I wasn't smoking, I was being made to smoke | The day I quit smoking and what neuroscience taught me

I wasn't smoking, I was being made to smoke | The day I quit a 20-year smoking habit

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When I was young, I smoked my first cigarette at a friend's house.

The first one made me cough and didn't taste good at all.
Still, I smoked it.
There was only one reason. I wanted to look cool. I wanted to act like an adult.

That was 20 years ago.
Seven Stars, one pack a day.

I'd wake up, brew coffee, and light one up.
The moment I finished a greasy meal, I'd light one up with my coffee.
While drinking beer, in the middle of yakiniku, after eating ramen.
When I was frustrated at work, when I relaxed, when I needed a change of pace.

The reason for smoking was supposed to be different every time.
But in the end, I was always smoking.
My brain was craving nicotine. That was all it was.

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When I was 25, I quit once.

I read a famous book called 'The Easy Way to Stop Smoking'.
The moment I finished reading it, I felt, 'This really doesn't taste good,' and I didn't smoke from that day on.
It lasted for about a year.

But the people I was close to at work were all smokers.
The time spent chatting in the smoking area was the time that brought me closer to them.
One day, I was offered one.
I thought, 'It's just one.'

The next day, another one.
Before I knew it, I was buying Seven Stars for myself at the convenience store.

'It's fine, whatever. I'll smoke.'
That's what I thought.

I stopped even thinking about quitting.

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I didn't truly quit until more than 10 years later.

The catalyst was reading 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People'.

In it, there is the phrase, 'Be proactive.'
When I first read it, I stopped at these words.

Being proactive means not acting on automatic thoughts, but stopping and choosing your next action yourself.

At this point, I looked back on what I had been doing for 20 years.

Wake up in the morning and light one up.
Finish a meal and light one up.
Run out of nicotine and light one up.

Was I choosing to smoke these myself?
No.
My brain was ordering me to 'release dopamine,' and I was just being made to follow that order.

In other words, I wasn't smoking.
I was being made to smoke.

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When you smoke a cigarette, a large amount of dopamine, known as a 'pleasure chemical,' is released in the brain.
This creates the sensation of 'feeling good.'

The problem lies in what happens next.

When dopamine is repeatedly forced out by nicotine, the brain decides 'this is excessive' and begins to reduce the number of receptors that receive dopamine.
As a result, you end up with a brain that cannot feel dopamine without nicotine.

Furthermore, nicotine interferes not only with dopamine but also with the secretion of other brain chemicals involved in mood stability, alertness, and concentration.
These are things the brain is supposed to produce on its own.
However, a smoker's brain becomes dependent on nicotine for these secretions and loses its ability to produce them itself.

In short, the more you smoke, the more your brain becomes a 'brain that cannot function normally without nicotine.'
During the times you aren't smoking, your emotions, concentration, and alertness all decline.

Then, the moment the nicotine wears off, you experience irritability, headaches, fatigue, and a drop in concentration.
You perceive this as 'discomfort that will disappear if I smoke a cigarette.'
When you smoke, you think, 'I feel better.'

But that is a false sense of enjoyment.
You have merely returned from a negative state back to zero, the brain's original state.
It is not a positive.
You are just returning for a moment to the 'normal state' that non-smokers feel all the time.

I had mistaken that for 'relaxation.'

There is a concept called the 'Paradise Lost Hypothesis.'
Smokers do not realize that nicotine is robbing them of the state of happiness their brain should naturally have.
Even though the dopamine that should naturally be released after a meal is harder to come by, the smoker feels that 'smoking a cigarette brought the happiness of the meal.'
In reality, the cigarette was stealing the joy of the meal, but they were under the illusion that they had regained it.

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Moreover, I wasn't really looking at what I was pouring into my lungs back then.

Cigarette smoke contains about 4,000 types of chemical substances.
Of those, about 200 are harmful substances.
About 60 are carcinogens.

Nicotine is a poison that was originally used as an insecticide.
Tar stains the lungs black, arsenic is a deadly poison, formaldehyde is a preservative, and benzene ravages the blood.
Carbon monoxide steals oxygen from red blood cells.

I was automatically pouring this into my lungs 20 times a day for 20 years.
I was paying money to put insecticides and carcinogens into my own body.
Without even realizing I was being made to smoke.

I thought it 'tasted good.'
In truth, I was just tasting the poison.

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Most people who smoke think this.
“I can quit whenever I want.”

I thought the same thing 20 years ago.
“I can quit anytime.”
I said that while continuing to smoke 20 cigarettes every day.

But the data is cruel.

According to the National Cancer Center, only 1–3% of people who try to quit smoking on their own are able to keep it up for more than a year.
Out of 100 people who try, only one, two, or three succeed.
The remaining 97 or more start smoking again.

Almost everyone who thinks “I can quit anytime” cannot quit.
I was among those 97 people 20 years ago.

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Smokers believe in their own “concentration.”
“Smoking a cigarette clears my head.”

This, too, is an illusion.

A study at the University of California, San Francisco, found that middle-aged smokers scored lower than non-smokers in language, vision, memory, and spatial cognition.
Studies comparing young people in the U.S. have confirmed that smokers experience memory loss and mood drops during times when they cannot smoke.

Furthermore, if you continue to smoke 11 to 40 cigarettes a day, your risk of developing dementia 20 years later is 1.4 times higher.
If you smoke 41 or more a day, it becomes 2.1 times higher.
It is also known that smoking causes the brain to shrink.

Tobacco is a device that destroys the brain's very capabilities while tricking you into thinking that “smoking will help you concentrate.”
Your brain function is lower after smoking than it was before you smoked.

While you are smoking, your abilities are diminished.
Even when you aren't smoking, you can't concentrate because you are suffering from nicotine withdrawal.
In other words, you are not performing at your true potential during any of your waking hours.

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When the topic of the cost of tobacco comes up, it is often calculated in money.
One pack a day, 200,000 yen a year. 10 million yen over 50 years.

But what you really need to face isn't the money.
It's time.

The time spent going to the smoking area.
The time spent smoking.
The time spent looking for a lighter.
The time spent buying them at a convenience store.

Just with this, you are losing more than one hour a day.
365 hours a year. 18,000 hours over 50 years.

That's not the only problem.
As long as you are a smoker, your brain function will continue to be stolen by nicotine.
Concentration, judgment, memory, alertness.
During the times you aren't smoking, your brain is exhausted just trying to recover from “negative to zero.”

In other words, your brain's capacity is in a diminished state during all of your waking hours.

Will you fight while carrying this shackle, as someone who is currently nobody but wishes to achieve something?

Smoking doesn't just steal your time and money.
It is a device that lowers your very capabilities.
You spend 50 years living with that device attached to your head.

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Please remember just this one sentence.

You aren't smoking cigarettes. You are just being made to inhale poison into your brain.

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I remember the moment I quit very well.

After reading 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,' I decided to 'choose proactively.'
The moment I felt like smoking, I would stop.
And then, I would ask myself.
Is this what I am choosing? Or is it my brain's autopilot?

The answer was clear.
It was all autopilot.

From then on, I didn't smoke at all.
The difficulty was much less than I had imagined.
That was because I had the feeling that 'I am choosing this myself.'

And about a week later, something changed.
The haze that had been hanging in my head the whole time disappeared.
It felt like the fog had lifted.

Until then, I had thought 'this is normal.'
But after the haze cleared, I realized.
For 20 years, I had been living in a fog the whole time.

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After I quit, the urge to 'smoke' attacked me several times.
At drinking parties, during stress, or when I saw someone else smoking.
There are moments when my brain whispers, 'Just one won't hurt.'

At those times, there is a phrase I always told myself.

If I smoke this one now, I will end up continuing to smoke from tomorrow on forever.

This is a way of thinking used in cognitive behavioral therapy.
When you want to smoke, you turn the weight of that one cigarette in front of you into '50 years of the future.'
It is not a magic cigarette. It is the first step toward starting a 50-year chain.

In fact, many people who try to quit smoking on their own and fail end up completely back at square one because of 'just one.'
The dopamine receptors in the brain restart the addiction circuit with just a single dose of nicotine.
Even if you have quit for a year, there is a high probability that one cigarette will take you back to 20 years of habit.
This is an unavoidable reaction due to the structure of the brain.

That is why, when I feel like smoking, I chant it.

If I smoke this one now, I will end up continuing to smoke from tomorrow on forever.

That is all you need.

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If there is a habit you are repeating right now, please ask yourself one question.

"Am I choosing this?"

Checking social media in the morning, snacks from the convenience store, a drink at night, videos before bed.
Think of one action you find yourself doing without realizing it, and ask that question.
That is all you need to do.

When the answer is "No, I'm running on autopilot," that is when your agency begins to stir.
From there, you decide whether to choose it or not.

That single sensation of "choosing for myself" broke a 20-year addiction.

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When I was a smoker, I was saved by another book I encountered when I was 24.
I wrote about that story here.

▼ Debt, Unpaid Rent, Forced Eviction | The Encounter with a Book That Changed Me at 24

And there is another truth about the brain that saved me from being "made to smoke" for 20 years.
It is the definitive edition of the Law of Attraction, integrating a century of intellectual lineage with modern neuroscience.

▼ The True Identity of "The Secret" That Saved Me at 24 | The Truth of the Law of Attraction Deciphered Through Neuroscience

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I wish for your happiness. Trigger a paradigm shift.

#QuitSmoking #Tobacco #Neuroscience #Addiction #7Habits #Proactive #Nicotine #SelfImprovement #SelfDevelopment #LifeChanging