of plastic um and sixty milligrams of magnesium.

I typically drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrates my body and make sure I have enough electro lites. And while I do any kind of physical training, and after physical training as well, especially if i've been sweating a lot, if you would like to try element, you can go to drink element, that element t dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that drink element l mt dot com slash huberman.

Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga ede, recessions and N S S D R non sleep depressed protocols. I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens, and I started doing yoga ea about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations. And they had a lot of different types of meditations to place, to bring your body into different states, and that he liked IT very much.

So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate. Other times I ve ve longer to meditate, and indeed love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga eda sessions, those you don't know.

Yoga eza is a process of line very still, but keeping an active mind is very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yoga ea and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or nsd r, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even which is a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial.

Again, that's waking up dot com slashed huberman to access a free thirty day trial. Let's talk about nickey and how nickey impacts our brains, our bodies, our mental performance, our mental health, our physical performance and our physical health. And once again, I want to remind everybody that we really need to separate out a discussion about nickey from the discussion about the delivery device for nicotine.

In other words, when we're talking about nicotine, we are not necessarily talking about smoking, although we might be. There are things associated with smoking and with vamping and other means of getting nickey into our system that have their own effects, both negative and in some cases, positive. Indeed, later, we will talk about how you can actually use nickey to get over smoking addiction.

This won't come as a surprise to to many people, but what perhaps will come as a surprise is the fact that many people actually use nicotine like substances, or nickey itself in order to relieve nickey addiction. We will talk about that and what that looks like and offer various protocols for you later in the episode. I also want to mention here the outset that I have have a long standing interest in nicotine, that earlier in my scientific career, I did research on nicotine in its role in brain development.

And i've had a long standing interest in neural plasticity, the brain ability to change in response to experience. And so experiments that have been done by close colleagues and friends of mine and really emphasize the fact that a seato calling, in particular when a seto calling activate so called nicotine ic receptions, something you learn more about no little bit, that can actually serve as a gateway or a trigger for directed rewiring of the brain. So this is faster.

We think of nicotine as something that we take, but actually we have receptions, that is, locations in the brain to which nicotine bines and can exert its effects. And those recept tors did not come about because of the existence of tobacco, or the isters of waking pens, or because of the existence of anything in the outside world. The fact that there are are nicotine ic receptors in our brain and body tells you that a seto calling and nickey themselves have very important roles in Normal brain and body function.

So much so that I often like to point to an anette of a very well known noble prize winning neuroscientist. I won't real who they are. They're not a fact. Remember its stanford, but many neuroscientists know of this person, and many people the outside will know of this person, and they are also well known for their love of nicotine.

I once said in this person's office and he, I will revealed that isn't he consume no fewer than three pieces of nicotine gum during that relatively short conversation of about forty five minutes. And that was surprising to me. And I asked him why he was taking so much nicky through nick tin gump.

And he replied that for years he had been a chronic smoker, which on the one hand, had greatly impaired his cardiovascular health in his fitness. No surprise, there will talk a bit more about what the underlying reasons are. But most everyone, if not everyone, knows that smoking cigarettes or smoking in general, really empire long health.

There is a simply no question about IT. There are some more or less unhealthy ways to smoke, but the quite honest IT is that smoking of any kind is going to disrupt long and the theory function, log function, blood vessels and so forth. It's going to make IT harder to breathe with vigor, take deep breath, deliver oxygen tissues.

That said, a, that said, he also pointed out that the data on nickey specifically, or pointing to the fact that nickey can be, can be protective against certain forms of cognitive impairment. And that is why he continued to chew nick team containing gum and he swore by the focus enhancing and motivation enhancing effects of nike teen containing gum. Now that is not a call to arms for you to run out and start chewing.

We're consuming nickey containing products. We will talk about those products later in the episode. Some of their potential advantages, some of their potential disadvantages. Now I share this animal because IT nicely separates nickey from the delivery device through which nicot arrives.

Now I haven't talked this individual in a few years to see whether not the nickel is working, stave off any kind of the alzheimer or nurture general or cognitive impairment that would come with age. This general is getting up in the years and seems quite sharp nonetheless. But then again, was always exciting evingly sharp.

The point is, nick is a substance that can both promote cognitive function and under some conditions, if taken to inappropriate, or I should say, to extreme dosages, can also impair cognitive function. So today we really have a nuances conversation about one that includes some of the benefits, some of the drawbacks, in particular for children, certainly for people that are pregnant, for people that have addictive tendencies and for people that have depression and any other kind of mood disorders. What I will tell you soon is that nickey can be very powerful as a mood modulator.

And many people who have tried to quit nicko teen, mainly through the form of smoking, will find that their mood can drop substantially. So nickey does a lot of things in the brain and body. And so i'd like to begin by talking about what exactly nickey is and how IT impacts your brain and body.

So what is nickey and where is IT found? Obviously, nicotine is found in the tobacco plant, but nickey is also found in night shades, that is, tomatoes, eg. Plants and sweet peppers.

Although the concentrations of nickey in tomatoes are eggplant and swept ers vastly lower than IT is in the tobacco plant, you actually can also find negative in potatoes. Now, why is nickey present in potatoes and tomatoes and in the tobacco plant at all? Well, nickel is a plant alcohol. D will get into alcohol a little bit later. But IT is thought that these alkaloids evolved in plant as a way to prevent insects from eating them.

And without going into a lot of insect biology, the reason or the rationality behind this explanation is that nickel is not only a substance in tobacco that people use, are in the various medications that people use, but it's also used as a pesticide, because I can dramatically disrupt the nervous system of insects. IT can render them in fertile, which is not to say that IT render humans and fertile. Run to say, again, IT is not the case that negative renders humans and fertile, but I can make certain insects and fertile.

IT can actually disrupt their motor function and their brain function, and the reasons that IT has such different effects on insects. In other words, IT can kill them or prevent them from reproducing, and therefore explains why plants probably evolved to have this plan to alcohol in humans because of the differences in receptors for nickey where they are located, the types of receptors, the effects of nicotine on humans is quite a bit different. And again, IT does not cause infertility in humans.

Although I will talk little bit later about some double blind review studies conducted in humans that indicate that, for instance, nicki can reduce penile girth, that is, the girth of the penis, and can lead to certain forms of sexual this function. And those changes are largely downstream of changes in blood flow and anatha al cell function and a theo cells of the cells that make up blood vessels and other vascular type tissues within the brain and body. So nickel is found in these plants.

And what we can know for sure is that at some point in human evolution, somebody or some group of people either, and here, i'm completely guessing, as a just so story, but someone or some group must have inhaled the smoke from the tobacco plant or put the dried leaves of the tobacco plant against some mucosal tissue. Any of the different mucosal lintons of their body by which substances can pass through. That's right.

Any of the mucosal soft lining tish's of the body will allow certain substances, not all certain substances, to pass in. That's why people can put to back with their mouth, and a certain man and nickey mixed into the bloodstream, put tobacco up their nose. Certain amount nicky gets into blood stream.

I haven't heard of people putting tobacco in other or faces of their body continue. You costal tissue, and i'm certainly suggesting people do that. But you get the idea and how nickey gets from these plants, these dried leaves into the bloodstream.

Burning tobacco leads to a heat, induce change in the availability of nick. And this is why smoking tobacco, or vapor tobacco, simply by heating IT up, allows the nickey to be liberated and go into the bloodstream simply by hiring into the lungs. We will get back to smoking of various kinds later.

But right now, let's just keep our attention on how. Nickey has pulled from these plants and into the human body. Now, whether by inhalation or whether not by placing in contact with the mucosal tissue, the mouth or other containing office of the body, the nickel then gets into the bloodstream.

And one is in the bloodstream, IT only exerts its effects because IT bines are certain so called nicotine ic receptions OK. So the nittinat receptors are of the eeo collen erga variety. I know this is a lot to think about and a lot to hear if you haven't heard about this, but it's actually quite simple.

Anyone can understand this. A C to Colin is a molecule, a chemical that is, that's released in the brain and body. And when IT bins to reception, there is a little parking spots on cells.

IT changes the way those cells behaved. Those cells can increase their activity and release other other chemicals that can become electronically active. They can do any number of different things when we are just nickering, IT gets into the bloodstream.

And eventually some of that will get into the brain and some of IT gets into the body. And in both of the brain embody, there are these so called Nicholas eeo, Colin receptions, now the so called family, and indeed, they are a family. This is how we refer to groups of receptors of related design and genetic background.

Just like humans, you have a family of these c calling receptors that are the neck tannic variety. Maybe on one street in neighbor od, you know, the Jones is on another street, you know, the Charles and another street. Well, in your body you have the nickel nnc actual receptors, and then you have the local muscle in a caudal in receptors.

Today it's really simple. Nikon only binds to the nickey inc. A eto Colin receptors. And there are a bunch of different ones on a bunch of different tissues.

And the differences in those receptors dictate what sorts of effects the nickey will have on those tissues. So let's talk about what those effects are, and let's do that by dividing the effects of nicotine into effects on the brain. So everything from the neck up and on the body, this so called central nervous system.

And the prophet, although I want to point out that your spinal court is part of the central nervous system, so in fairness to the reality, your brain and spinal cord are all central nervous system. Everything else is considered the periphery. Now there are a lot of different niche, inc.

Acy to calling receptors. But for those of you that want to know you have a santos or for your alter, curious about this. The main effects of nickel in the brain are mediated by nickey binding to the alpha four beta two receptor, alphago four beta two receptor. Even if you don't care about recept subtypes, that's onna come up later when we discuss why nick tine suppresses appetite.

In fact, one of the major reasons why people don't want to quit smoking or they quit smoking or another form of interesting nickey and then they relax, say they go back to smoking or interesting nicklin in some other way, is because indeed nick ti will increase metabolism and reduce hunger in large far by binding to this alphago beta two reception in a particularly area of the brain. We're going na return to that little bit. But if you've ever heard that nick ting kills the appetite, indeed, IT does.

It's not the behavior of smoking itself as not because you always have a cigarette in your mouth that you're not eating more food. Although I suppose that might be a minor effect, there are direct effects of nickey on both appetite, that is that reduces appetite, and direct effects on metabolic, that is, the increases metabolic. Its effects on some other areas of the brain and body will talk about in a moment.

And within the brain, nickel binds to this alpha 4， beta two receptor in various locations in the brain. And there are three and maybe a force that will talk about neurochemical effects of nickey after you injust IT. First things first, when you just nickey ine by smoking nickey containing tobacco, or if you place tobacco in contact with the mu costal lining of the nasal passages in the mouth takes about two to fifteen minutes for that nick teen into the bloodstream, moving hits the bloodstream faster, walking even faster, I should mention for variety of reasons.

And placing tobacco directly in contact with the mucosal lining is going to be the slowest. Now, as I mentioned before, nicky teen gets into the bloodstream. And then because nickey can pass through the so called blood brain barrier, the B, B, B, which is basic offense around the brain, because you can pass through the blood brain barrier, it's going to have very rapid effects on the brain in these four major categories of neurochemicals and neural circuits.

The first of those categories, this is a very important one. This is one that was brought up in the episode on dope me, motivation and drive. And I think not just all scientists, but all human beings should know that within their brain they have what is called the misal limbic reward pathway, the me olympic reward pathway, you just want to call IT.

The dopamine reward pathway is, as the name suggests, a set of connections between a brain area called the ventral tegmental area. You have to remember the named these things, of course, but if you want to, that's fine. To the virtual tegmental area.

V, T, A connects to another area called the nuclear accumbens. Now here's what's very important. Nickey triggers the release of dopamine from the nucleus. Accumbens is what gives nickey its rewarding properties that increases motivation. IT tends to give not so subbed, but very trends in increase and feelings of well being and alertness and motivation.

That's because the increase in dopamine caused by nickey directly within the nuclear nicki also triggers the release of certain of chemicals from the ventures tegmental area itself and those in pinch on nuclear, and increased dopamine levels further. This is what makes the rewarding properties are sometimes refer to as the reinforcing properties of naked so powerful. This is why so many billions of people in just nicki in one former another is also why nickey is so hard to quit.

Because there is a potent increase in dopamine from multiple narrow circuit pathways within this mission. Limited reward circuitry now within the musical mic rewards are contrary. There's an interesting feature.

There are accelerators that essentially push out more depine, get more dopamine released. And there are breaks of the social gabba urgent ride gabs and hiba orna transmitter. Don't need to know too much about to just understand that nickel both increases doping but also increases the activity of gabba.

And so this is like pushing on the accelerator for doping but also removing the break. So there's a two prong effect of nicotine on reinforcement reward, dopamine related pathways, the feel good motivation pathways. And that is an increase in dopamine and a decrease in gabba.

And again, that's all immediately through the missile limbic reward pathway involving the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus A, B. So if you can conceptualize even just five percent of what I just you or even if you can just remember, nick ti increases doping, and that's why IT feels so good and makes you want more of IT. You will have everything you need to know in mind in order to understand, but why nickey is so highly used and indeed abused, why it's so hard to quit.

And that will point to avenues as to how to quit, reduce, take. And IT also points to how nickey can actually be used in an anti depressing way should you choose. And we will talk about what the various criteria are for choosing that.

But just understand, nickey increases motivation. IT decrees negative feelings of mood. That increases positive feelings of mood and motivation. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.

The reason I started taking athletic Greens in the reason I still take athletic Greens once, or usually twice a day, is that IT gets to be the probiotics that I need for good health. Our god is very important, is populated by got microbiome that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics and athletic Greens are optimal and vital for microbiota health. In addition, athletic Greens contains a number of adaptations, vitamin minerals, that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met. And IT tastes great.

If you you like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman, and they'll give you five free travel packs that make IT really easy to mix up athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, at sea, and they will give you a year supply of vitamin d 3k two。 Again, that's athletic Green dot coms slash huberman in to get the five free travel packs in the year supply of vitamin three k two. The second major effect that nicki has in the brain is that IT increases a seto calling.

A seto calling. IT is a neuromodulator that exists in you and me, is released from multiple sites in the brain. And the two major sites are the nucleus by sellers. So these are collection of neurons in the front and base of your brain and from some brain stand areas.

And there are a bunch of different ones back there in your brain stand, which is indeed in the back that released a seto calling that include in local s ulia is kind of a minor site that peduncle punti nucleus. There are a bunch of these different areas, the parade by germinal nucleus. There are a bunch of these things back there.

We don't have to go into all the names, but just understand that there are little pockets of neurons and nerve cells located in the front, in the back, and some extend the middle of your brain, but really, in the front, in the back, your brain, that can serve two major rules. Here they are, a seto calling released from nuclear specialties leads to sort of spotlighting or highlighting a particular neural circuits in the brain. What do I mean by this? Well, let's say your working on a puzo let's is a cognitive puzzle.

You're puzzle. And nowadays ve heard of this word thing among twitter and people posting their word thing. I have no idea what that is, but i'm guessing it's some sort of puzzle i'm guessing like across word puzzle.

And here, if i'm wrong, I don't educate me. Tell me what word is. Somebody put IT in the comments and tell me if I should play IT or not. Here's the deal.

When I see the coin is released from nuclear, special as the neurons are there in the base of the brain, but they extend actions which are like little wires elsewhere in the brain. And when a city to calling is released, IT tends to be. Particular locations in the brain that are associated with whatever activity we happen to be doing.

So if i'm doing word here, i'm talking about as if i've ever done IT doing crossword puzzle world do well. The neurons that were involved in trying to figure out the solution to that word, le crossword d puzzle are active, and then a seto calling is released from the little wires, the little endings of these cells in nuclear species, and all of them. Those neural circuits get a boost.

They become more active. And believe IT or not, our ability to perform that crossword puzzle, at least focus on that world or crossed word puzzle gets enhanced. IT literally increases our our attention for that, and not anything else is enhances.

so. So I literally like a neurochemical attentional spotlight. Nickel increases a city of calling and thereby focus on concentration and mental performance, not by changing the neural circuits that are activated per sue, but rather by making more ACCA calling available at those released sites.

So IT as if the spot lighter got more intense, the highlighter is more intense than that would be otherwise. And should also mentioned because of the so called pharma connect s, the time course in which nicki hazards effects, which are pretty short lived, talk about those in a moment, this enhancement in cognitive performance and attention. It's going to be a very transit, probably on the order of about thirty, maybe forty five minutes.

The half life of negative, depending on how it's ingested and why're, not your food in the god. And what else is in the blood stream at sea to be anywhere from one to two hours. But typically the effects of niki team will come on in about two to fifteen minutes, I mentioned before, and then will last anywhere from about thirty to forty five minutes.

This is why in the old days, and still, to some extent, in three areas of the world, but less so in the united states and thirty in europe as well, we don't see quite as many people smoking cigarettes for reasons we can discuss later, but you would see these chain smokers who, trying to maintain constant levels of of nickel in their brain and bloodstream. Now, perhaps they didn't know that nicky has this one and two our half life, but they could sense, no doubt, the cognitive, the physical effects of nickel in including this cognitive enhancement effect and highlighting of neuroscience its effect. And they would notice they would smoke a cigarette, then, for the next five to forty five minutes, have heighten focus, and they would start to drop off, and they smoke another cigarets.

In other words, they are trying to maintain a constant level of nickel for whatever activities they need to perform. Obviously, change smoking because of the terrible effects of smoking. I'll talk about those terrible effects. I'm sure you've heard of them before um cancer, uh depletion of just about every organ and body tissue to the point that I can actually be measured. How many years of your life you're peeling off in terms of a lifespan and health and by smoking, well, the terrible facts of smoking are in disputable.

But the positive effects of nicotine in on the circuitry is part of the reason why people would change smoke in the first place rather than get one big peek of concentration and focus and then just let IT disappear after forty five minutes. okay. So what we have is a scenario where dopa ean is going up in the me olympic pathway.

That's why smoking or ingesting nicky any other way feels good and makes us feel motivated. And then the increase in the sea calling, especially from nuclear species, the front of the brain, is the reason why IT can increase our ability to focus on particular types of endeavors, particular mental work that we're doing, or maybe you, in particular physical work. Although I should mention any time on pairing the word's nicki in and physical work, it's obvious that because of the ways that smoking in pairs long function, those two things really run counter to one another.

In other words, if you are thinking about ingesting nick team through smoking your vapor in order to improve physical performance, um that's a terrible idea. The logic isn't there and the health detriments are certainly there. The third chemical pathway that strongly activated when nick teen is brought into the central nerve stem into the brain is apple ean in particular, nor epinephrine is related to apple afan.

Now, earlier I said apple eren is the same as a gentleman. That still true nor up and ever is closely related een eea. And for today's discussion, we're going to use them interchangeably.

Although I realized, as I say that, that the medical students and some biology students are probably going to have a minor seizure when I lump in north F A. And epanchin T, I don't do that to be too much of a lumper. You in science, we talk about lump ers and split ters lump ers.

Are people like to over simplify little bit splitters. Are people really like to detail? You see a lot of split ters on social media from time to time. They'll say, wait, no, you didn't mention alpha to beta six recept. So okay, look, I get IT and I am all for having splitters in the room. But for sake of today's discussion and for ease of digestibility of some of this, just want to point out that no up and effort, appendant and a general and i'm gona treat as a common pool of similar, in fact, very similar molecules that all have the same net effect, at least in the context of this discussion. And that's the increase levels of alertness, energy, an arousal and the way that nicotine accomplishes.

Those increases in alertness and alzo and energy within the brain by trigger ing the release of north p and afford from a low cluster of neurons in the back of the brain called locus seul as tiny cluster of neurons that offers up, where I should say has, because they're always there from birth, has these little wires, these axons, that extend many, many places in the brain, not every place, but virtually every place, and can sprinkle the brain with new up and after an essentially service, a wake up signal, elevating levels of energy. And when that combines with the aeo calling from nuclear specialists, which causes attentional, spotlighting increases in concentration and focus in with the feel good properties of dopamine and the motivating properties of dopamine released from the muse olympic reward pathway, now you can start to get a picture of why nickey is such a powerful molecule. It's making people feel motivated and good at, making people feel focused.

And IT makes people feel alert when they would otherwise feel little bit sleepy. So this is a really powerful compound. In fact, going back to our earlier discussion about focus and some tools for focus, and I encourage you, if you're interested to please check out the episode on focus, there are number different tools and protocols there to increase focus.

Here we are trying about one molecule nicki found in plants like tomatoes and potatoes, and the tobacco plant and IT can be synthesized ed in a laboratory and adjusted through out a patch or a gun, or even a pill or a tooth pic dipped in nicky. One molecule that can trigger activation of all the circuits for focus on motivation in one fell swoop. That is remarkable.

That is absolutely remarkable. Here, we haven't touched on some of the psychological components of focus, right? Whether we're interested in something, whether we're excited about IT or not, this is a very, very powerful system. So powerful, in fact, that I think we can really place nickey right up there at the top, right next to caffeine, as the molecule that has fundamentally changed human evolution, human consciousness and human experience. Even if you're somebody who's never in juster, nik tine, this absolutely has to be true because you have these nkt, inc.

Which is to say that a seto calling that's naturally released without any external trigger within your brain body, or I should say, without any trigger from nick, a team in particular, is buying these nicki ic acy to calling receptors and is creating these affects in your brain and bodies just absolutely staging. Now earlier I mentioned the appetite suppressing and indeed meta lisp increasing effects of and while that's a fairly nish component of what nick tin does, I mean, it's an important one, but it's not the major reason why most people consume the team. Like to take a moment and talk about that now because we are in the brain, and we're talking about the effects of naked teen in the brain.

And so seems to me the appropriate time to talk about this. Now we can have this conversation about naked and appetite metabolic in a very simple, straight forward way, if you'd like to learn more about the biology of meta lisp and appetite and how those things are mediated by neural on ents. So not just stuff like you're liver, is that where we have episodes on that? But really the neural components of hunger and appetite encourage you check out our episode, hunger and appetite.

But in that episode we had a discussion and one that all just briefly summarized now that you have a collection of neurons, that it's right above the roof, your mouths or so called the hypo sales hyo means below, and thinness is right above hyo sellers. So the small collection of neurons in the hypo salus to a number of different things related to sex behavior, aggression, mediating the temperature your body is set up, but also appetite and suppressing appetite. And within the hypotheses, almost there is a compact collection of these long neons, which you referred to as the palm C P O M C neurons.

And the name comes to in the fact that they express a certain peptides. Yes, and we won't get into that now, but the palm sea neurons have a very profound impact on whether not you feel hungry or whether not you do not feel hungry, whether not your appetite is suppressed. And turns out that when nicotine gets into the bloodstream and into the brain, some of that nickel binds to nike tini c alphago beta containing nec tin receptors.

Again, these some units are receptors, but based next, buy some of those parking spots, parks there. And as a consequence, these palm C P O M C neurons increase their electrical activity and appetite is suppressed. And that's because the palm y neurons have outputs to various areas of the brain and body, controlling everything from how full we feel to whether not our blood sugar goes up or down, which can impact our hunger and believe in or not, whether not we have a tendency to want to move the job of our mouth in order to chew food.

Yes, believe or not, the neural circuitry associated with appetite and suppression of appetite, actually, dict ates, whether or not you prefer to, or, I should say, are more biased or less biased to moving your mouth. That is, chewing, which makes perfect sense when you hear IT right, one way to suppress appetite to so the jaw shut nearly, or at least make IT less likely to open your mouth and put food in IT. Actually, that reminds me of a story.

I'll just interpret myself to tell every story. That there is a famous nobel, Laura, who won the nobel prize for something totally distant from appetite, but once turn to a friend of mine at a meeting and said, and I discovered the biological mechanism for losing weight. And my friend said, of course, I say, you know, in just fewer calories than you burn, write calories in, calories out, fundamental rule of dynamics and based the fundamental rule of weight loss, weight in or weight main.

And he said, no, it's actually the gene that controls whether not you open your mouth. Now he was making a very nerdy joke. So if you didn't register as a joke, that's about as funny as neuroscience or biology jokes get.

There are couple of funy ones, but that ones kind of considered on the funny other side. So this is why we're not considered comedians. But the point of the matter is that whether not you crave or desire or impulse sively want to put things in your mouth and show IT will actually dictate how many calories that you eat.

And so I find IT remarkable, and indeed important to know that these palsy neurons are actually inhibiting the opening and the movement to the mouth for chewing. So when we smoke and when we adjust the caine in any other way, you activate these palm cy neurons, you suppress appetite. But in part, you do that by actually limiting the impulse to chew.

Incredible, at least to me. Now, in addition to limiting appetite, by changing one's desire to adjust food and show IT and actual craving a food by regulation of blood gurt sea, there do seem to be some quite direct effects of nickey on metabolic. And the effects of metabolism aren't enormous.

These are increases in metabolic that are about two percent, up to about five percent. But I want to emphasize that those are transient increases in metabolic. Nonetheless, people that quit smoking off and find that their appetite goes up, they sometimes game weight. They sometimes do not, depending on whether that they offset that increase in appetite with increased physical exercise or would decrease food intake in other ways. But there does seem to be the direct effect of interesting nicot on metabolic, which I find is interesting.

Because if you look in the literature, one of the reasons why people are reluctant to quit interesting nikon, if, for instance, they want to quit using the delivery, your device, nicky, that's causing such problems for their health, like smoking or vapor, or whether or not they find themselves couldn't, quote, addicted to or have the habit of interesting nickey. In part that's likely due to be the doping effects, right? Because dopa eine is highly reinforcing and rewarding.

IT feels good, so people want to do more of IT. But it's also that for many people and hear the data, really point to the fact that a lot of the Younger female smokers or Younger female vapors, or when I say that, of course, I mean Younger females that vae are doing that because they like the appetite suppressing effects, which of course opens up an entire conversation about the sociology of body imagery, is set a topic for a future podcast. Okay, so nicki has certain effects on the brain by virtue of the fact that xing binds these nicki eeo calling receptors.

And those receptors are found on some, but not all, neural circuits within the brain. And we talk about some of them already, ms. Olympic, the palaces, neons at a now when we injust naki, IT goes from the bloodstream to all the tissues and organs to the body.

Has to do that. amazing. You can pass to everything the brain, the body IT does that because nicklin is fat sollie. And now in any time people hear the word fat, they tend to think about body fat, subcutaneous fat, and maybe they think about diei fat.

What I mean by fat sollie ball, in the context of nicotine being fat sollie ball, is that the cells of your body have an outer layer, so called outer membrane, and it's made up of lipid of fat, very particularly types of lipid ds. In fact, nickel tin has this remarkable ability to move through that fatty tissue. Not all molecules have that ability, but nicot does.

So I can move relatively freely through the brain and body, and relatively freely from outside of cells, extra seller space to intra seller space. So I can get into cells. I can do that with the brain.

We talk about those effects, and I can do that within the body. Now, anytime we're talking about the body, we could be talking about any number of things. But today i'm referred to the periphery and the body in more, less the same way. But keep in mind, in the back, your head pn intended. You have your brain, your eyes in the spinal court.

And those three things make up your central nervous system, the peripheral nervous system, and the peery, which is the rest of your body that contained your organs and so forth outside of the nervous system, things like a liver and your stomach at sea. That's what we're going to talk about now because nicotine has profound effects on the organs of the body that are separate from, but that occur in parallel at the same time as the effects of nickel on the brain. So let's talk about what some of those effects are when nicot makes IT into the blood room, again, within two to fifteen minutes of ingesting IT, depending on the delivery device, your heart rate will increase, blood pressure will increase, and the contract ability of the heart tissue will actually increase.

So what that essentially speaks to is an increase in so called sympathetic tone. And when I say that I don't mean an increase in sympathy for others of the emotional sort. What I mean is an increase in the sympathetic activity of the sympathetic ARM of the automated ic nerve system, which is a real mouth and mindful of ideas.

But all you need to know is that it's a generalized system that increases levels of alertness and physical readiness. Ss, so IT makes you ready for action, makes you ready for thought. It's baLanced. A whole other system called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is basically the so called the rest and digest system, which is a system in neurons and organs, that said a that put your boating, your brain into a state of not being able to think clearly to digest into fall asleep. Okay, so nicki increases hard rate, blood pressure and contract ability, the heart, so it's going to cause more blood flow.

In theory, although IT also tends to constrict blood vessels in many locations in the body, this explains the decrease in piano earth effect of nickey, in particular nicki, in injustice by smoking or vapor. That's right. Smoking in vapor reduces penis size and also will have damaging effects on the blood lining and the theist tissue.

So over time, IT actually impairing blood's ability to get to the penis chronically, as well as to other organs of the body. But when people in just naked teen acute, unless say, they do that by negotiate patch or by tooth pick tip in IT, will have some of these same effects. But when not smoking tobacco, when bringing nicot into the bloodstream through other mechanisms, many, if not all, of the disruption of the end of theoria cell function can be bypassed.

But the effects on piano earth, the effects on reducing blood flow to various tissues, is still present during the effects of nickey, which is, I mentioned last about one to two hours. The half life is about one to two hours, depending on number of factors. Not interesting for today's discussion.

So when nicotian gets into the bloodstream, it's making us more alert, is preparing our body for readiness. The hardest, pumping harder evenement that is a gentle in is released from the adrenal al glands, which ride a top, our kidneys. So everything is pointed to art, creating more readiness to move more readily ess to think. And again, this is happening in parallel with all the effects of newer chemistry that are happening with the brain that we talked about a few minutes ago. Now what's interesting about nick ti is that while IT causes this global increase in readiness and alertness and attention and mood at sara, IT also has the effect of somewhat relaxing skeletal muscle.

Now that might see counter intuit, to those of you out there that already know about to tell the rest of you didn't know IT previously, that your muscles are able to contract because of the effects of a eto Colin released from neurons in your spinal cord that spit out a seattle calling onto the muscle and buying to what nicki I C A eto calling receptors put into plain english nickey's ic receptors are also the ways in which your muscles can get activated. So therefore, why would IT be that increasing nicklin would cause relaxation of the muscles? And that has to do with some of the neural circuits that are upstream of the muscles and has to do a little bit of how the automation ic neuro system is arrange in terms of which receptors go.

Where a topic and kind of rabbit hole of conversation far too deep for right now, at least the context of this already somewhat detailed discussion of the effects of naked. But we would assume out and just think about the effects of nickey, we now have a very clear picture. Reward pathways are turned on, attention is turned on, alertness sis turned on.

You feel Better than you felt a few minutes ago. Your blood pressure is up, your heart rate is up, your prepared this for thinking is elevated as well. And yet your body is somewhat relaxed. That's a very interesting state of mind body. Interesting because it's somewhat ideal for cognitive work.

If you're going to sit down and work on a book, we're you're going to sit down and try to figure out a hard math problem where you're going to write a letter that's really chAllenging you for you to write or maybe that you're really excited to write. But they've been no slow to get out the door for whatever reason. Here i'm talking about my own habits of protestant ation.

Well, that state of being very alert but your body being relaxed is almost, if not, the optimal state for getting mental work done, because if you're feeling agitated in your body and you want to physically move your body is very hard to do cognitive work, at least the sorts of coding of work that involved typing or writing of these sorts of things. It's also the exact opposite of the optimal state for physical performance, which is one of, yes, also alertness, yes, also motivation and elevated mood. That's a wonderful stuff to have in mind, literally, when you are exercising your competing in sport or something of that sort.

But under those conditions, you really also want to have a fast reaction time, a low late tansey for muscle activation, so that you can make coordinated muscle movements in the ways that you need to, which is, of course, what's required of physical endeavors. That tells us a few things first. So that tells us that nickel is going to be generally a bad idea for a free workout tool or for enhancing physical performance. However, its APP to be in, in fact, is an excEllent tool for enhancing cognitive ability. And of course, that trigger my mind to return to the anecdote about my nobel prize when in colleague, who injust nick team by way of naked teen containing gum in order to increase levels of cogent focus.

Certainly not for going out in playing sport in fact, despite the fact that he is very, very tall, he often points to himself in a um an appropriately funny way that you know he despite being on the baseball team of his high school is you know probably the worst player that ever existed in the only position of there because of his height and I guess his head was designed to prevent balls are mentioning the in any event, nick team does seem to be very good at enhancing cognitive functions, at least in the short term, which is not to say that IT isn't without its side effects, which we will talk about. And again, those are side effects that are independent of smoking or raping or other forms of interesting neck. For instance, dipping or chewing tobacco is known to cause a fifty fold, yes, five zero fifty fold increase in mouth cancer.

Things like look, playa and just generally is terrible for your health. I'm sorry to break into you, but if you're dipping or you're using snap for things to that sort, i'm certain ly, i'm not going to tell people what to do. That's not my my in life, but you are dramatically increasing the probability of an oral cancer or a mu costal landing cancer of some sort.

So it's not just that smoking in vapor are bad for your health, these other forms of delivery from nikki can be bad for your health as well, whether not interesting nickey by way of nicotine containing gum or patch or toothpick or other method is dangerous for other reasons, is a discussion that's important right now. IT appears that provided the dosages are kept reasonable, to talk about what reasonable means the later, and the frequency is kept relatively low. So not relying on these things constantly, there may in fact be some benefit to ingesting nicky from time to time, provided that you are not still developing your brain.

Now in reality, neuroplasticity goes on throughout the lifetime. Your life is actually one long development. And or is only development occurs and then stops, but certainly for people before puberty, during puberty, and probably for the next fifteen to twenty years after puberty, avoiding nicot is probably a good idea.

Now of course, development is your entire life is not the development starts in the ends, but certainly for people that are twenty five years old or Younger, ingesting nickey as a way to enhances cognitive unction is probably not the best idea. And certainly please, for those of you that are fifteen years old or Younger, ingesting nickey in any form, unless it's prescribed ed by your daughter for a very specific clinical reason, to me seems just like a terrible idea based on all the data that i've read. And the reason for that is it's going to create a scenario of nicotine dependence in order to achieve heightened levels of mood and alertness at ta.

And that's bad. And what we're effectively talking about is an addiction for nicky tine directly, not necessarily the delivery device method like smoking rapping, although IT could pull that in as an addictive or habit forming behavior as well. But you want to let your neural circuits developed to the point where, again, unless there's a clinical need for a proscribed drug from a licensed physician or psychiatric, that you're not relying on chemical enhancement of these circuits for people who are twenty five years or older.

And again, that's a strict cut off, but roughly twenty five years or older. But for those of you that are thinking about using sixteen to enhances cognitive unction as adults and your brain development is slowing down, right? Never ceases, but is slowing down or has slowed down to the point where we would say developmental plasticity is largely over and you're now in Operating in the context of an adult.

Well, in that case, there maybe incenses in which increasing a seal calling dopamine at seta by way of nicotine, Justin, might be a good idea, but certainly not by smoking, raping or by direct contact of tobacco to the mucosal lining issue of the mouth or nose. So got dipping or nothing for the last twenty minutes or so. We've been talking about the biology of niki specifically, how would impact the brain, how would impact the body, why IT feels so good, why I can enhance focus.

And we've largely set aside smoking wapping, dipping tobacco and snuffin, the negative effects that those all have on mental and physical health. Working down from the top of the head to the bottom of the feet, we can say that smoking, vapp, dipping and snowing negatively impact every organism, tissue system in cell of the body by virtual. The fact that they all damage the end of the ulia cells again, the end of the lial cells at the cells that make up the vast culture, which to delivers blood and other nutrients to all the cells and organs and tissues of the body.

And those antithetical cells are strongly and negatively impacted by all of the practices that I just described. The way that that happens very is a little bit from each one to the next. For instance, IT has been estimated that cigarettes contained anywhere from four thousand to seven thousand toxins.

Now the word toxins is a real buzzard these days. Hear about detoxes and toxins, but more specifically, we know that IT contains car. Since these are cancer promoting compound for incident. We know that the tar in cigarettes, even low tar cigarettes, as well as the ammonia within cigarettes, as well as the formal ohio contain within cigarettes, as well as the carbon dioxide is generated from smoking. Those cigarettes are all cars in gent.

Con dioxide also has the negative effect of depleting the amount of oxygen that delivered to any and all of our tissues by way of the impact of carbon oxide binding hemoglobin and preventing hemoglobin from delivering oxygen to the tissues of the body. So while there maybe four thousand or forty, five hundred or seven thousand toxins, depending on which cigarette, which papers they have any rolled in, whether or not their filtered or non filter the type of tobacco at sea, there are a tremendous number of toxins. And there are some very poor carcinus within that long list of, again, ammonia tar for malahide and commodities, xi de being the most potent of those car, cco ans.

Now the fact that there are car cino and cigarettes sometimes lead cigarette smokers, and particularly the cigarette smokers that have the hardest time quitting or that enjoy their cigarets the most from saying, well, this in everything is a carcinus and everything kills you. Well, certainly that's not a true statement. And while there are other cassino in the environment, so environmental hazards like solvent and um if you even if you work in a laboratory, for instance, we use in the laboratory DNA intercultural es, these are literally dies that allow us to see the DNA structure of cells and see the proteins they make and see the R N.

S. They make. And it's very important to work gloves when you work with those things, because as the names suggest, they interculturally actually get in between the strengths of DNA and separate them.

They are mugen. They mutate DNA. They are often cocina gans as well. So we have them in our laboratory, but we take certain precautions to not have them negatively impact our health safety protocols and so on. We hear that there are car indians in car exhaust and bus exhaust and in all sorts of things like pesticides, and that's all true.

So in the argument of probabilities, one would say, well, if there are all these other cars engins in the environment, why would you compound their carts geni effect by smoking or rapping or dipping or nothing? But that usually doesn't get people to quit smoking or doing those things because of the powerful reinforcing effects of nickey itself. So again, nickel is the reinforcing element by way of trigger ing that dopamine reinforcement pathway, the most olympic reward pathway.

And of course, there are all the other additional effects of increased focus, such as increased ability to pay attention to work or to others that lead to other rewards. And so then IT becomes the situation of compounding rewards. Not really about the cigarette.

It's about the nickey. And it's not really about the nickey. It's about the dopamine that the nickey evokes, and it's not really about the dopamine that the nickey evokes directly persue, but also about all the positive effects that that increased dopamine results in.

So we can easily circle back to the negative effects of smoking, wapping, dipping and snuffing and say the end atheist cells are disrupted. The end atheros cells are involved in delivery, blood and other nutrients. Every issue of the body and smoking, raping, dipping in nothing contain car cinders, which are cancer promoting.

And because the epidemiology, ical studies are out there, we can actually arrive at some very clear numbers as how much life one will lose from ingesting nicotine by way of those four delivery devices. Or I should say, any one of those four delivery devices, although I should also mention that many people are waking, are also smoking. Cigarettes is becoming increasingly common.

Lot of people are using wapping in one cigarettes and another, dipping in one context of aping in another. But even for those that only smoker, only vapor, only deeper, only snuff, the negative effects are dramatic and calculable. So IT is thought that for every pack of cigarettes consumed per day, so he could average that out if you're two a day cigarette smoker or moral pack day cigarette smoker or two pack a day for every pack of cigarettes smoke per day, we can reliably estimate a fourteen year reduction in the lifespan.

So cigarettes are literally peeling years of your life now, because of the way that the brain works in the way that human beings anticipate the future and can be grounded both in the present in the future, the present in the past. That's just how the mind works, right? That's why we can think about the future, but also realized where we are in time, in space today.

Because of that, many people say, well, I enjoy cigarettes or I enjoy vapor. And so at least while i'm here, i'm enjoying IT. And that's because the dog mean system is not very good at understanding opportunity cost. That is what we would be doing in those fourteen years and what we would be enjoying and the enrichment that we would get if we worked to live into those fourteen years.

So at some levels, the smoker, the ape is being rational when they say, yeah, but I enjoy this um and so the year's lost, I can't really register that because it's hard to register what you don't have and what you've never had. On the other hand, we can also point to the statistic that there is this fifty fold increase in mouth cancers from dipping and there are nasal cancers as well that are greatly increased by snow and from smoking. And now we know, based on data from raping, that the antithetical cell, the image and the direct effects.

Of damage to the lungs from tars. And even if people are vapor, which tends to have lower tars than do cigarettes, even for people that are raping, greatly increased probability of stroke of preferable vascular disease. So this is preferable pain because, remember, you know, blood is delivering not as blood, but other nutrient, and it's clearing things out from tissues.

So there's an accumulation of literally toxins and debris that cells generate all the time, which is healthy. But then the Normally is cleared away by the end of the elio cells and by other cell types of the immune system. That's all increased in people that engage in these negative delivery device behaviours.

Rates of heart attack, rates of stroke, rates of cognitive decline are all increase in. Now, you might say, cognitive decline. I thought that nickel increases the likelihood that we can maintain healthy nono function and cognitive capacity, and might even increase cognitive capacity in a pot way in the short term.

Min, indeed. IT does. However, cigaret smoking in vapor are now known to dramatically decreased cognitive function because one of the key things about the brain is that IT is the most metabolite demanding organ, which means that consumes a lot of blue coast.

Or even if you're key to gently, you knew key tones, you need new tries getting to the neurons, another cell types of the brain and nervous system, in order for IT to function properly. And when you disrupt the acculturation through this antithetical sadist function, you is like interstitial, which just means in the spaces between these functions. So it's not just beating up the end the selves themselves, but the spaces between themselves is being disrupted.

There's a lot of debris that accumulates there. And as a consequence, the brain just simply will not function as well. So you start getting short term memory lapses. You start getting working memory lapses. Working memory is a sort memory.

If someone tells you the seven digit phone number typically novaes people to share their info, but seven digital phone number sequence of numbers are an address, and your inability to remember that you're walking back to the kitchen thinking you can't remember what you were trying to remember just a short moment ago, that working memory, working memory suffers long term memory projective or and interrogate memories into the future. How can you know? How can you remember things in the future that haven't occurred yet? Well, this is more of a memory for future plans or ideas and planning for things that are to come.

So what we can very reliably say is that currently more than one billion billion, more than one billion people consume tobacco in order to get their nicotine, because that's really the reinforcing element with tobacco. More than one billion people consume tobacco in the form of cigarettes every day. A growing number of people, more than half a billion people, now are starting to wake.

The estimates range from two hundred million to five hundred million. And there's a lot of debate about this because a lot of people are hybrid smokers and vapors, meaning they do one or both depending on the time of day and location, as I mentioned before. But now you start to see how you can get to the number that billions of people are consuming tobacco because, of course, you also have people that are dipping in your people that are snowing.

And as I mentioned before, you have people that are engaging in multiple of these behaviors. So billions of people on planet earth, anywhere from one eighth to a quarter of human beings, incredible, right? Anywhere from one eight to a quarter of human beings, are consuming tobacco in one former another in order to get their nickey one way or another, and as a consequence, are peeling years of their life dramatically increasing the probability of cancer, stroke, heart attack period, narai thy brain, this function, meaning cognitive disfunction, memory impairment, sexual, this function, there are number stays.

They have looked at increases in court as all, and while minor, those increases do exist, decreases in growth hormone and while minor, those decreases exist. But even setting aside the negative impact on underground, on hormonal factors, it's very, very clear. Smoking, wapping, dipping and snow are among the worst things that we can do for our health, right? They are among the leading causes of preventable death and debilitating life conditions, which may lead you to the question as to why in the world would people do this? Well, IT turns out most of them don't want to.

In the best surveys that one can find of if you could quit smoking, if you could quit waiting, would you? What you find is that, at least for cigarette smokers, seventy percent seven, zero want to quit. They would love to quit. And yet they find that to be exceedingly difficult. And the reason they find IT to be exceedingly difficult is because of all the brain neal chemistry that we talked about before.

The reason I spent close to twenty minutes talking about dopamine in the most olympic pathway is still calling the nuclear specialists and epa and the relaxation of muscles in the preferred and the increase in readiness and the body and brain is that all of those combined to make nickey one of the most powerful important cognitive enhances into some extent physical enhancer. Although, as I mentioned before, the total number of physical exercise or physical sport promoting effects of nickey is very, very small, if not is zero, there are certain conditions under which one might imagine using nicky specifically for cognitive enhancement, where performance of complex motor skills, which sort of out wave, and negative effects on the new muscular system, our ability to generate coordinates movements, is actually an excEllent study. Looking at the effects of nicotine, not by smoking delivery, but by a different delivery mechanism in which they looked at performance of hitters in baseball.

The spirit is kind of an interesting one. Even though these were fairly skilled baseball players, what they had them do with hit a ball off a tea, as I will call growing up, and I immediately, if I didn't play much baseball, but you start off on tea ball, and then you would do, I think he was a pitching machine, then they would use actual pitches through. But in this case, there was a couple of different baseball related tasks that had people hit the ball off a tea in, but they had to direct that hit toward a ball, a top, another tea.

So it's partly precise targeting that's required or to knock that ball of the tea. So this is an activity that involves not just motor output, but ordinated motor output and not just coordinated motor output, but directly coordinated the output that require some as we would take top down processing, right? This isn't the kind of thing that can be done reflexively.

This is the kind of thing where the four brain, the prefrontal cortex in particular, has to be heavily involved in order to suppress certain actions and then create other actions. So the basic take away of the study is that nickey, delivered by way of nicki n gum, not by smoking, dipping or nothing, was able to increase cognitive forming in motor output. So a rare circumstance where a specific set of demands that involve both cognitive engagement and physical engagement showed a slight but significant improvement.

But again, in most cases, nickey is just simply not going to improve physical output if it's delivered through a smoke cigarette, through raping, through dipping or through snifty. So of all, these behaviors are terrible for essentially every aspect of our health, Frankly. I mean, you look at the large is terrible for pregnant women.

It's terrible for kids. It's terrible for older people. It's terrible for Younger people, and you really cannot find a scenario in which smoking, wapping, dipping or snuffing ing are good for us.

And yet people like the effects on the brain, and they feel quite addicted to them. Even if they say they're not, most of those people would be unwilling to give up. They are practice of nickey delivery for more than a few hours.

In fact, if you look at the effects of withdraw, and when you are going to talk about what withdraw of nicotine looks like, you find is that as soon as four hours after the last injustice of nickel by way of cigarette, or raping, or dipping or nothing, what people start to experience with some agent craving for nicky, of course. And while craving is kind of a vague concept, it's actually a very specific biological mechanism. Is the drop in dopamine that starting to occur so much so that there is a drop and opaque below baseline, that is, the increase in dopamine that would Normally be experienced from smoking v aping to or nothing is now not happening.

And in fact, the levels of dopamine are dropping below where they would have been even without performing that behavior. So that's what craving is. And withdraw is an increased sense of that craving as well as a lot of negative stuff like stomach export, noja, urda ty and often collections of all of those.

So because these negative delivery approaches are so terrible for our health and also because as many as seventy percent of people who smoke would like to quit, but either feel they can't because they've tried and failed repeatedly often, or because is just too scary, meaning the reinforcing properties are too strong and therefore they can't imagine living without them, or the withdraw effects are too strong and they can't imagine living with those. Well then is there hope for quitting smoking, raping su fing or dipping? And the short answer, fortunately, is yes, there are excEllent ways to do that.

And some of them, our single event treatments, and we're going to talk about those shortly. But before we do that, I want to highlight one very brief point, which is that nickey is not the cause of cancer. Nickey is not the carcinus.

En is the other things in tobacco or associated with the nickel ine delivery device that are causing cancer. And I should mention the other negative impacts on our health, in particular by way of disrupted and the thiel blood vessel function. Now that leads us to this issue of vapor, because as many of you know, and probably are thinking as i've been delivering this information, people don't have vae tobacco.

The way that vapor pens are designed is that IT includes some liquid IT involves heat and IT does not involve the burning off of tobacco. In fact, there is a constant updating of the engineering of these weight pens so that they can be very low heat. In some cases, they use even non heating approaches to vaporize the nickey and allow IT to enter the bloodstream very quickly.

I must say, in a lot of ways of raping resembles crack cocaine. The reason why va ping and crack co cano so similar is the speed of entry of nicotine into the bloodstream. This is into episode about cocaine.

But I just want to very briefly touch on some of the delivery routes for cocaine because they parallel a lot of the delivery routes for nickel. And we can learn a lot about drug farmer connect s and doping. If we look at the parallels between cocaine and nickey team, our professors, by saying cocaine is a terrible drug, IT is actually a schedule two drug in the united states, which means that IT has very, very limited.

Yet still present medical application, many mainly as an anesthetic and certain laboratory and hospital conditions. But aside from that, it's very clear that cocaine is one of the most debilitating drugs that humans can use because of the way that in impacts the doping system. And IT basically created a loop whereby the only thing that can really trigger dopamine release is cocaine. And as i've said before, the way that I define addiction is is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring people pleasure. Cocaine certainly falls into the category of addictive drugs, strongly addict tive drugs.

And in fact, IT has the additionally pernicious ous feature that after using cocaine for some period of time, the amount of dopamine that's released becomes progressively lower and lower and lower, so that people can never get back to a state in which dopamine release is ever as great as IT was the first time they did cocaine or prior to doing cocaine. Now, with a long period of no cocaine news whatsoever and protecting the dopamine in system in a number of different ways, people can often, not always, but often recover their dopamine system, if not completely, the near completely. So by all means, if you have a problem with cocaine, quit.

Find a way to quit. Get treatment. Get over that one way another. We have an episode with an expert guest doctor on olympic, who's a physician and the chief of the stanford school of medicine, dual diagnosis addiction clinic, world expert in doping and addictive substances and addictions of all kinds, can find that episode of huberman lab dot com filled with information about how to get over different types of addictions, including cocaine addiction.

Also check out her absolutely phenomenal and indeed important book documentation, which touches on some of this as well. And in the shown note captions for the episode where doctor li was my gas, you can also find some additional resources related to that. So cocaine is terrible.

That needs to be acknowledged. IT should be avoided and you should find a way to quit IT if you are currently using. With that said, the delivery mechanism for cocaine strongly per parallels the delivery mechanisms for nickel ting, that is, people will not cocaine, which is a lot like snuffing or dipping.

That is, when people smoke cocaine, they bring cocaine into proximity or into contact, really with the mucosal lining of the nasal passages, which then allows the psychoactive substances to permit into the bloodstream. Very seldom do people eat IT, although that does happen from time to time. People will inject IT, then a so called mainlander, which is a very rapidly try into the bloodstream because it's direct application to the bloodstream by wave injection.

And then there is crack cocaine, which is essentially like a vaporizing of the cocaine from a from a so cocaine rock that somewhat resembles vamping of nickey. So well, the they pen involves a liquid that sold a cartridge that contains in the caine and often other flavors as well, flavour rings. I should say, both crack cocaine and raping cause very rapid increases in the relative substances that are psychoactive. In the case of cocaine, that would be cocaine and the crease in dopamine e in the rain and body, I should mention. And in the case of raping, there's a very rapid increase in blood concentrations of nickel, much faster than occur with cigarette smoking or other modes of nicotine delivery.

So that speed of onset turns out to be a critical parameter because the speed of onset of nicotine is going to also determine the speed of release of dopamine in in the nuclear accused in ventral tegmental area that me olympics reward pathway and with the whole limit r word pathway, it's not just about the peak, meaning the maximum amount of dopamine that's released, but it's the time course, how steep the curve is, how quickly that dopamine increases, that's going to determine how reinforcing, how habit forming and indeed how addictive a particular substance is. So one of the major important differences between weapon and cigarette smoking is that the onset of dopamine release from raping is faster, and even a suddin increase in the rate at which domine increases in the islamic reward pathway can make a given amount of nicotine much more habit forming and addictive. This probably explains the fact that many, many more people, in particular Young people, age twenty five and Younger, are waving at phenomenal rates.

Now, people are starting to wake just about everywhere. You, you see this in restaurants, you see IT on the street. Indeed, you even see IT in the classroom. This is actually become sort of sport of its certainly not something I encourage.

In fact, when I learned about this from a college student, new college student, he's telling me that many college students are actually bringing vate pending in the classroom. I think this is also happening in high schools and even junior high schools. And this is a really concerning practice here. I'm not trying to come across as the you know, the anti vapor crusade or but I must say, given the negative effects on one's health in the long term, but also given these exceedingly powerful reward properties of nickey entering the bloodstream quickly and dopamine being released very quickly from the miss olympic reword pathway, what we're seeing out there makes total sense.

Young people's brains are essentially getting wired to the expectation that dopamine is going to be increased dramatic and quickly under their control, except its under their control only in a very narrow set of circumstances of recall, the definition of addiction, a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. We can change that statement to also say a progressive narrowing in specific connections, that is specific time course of the things that bring you pleasure. Now that's a bit of a nursery or statement than a progressive nearing of the things that bring you pleasure.

But what we are going to see in the next few years, I believe, is an entire generation of Young people for which a very large percentage of them are going to be seeking out a pattern or feeling because to the person taking that, they're not looking at their dopy levels rising in their blood. They're experiencing this as an increase in focus, an increase in the alertness and increase in mood and well being that is very rapid, very dramatic and that simply cannot be recreated by any other substance. And that's a very concerning scenario concerning because that miss olympics reward pathway is the only pathway, the only pathway by which you can achieve the rewarding properties of any kind of endeavor, not just waking.

Of course, this is the way in which people achieve satisfaction from reaching a relationship goal, or an athletic goal, or an educational goal, any kind of goal or sense of satisfaction. And so IT comes as no surprise that vapor are strongly associated with increased levels of depression, especially when vapp use drops off. Why would that be if people are getting so much more dopamine so much more quickly from vapor, shouldn't they be feeling Better? Ah that brings us back to the critical and I should say, defining feature of the dopamine reward pathway for motivation and well being, which is that initially a given substance will cause, let's say, in eight out of ten again, arbitrary units, but eight out of ten increase in dopamine but with repeated use, what ends up happening is that even at similar or higher levels of injection, so one innovation a minute, but maybe two innovation a minute or inhalation every thirty seconds.

Now it's level four out of ten activation of dopa and then three and then two. And eventually IT drops below baseline. Now the whole system can be recovered by absence from nickey consumption, but the dog in system is applied to everything, all sense of well being, all sense of motivation.

So during the period in which one is abstaining from nickey and vapor in particular, people do not feel good. They feel miserable. That's why it's called withdraw. Its associated with a bunch of psychological and physiological symptoms that all lead back to trying to get to the same levels of dopamine release in the same patterns that were when one initially started raping. So i'm not trying to paint a dark picture here, but Frankly, the picture is very dark.

I'm very concerned about a practice of ingesting something that powerfully module ates the dopamine system with the sorts of connections that one sees from injection of crackle in Young people that has all these other negative health effects that in the short term is very powerful ly rewarding increased focus, well being at set, but that over a very brief period of time leads to a state in which the entire dopamine reward system is impaired and can become permanently impaired unless one intervenes in a very deliberate way. So people are directly controlling the rate of dopamine and the frequency of dopamine release by the duration and frequency of inflation of the a pen. And that's an incredible thing because what he does is IT sets up the missile mic reword pathway for an expectation that dopy will be delivered on that schedule.

So that's one of the things that makes vapor, in particular, so hard to quit waiting is actually harder to quit the cigarette smoking for most people. Does that mean that cigarette smoking is fairly easy to quick for most people? no.

Seventy percent of people who smoke cigarettes report that they like to quit if they thought they could. The success rate of quitting smoking when people try to go just called turkey, just quit with no assistance whatsoever, they might tell their family and friends i'm quitting. That's IT is exceedingly low. It's five percent.

So five percent of the people that say that's IT, i'm not smoking again despite cancer diagnoses are not smoking again despite the fear of the negative health facts are not gonna ever smoke again despite the financial cost, the health cost at the way to list off the a huge number of things that IT does their negative but you already know these are you ve heard them IT makes your skin worse that um as I mentioned IT IT a lowest lobo IT disrupt hormones IT disrupts vascular function, brain function doesn't all these terrible things and yet most people who trying quit simply can't. And over the five percent that succeed in quitting, a full sixty five percent of them are lapsed within a year. So that's a very depressing picture.

But it's not to say that people cannot quit. In fact, they can. There are a couple of methods that have been shown to help people quit summer behavioral, and some are from ma logic.

I just want to touch on the behavioral ones first, because IT turns out that there is a quite powerful method for quitting nickey injustice by way of cigarette smoking, which also Carries over to baking. This is beautiful work that's been done by my colleague, in fact, close collaborator. Although I was not involved in the research that am about to describe at stanford in his name as doctor David speaker, he is our associator of psychic.

He's been a guest on the huberman lab podcast, and he is a world expert, if not the world expert, in the clinical applications of hypnosis. Now when I say hypnosis, a lot of people think stage hip nosis, which is the hip notis, trying to get people to do certain things and say certain things. Unsubtly against their will because they actually have to agree.

But the himmel is dictating what the person think, says and does. Clinical hip nosis is vastly different from that. Clinical hip nosis is where the person, the patient actually x their own brain changes toward a specific emotional or behavioral goal work from doctor David people's laboratory down in one hundred and ninety three.

But that now has been repeated many, many times as Carried over into some more modern studies and will provide links to those studies in the shown note caption to that you can access them. Those studies have shown that using a specific form of hypnosis, people can achieve complete in total sensation of cigarette smoking. And there's no reason to believe this doesn't also Carry over to raping through one single hip nosis session.

And the success rates are incredibly high when one considers that Normally IT would be only a five percent success rate. The success rate with this particular hip nosis, developed at ten for school medicine by doctor David speel, is twenty three percent of people who do this photo is one time succeed in in quitting smoking. Now in the old days, which actually wasn't that long ago before the advent of smart phone, then before the internet took off, to the extent that IT has now, this was done by having someone come into the clinic, and doctors speaker himself, for one of his colleagues, would take somebody through the hip nosis.

Nowadays you can access this hip nosis. There's a wonderful APP. IT was developed by dr. David speel and others. It's called a revery R E V E R I. I've talked about this APP a few times on the podcast before, because there are have noticed scripts within the APP for enhancing sleep, for improving ability of fall asleep if you wake up in the middle night, for focus on a number of other behavioral and emotional changes.

There is also a function in the revery APP for smoking sensation, which exactly parallels the sort of in laboratory and in clinic approaches the doctor speaker would use where you to show up at his clinic or in his laboratory. And since that's not possible for the large number people out there, if you or somebody else is trying to quit smoking or waking or dipping or snowing for that matter, I strongly encourage you to check out the revery APP. You can find IT easily by going to revery.

Docs is available in various formats. Some of IT is available free, some of us behind a paywall. But given the tremendously negative impact of smoking vapor, tipping is nothing the hippos is for smoking sensation that referees has seems, at least to me, as a very powerful and worthwhile resource.

So please check that out if you're somebody who's trying to quit ingesting nicky by any of the four methods that I just described. Now of course, there are other methods that people have used to successfully quit smoking or raping or other forms of nicky delivery. And there's actually an excEllent review on this topic.

So before diving into a few specifics about some of the pharmacology of using nicotine itself to quit smoking, or nicotine itself to quit vapor, or the use of various things even assize into depressions to quit smoking or vapor, I just want to point you to a review article that if you'd like to get a complete survey of all the options that available, there is an excEllent review on this. IT was publish just a couple of years ago in twenty and twenty, and the title of the article is pharmacology approach, smoking sensation and updated review for daily clinical practice. And even those is mainly focused on smoking sensation.

Ah IT Carries over quite nicely to raping and IT details the numbers, statistics. You know the fact that every year seven hundred thousand or more people die because of smoking related diseases. So there are going you have the the negative health effects on the Younger people are smoking, that women are smoking more nowaday, and that even though you see less smoking, typically in the U.

S, in canada and even in northern europe, some places still many, many people are smoking. Who would like to quit? But that seventy five percent of people, at least according to this review earlier, I said seventy percent, but estimates are as high as seventy five percent of people try to quit smoking.

rela. Pse, within the first week, the first week they just go right back to IT. That's how powerfully reinforcing the nickey is.

Remembers the nickey in the cigarette that's powerful ly reinforcing, but it's also the oral habit, the motor habit. You know, there is this thing about density of sensory recept tors in the lips. People like bring things to their lips, food, cigarettes, other lips. In some cases, I said a there is a reinforcement pathway related to that for for obvious adaptive reasons. And as a consequence, there is a reinforcement both from the behavior and from the dopamine released from the katine itself.

And as I mentioned earlier, from the plausible reinforcement that comes from increased focus, the money that you make through work or your attentional build, you're the fact that you're alert and people feel you present all of that funs back into positive enforcement, behavioral reinforcement and in what we would call addiction. So this review covers all of that and then steps beautifully through nicotine replacement therapy and various compounds, several which i'm going to talk about now, which have been shown to increase that number that we talk about earlier of only five percent of people who tried to quit with no other support, pharma logic or hip nosis. Otherwise, just say that's IT, i'm not to smoke again and i'm not to work again.

And only five percent people succeed in doing that. And even among those money end up relapsing later. There are a couple pharmacologic approaches. One of the main ones that received a lot of attention in recent years is blue piper own, sometimes referring to by its commercial name.

Well, button now you proper on is a compound that increases the release of dopamine, and to a lesser extent, at an f an and some other neurochemicals as well. It's used for the treatment of depression and for smoking sensation. Now I want to point out again, i'm not a psychiatry.

I'm not telling you to take proper peron OK well button, but i'm going to give you a little bit of the contour of what's typically done in terms of you preparation administration to help people get relief from some the withdraw symptoms of trying to quit smoking or raping or other forms of negative injustice. Typically, the pride prone is taken in three hundred milligram per day doses divided into two dosages of one hundred fifty milgram each. Or sometimes there is a slow release formula.

The dosages will vary from person, a person, when a really emphasize that there is an increase seizure risk with be propre IT only occurs in a small fraction of the population, but nonetheless a real concern for those members population. So for those of you would seize risk, but then, you know, IT or not, that's going to be a valid concern in terms of potential side effects. The other thing about proper one is that has to be used with caution in patients that have liver disease or renal disease that can impact the amount that anyone can take.

me. Sometimes people have to take a much lower dose if they have renal disease or liver disease, and sometimes they can't take IT at all. Sometimes if people are taking them to as a peines, for whatever reason or other sensitives, there are contraindicated there.

So you proper one isn't a one size fits all or magic bullet for quitting smoking. none. There's for people that can take IT safely. Again, this is a prescription drug aboard certified psychiatrists or other physician is going to have to prescribed IT for you if it's appropriate for you.

And IT moves that number of five percent access rate to about what one sees with the clinical hip nosis to about twenty percent of people will successfully overcome their nicky or I should say they're smoking or raping addiction. Now it's important. Ask why this would work, right? I mean, it's not as if reprover one is increasing nickey persae.

What it's doing is it's tapping on that missile mic reward pathway, increasing depine or at least allowing dopamine levels to say substantially elevated enough that people don't experience some of the drop in dopa mean that leads to the withdraw symptoms of the listening, a mood at sea and its no coincident to be preparation is also invented. The present. It's a common to depression for people that experience negative side effects with the so called ssr selective serotonin, taking habitats that prevent them from taking those things like lesson libido or appetite, in some cases, increased appetite or any number of other side effects that some people, not all, but some people, experience with accessory.

They'll be prescribed while buses preparing the generic name. Uh, so well, you from being the commercial name, again, be primary is what they'll perscribed instead with the caveat of seizure risk, rino disease, liver disease at sea, the outcomes with, well, you train for smoking in station are pretty good. And if you think about an increase from five percent to twenty percent, that's pretty dramatic.

And yet, I also want to refer back to the incredible success of the clinical hypnosis approach. Again, you can find that a revery dot com, the clinical hypnosis approach has a success rate of twenty three percent. So it's very close to a line with, if not exceeding the success rate with view pro.

Of course, there are other pharmacology approaches to quitting smoking or raping. All of them generally circle back to increasing dopamine and or no and f in, in order to offset some of the withdrawal symptoms of smoking sensation or vapor sensation. A very common approach for people to try and quit smoking or vapor is to use nickey tine itself to try and prevent people from seeking nickel tin through a cigarette or a vate pen.

What I mean by that is people using a nickey patch or nickel dumb or other niche delivery device that is not cigarette and not avAiling in order to maintain levels of nickel in the bloodstream, which of course, means maintain levels of sixteen in their brain and body to the same extent that they would, if they were smoking or raping, maybe even gradually taking down the total amount of nicki in their brain and body by reducing the number or size of nicotine gum pieces that they ingest each day, or keeping the patch on for a shorter amount of time, or getting a lower dose patch that releases less negative total or over time. All of those approaches have been shown to be reasonably successful, get to the numbers in a human, but reasonably successful in allowing people to quit smoking or vapor. Again, most of the data is on cigarette smoking because vapor is a relatively new phenomenon, although quite troubling ly, it's a very rapidly increasing behaviour, especially in the Young population.

Says, i'm kind of lumping these two things together because I think very soon we are going to need an all out campaign for how to counter viking addiction. So what do we know about smoking sensation using nickel ine itself is the patch best is naked ting gum. Turns out that a combination of approaches is best.

So somewhat surprising, but is very clear from the literal that I was able to find that using nicotine patches for some period of time and then switching to a gum and then perhaps switching to an a nasal spray, that's going to be the most effective than the question is how long to continue each of those and whether not to overlap them. IT seems as if doing one for about a week and then switching to another for about a week and switching to another is one rationally and reasonable approach that many people have used successfully. Why would that be? Well, IT all has to do with the different rates of absorbtion of nickey into the bloodstream, and then the downstream consequences of that on the doping, a eda, Colin epic and other systems of the brain body.

And well, there hasn't been an extremely detailed study of the exact connects ics of, you know how the naseer spray versus the transdermal patches versus the guns. That said, our work, there's a logical structure to IT that will immediately make sense. You first of all, the transdermal patches provide a fairly steady state dopamine release across the day, and often those people are wearing them at night as well.

This is relevant because if people are interesting, nicky, by way of smoking, and you hopefully they are waking up in the middle, just a smoker APP believe not some people do that. But of course, well, people are asleep. They are not smoking or vapor, I tell you, don't falls.

See with a cigarette, your mind, you burn the whole house down. But exceedingly rare to have people are smoking in their sleep. So people wake up in the morning, and because the half life of nicotine from some king vapor is very short anywhere from one to two hours, they are essentially in a state of withdrawal at the point where they wake up in the morning.

How can I say that? Well, remember, withdraw sets in about four hours after the last indigestion of nickey tine, by cigarette or by inhalation from the a pen. So people are waking up in nicky tine withdrawal, and then immediately going into the behavior of interesting nike tine, or very soon after waking for most people. So nickey patch is going to be very effective for a week or so.

Again, talk to your physician about the best approach for this, but then switching to a nasal spray or switching to nicotine gump for about a week, which is gonna the connecting s of that nickel absorption the bloodstream, and change the release of dopamine and other arrow chemicals within the brain that's going to keep the system intentionally off baLance so that IT never comes to expect one single pattern or amplitude of dopamine release. And that is a very powerful way for a, let's just call IT, a quitting method to work. Because, as i've always said, the most powerful schedule of depine is going to be this random intermitted reward.

This is what's used in the casinos in order to take your money. And generally they do, on average, they take your money more than you take theirs and they take more of IT um not just more often because they use this random m in schedule. The random m in schedule is one in which you don't really know when the piece and dooming are going to arrive.

And so there isn't this expectation and craving and then all the sudden when dopa is released, its extremely hard. That's how they get you to continue playing even though based you're losing money in your dopamine is dropping. They elevated every once in a while.

Nicki replacement can be used in a similar way, but in a benevolent way, in order to help you get over smoking or raping by keeping the total amount of dopamine variable around the clock and by changing the amount of dopamine e that's released. IT seems to help people behaviorally and psychologically, because they don't come to expect having a particular amount of dopamine in their brain and blood at any given time. This is an important point because IT brings us to this notion of homeostasis is homeostasis is this tendency for biological systems to try and to reach at clipper.

Um what goes up goes down and set and to some extend to the same degree. So i'll talk about this right now in the context of nicot use, withdrawal and then the period in which people no longer crave nick team. So you can imagine that if we were to measure your hearts rate, your blood pressure in your overall levels of alertness and well being in mood, this just give that some value.

Let's say IT runs from zero to ten again, arbitron its just just take all those physiological measures and the subjected measure of your mood and let's measure IT four times an hour across the day, across the waking hours. What we would find is a line that would kind of swigged a bit maybe so a nice text comes in that you really like maybe you get a you know not so good news and your your kind of autonomic allows all over the place, but average kind of a quickly line where increases in the morning because that's typically when body temperature autonomic rosal increase. And then towards the afternoon, it's going to come sloping down.

And then right before sleep, we'll be an increase again. You've ever felt that you run around a lot before sleep and then IT goes down. That's kind the typical contract of automatic arse al mood at sea across the day, removing, of course, life events and things like psychiatric illness and know depression and a that's the typical art of that.

Now, let superimpose on whatever that country is for you nickey. So get a little bolas, as we say, a little bit of niki from smoking cigarette, from taking the elation on a vate pen. What ends up happening is desert, increasing blood pressure, increasing high rate, increasing mood, increasing the learning, all things we talked about earlier.

Over time, the body starts to adjust so that the baseline upon which that nikon induced increase in area will occur is actually reduced. right? Why would that be? Well, the body and the brain, your physio gy seeks homeostasis.

So if there is a big increase in all those things like blood pressure and mood at set a, typically your baseline will drop a little bit to compensate for that over time. After a couple days or even weeks of ingesting nickey tines, let's say you you wake up, you typically take an inhalation off your wap or you to have a cigarette around nine or ten am. You do that daily.

You get used to a certain level of a mood and alertness and well being for that time of day. And then if you smoke again in the afternoon, let's say you also get a custom to a certain level of mood and alertness and well being for that time of day. Again, it'll very depending on life events, but your system sort to get to use to IT and your baseline will drop to compensate for those peaks so that the peaks aren't quite as high as they were when you first start using negative.

Now you decide to quit. So now what we're talking about is transitioning from the consumption to what we're going to call the withdrawal face. Now what happens is you say that's IT, i'm going cold turkey.

I know there's only five percent successful but i'm going to just go cold turkey or somebody will say, no, i'm use the revery APP or somebody says, no, i'm to use you pre pro or another method or nickey patch or something like that sort. Well, setting aside the nicki, I patcher the nickey delivery device and only focusing on approaches for getting through with raw that have no direct effects on nicking. Okay, so not using the team patch but say the hip nosis or be proper on which can increase dopamine, but IT doesn't crease nicky directly.

What happens the days that you quit that homeostatic mechanism in your brain and body that sets your level of mood and arouse eeta does not know and hasn't adjusted to the fact that you're not bringing in nicotine, you're not having that cigarette, you're not having that installation on the weapon. So what ends up happening is that baseline, which has been adjusted down to offset the increases in mood, in alertness at a when you smoke or vae, is lower than I Normally would be. So that nine cigarette or wave innovation time no longer feels above baseline IT actually feels below baseline because what you're seeing is the lower amplitude of arousal that was there to offset the increase you were getting from raping or smoking.

And then in the afternoon, if Normally you have a kind of phase of your afternoon, you really enjoy, you got society of a vapor cigarette. You Normally you feeling relaxed, you go out at night, you like to vapor, say, no, i'm not going to do that anymore. You're going to feel much, much worse then you would have had you never started smoking your weapon.

Now that's not much help to anyone who's already started smoking your vapor. But I say this because its very important. Understand that the reason why we lapse rates are so high within the first week, seventy five percent of people relaxed than one week, and overall failure rates are ninety five percent, is because people don't expect to feel even worse then they did prior to ever smoking your vapor.

So that first week is absolutely critical. And the beauty of understanding this is that if you can get through that first week, either by sheer grit or by finding other methods to increase dopamine, healthy methods, I would hope. And certainly cold showers, ice spas have been shown to do that, by the way.

And this was described in doctor on olympic y's books, open cold showers can increase up. I mean, exercise, positive social interactions is very likely that people will need to use other healthy methods to offset that reduction in doping. If ever they stand to get through that first week.

And again, if you can get through that first week, chances are quite a bit higher that you will be able to maintain the sensation of smoking or walking. And of course, hip nosis things like be preparing can also assist in that be proper by way of increasing dopamine e promo. Logically, he, through changes in neural circuitry that aren't completely understood, but seem to involve a remapping of some of the so called default networks and some of the newark that involved in kind of understanding of your own internal state.

This stuff get a little bit complicated. We're going to return to this and out upcoming eis ode of the urban lab podcast. But there are indeed legitimate changes in neural circuitry caused by clinical nosis that can at least partially explain why IT is so effective in helping treat or allow people to stop smoking invading.

So for those of you out there that either here or are saying yourselves, I just can't seem to quit smoking or raping or dipping or nothing, hopefully an understanding of how that homeless this process works, and the time course of nicotine, depending on the delivery device hopefull understanding that will allow you to develop a protocol maybe involves IT noses, maybe IT involves just understanding that. The typical times in which you injured ted nicky through any of the different approaches are bringing in the your system are going to be particularly hard. But I don't just mean particularly hard, mean particularly hard and you're going to need to do something specific to offset that decrease in overall autonomic alisal in dopamine at sea.

Hopefully in understanding that, that will allow you to get through that first week. And if you can make IT past that first week, you stand a very good chance of never going back. However, I did console va dr day with speed and anticipation in this episode. Regardless of the method that you used to quit smoking or walking nothing or dipping, there's good evidence that a routine may be once a month or even once a week. Nosis type approach to plan ish even enhance the neural circuits that are allowing you to stay away from nickel is give me a very good idea.

And given that it's a purely behavioral intervention, I can see no reason as to why people wouldn't want to do that going in reinforcing, tighten the bolts on that circuitry that are allowing you to not feel the impulse to smoke, not feel the impulse to vae. And just a very brief mention. There is a vast literature on fact that when people have quit smoking or raping or other form of consuming nicotine, that when they consume alcohol, there is a much higher probability relapse their interactions between alcohol and nickel that will cover in future episodes.

But for those of you that want to quit, I want to assure you, despite the fact that ninety five percent of people fail with the appropriate tools. And I like to think with an additional understanding of the underlying biology and psychology and what you can expect and when to really dig als and went to reinforce your system with more dopamine through any of the number of the different protocols and tools that we've offered here and that you can find elsewhere in other epsom to the human and podcast, I have a high death of confidence that you can quit smoking or vapp dipping or nothing. So today, typical of, Frankly, all episode, the human apotex, we covered a lot about the biology of a particular system.

We talked about the biology of nickel in particular. We talked about walking and smoking, dipping and snow, and the negative health consequences associated those. When I reemphasize that nicotine is not what causes cancer, is the delivery device that causes cancer in the other negative health effects. That is not to say that people should be ingesting nickey through any different methods simply to get a cognitive oose. There are certain circumstance stances where that might be appropriate for the occasional work about, certainly not for physical exercise, given what we talked about earlier.

But of course, there are more and more approaches to increasing, not just nick team, but a seed of calling generally, in order to achieve cogan enhancement or physical enhancement, or just like physical performance enhancement, some of those we talked about earlier, such as alph a gpc. In any event, nicking IT should now be clear as an immensely powerful substance, one of the most commonly adjusted substances on the face of the earth, and has been for a very long time, and now you understand the underlying biology and the way in which is changes your psychology. And that should come as no surprise if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel.

That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please subscribed to the podcast on apple and spotify. And on both apple and spotify, you can leave us up to a five star review if you have questions or comments or suggestions of topics you'd like us to cover, or guess you'd like us to invite onto the human podcast.

Please put those in the comments section on youtube. We do read all the comments. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the ginning in today's episode that is the best way to support this podcast.

During today's episode. And on various previous episodes of the human life pocket, we talk about supplements. While supplements aren't necessary for everybody, many people died tremendous benefit from them for things like enhancing sleep, hormone function, focus and so on.

The human la parga is partner with momentous supplement spelt moments. O U. S. You can find those supplement at live momentous dot come slash huberman if you haven't already subscribed to the huberman lab podcast. Neural network newsletter is a monthly newsletter.

We provide summaries of different podcast and we provide summaries of specific tools that you can use to enhance sleep, for instance, or enhance dopamine. We talk about deliberate cold exposure. Deliberate heat exposure it's very easy to sign up for and it's completely zero cost.

Go to huberman lab dcom, go to the menu, click on newsletter, provide us your email we do not share with anybody else, and you receive that monthly newsletter. And there you can also find PDF of previous news letters that you can immediate download without even having to sign up. If you're not already fallowing us on social media, we are huberman and lab on twitter, huberman lab on instagram and huberman lab on facebook.

And that all of those locations I described science and science related tools, some of which overlap with the content of the huberman a podcast, much of which is distinct from the content covered on the human lab podcast. So once again, I like to thank you for joining me today for a discussion about the ideology and psychological effects of nickey, this incredibly powerful substance. And as always, thank you for your interest in science.