When I did manage to kick them it was after I read the Easy way to quit smoking by Allen Carr which helped with the mindset then admittedly I ruined the data by moving house and starting a work from home job, therefore got rid of all of my cigarette initiating habits in one go.
The higher cognitive function that leads you to read books about quitting could be exactly the mechanism the GP describes.
FWIW, I also credit that book with me finally quitting the habit.
I was expecting a mix of "here's why it's bad" and "here's the good stuff, and at which milestone dates you'll notice them" maybe.
The stuff I already knew and believed in really strongly.. for 20 minutes until the third 'last' cigarette of the month.
If anyone else is stuck in a holding pattern of quitting it's worth giving it a shot. Promise no affiliation haha, go see if your local bookshop or charity shop has a used copy for 20p (the pages will be a deep yellow, of course)
Is it really just that the Easy Way is a self-referential thing and the Way is itself to think about the Way a lot and in doing so convince yourself or your subconscious that you’ve reached some sort of solution despite having not? Or was there some set of concrete messages I might just have missed?
Is the act of reading the book the thing itself?
More likely, people who smoke do function better cognitively with a cigarette in their hand. They are nervous and irritable without it. Their brains probably produce insufficient dopamine when they aren't smoking.
It's amazing for improving focus, I get a lot more work done, remember things very well and am more patient with people.
Doesn't seem addictive in this form either, I can go a week without it and no withdrawal.
Also no negative impact on sleep (unlike caffeine)
I quit smoking about 5 years before I was diagnosed with primarily-inattentive ADHD. Diagnosed with insufficient dopamine (uptake?), haha
There was a lot of burnout between the two, incidentally. At one point I'd decided to cut down on the caffeine too, it's almost like I was trying to burn out in hindsight :)
Thought experiment: Take 1000 13 year olds of equal cognitive capacity and place half in peer groups where some smoke half in peer groups where none smoke. I’m guessing there would end up being more of the first 500 that decide to take up the habit.
There is also a difference between cognitive function and reasoning capacity, the later also strongly influenced by socioeconomic factors.
An intelligent addict will say: I realize it's terrible but I am losing the battle against the urges every day. Anything more than that smells like low cognitive ability to me.
Citation needed. As the GP pointed out, we have a correlation between addiction and lower cognitive function based on this study.
How many is plenty? And how does that compare to the general population? The claim isn’t that addiction and intelligence are mutually exclusive. Rather, the claim is that intelligence makes addiction less likely.
According to the study, alcoholics had a lower baseline IQ before becoming addicted to alcohol. So that does seem to support that lower cognitive function is somehow linked to becoming an addict.
Not only is "plenty" not an objective quantity, but even an objectively large quantity is irrelevant if it's not a large percentage of the whole. 100k geniuses with addiction problems wouldn't disprove the rule if there are 1b people with addiction problems who are of below average intelligence.
You could swap "plenty" to "every" and it would still have the same problem
Better to note that since the study isn't claiming every person who smokes suffer cognitive decline showing a person who is a genius and smokes isn't a counter
People do not have some hidden addict/not-addict bit.
Smart people become addicted to things at a lower rate than not-smart people, and smart people become un-addicted to things at a higher rate than not-smart people.