I don't smoke usually but when I do smoke (about a month in a year usually, when I have to solve a lot of problems quickly) it makes me more alive, awake (in many senses, incl needing much less sleep and making it much much easier to get up), productive, confident, reasonably vigorous and masculine in general behavior (my gf loves this part) by an order of magnitude if not more. In an instant! Sadly/curiously strong nicotine gum doesn't work this way (I haven't tried patches so far), only cigars (I inhale the cigar smoke the way people do with cigarettes although this is not the way cigars are meant to be smoked actually) do. This makes me think I should be smoking chronically to improve my whole life but I just don't want to develop a serious addiction (nor to spread odor around me :-)) so I don't.