At the same time knowing I was harming myself by smoking added a lot of anxiety.
> Nicotine-containing products are sometimes used for the performance-enhancing effects of nicotine on cognition.[57] A 2010 meta-analysis of 41 double-blind, placebo-controlled studies concluded that nicotine or smoking had significant positive effects on aspects of fine motor abilities, alerting and orienting attention, and episodic and working memory.[58] A 2015 review noted that stimulation of the α4β2 nicotinic receptor is responsible for certain improvements in attentional performance;[59] among the nicotinic receptor subtypes, nicotine has the highest binding affinity at the α4β2 receptor (ki=1 nM), which is also the biological target that mediates nicotine's addictive properties.[60] Nicotine has potential beneficial effects, but it also has paradoxical effects, which may be due to the inverted U-shape of the dose-response curve or pharmacokinetic features.
If you had ways to moderate the withdrawal of things like caffeine and nicotine you could possibly try alternating regimes. Would probably do dreadful things to your heart though.
https://peterattiamd.com/ama23/
I'm not necessarily recommending nicotine to anyone, but there are ways to get it without smoking.
Or do you mean people worked faster because they couldn’t during their cig break?
But more importantly, it's morally wrong to suggest we shorten and make our lives worse for some short term stimulant spike.
e.g. in the median age at diagnosis is ~71. Most people at that age have very low productivity live on a pension/from savings/other passive income and economically probably cost more to the society than they contribute.
actually it make worse your worst year, but has no effect on your best years
> and puts a burden on a nation's health system.
listen, I know smocking is bad as anyone else, but if we wanna talk about "burden on a nation's health system" let's talk about cars (fumes are just the tip of the iceberg, we have more than 20 thousand deaths/year caused by car accidents and many more injured and/or left invalid) or having children.
You know what also puts a burden on on a nation's health system?
an aging population!
in my Country more than 25% of the population is over 65, so they not only are retired and do not contribute anymore to the expenditures through their work, they also need a lot of very expensive and prolonged care.
They most probably smoked in their younger years, but survived nonetheless and now they need to be taken care of.
Truth is the nation health system wastes too much money on things that do not help people, we've seen it during the pandemic, the personnel was crushed by the unsustainable shifts and the output was barely sufficient.
said by someone who was born and lives in a Country with a public healthcare system, who happily pays for it through a lot of taxes (half of my salary) and a big chunk of the family employed by the aforementioned public national health care system.
Or, for example, what has been the cost (both economical and social) of the recent opioid epidemic in the US of A caused by the health care system itself?
> But more importantly, it's morally wrong to suggest we shorten and make our lives worse for some short term stimulant spike.
like, for example, firing up combustion engines to drive kids to school? kids that, bear in mind, have perfectly functioning legs and can walk!
If only there was something out there that could thin out this group of people in particular.
it's the same thing that, eventually, will happen to everyone of us.
But literally where I am from they have on average 20 years more to live (second oldest Country in the World) so, regarding the burden on the national healthcare system, smokers cost less (I must specify I believe the economic angle is rather meaningless when talking about health care. I don't believe health care should ever be profitable, barely sustainable it's enough).
A study concluded that the abuse of medicines causes around 40 thousands deaths/year in my Country, which is an incredibly high number, so maybe the secret lies in moderation and not in abolition and prohibition.
There's also the fact that for many people a long meaningless life is much worse than one lived fully, as the "owner" intended.
Maybe someone in the future will convince everyone to avoid any potentially dangerous habit, but I'm also quite sure that such a society will face an epidemic of depression and suicides.
Similarly, old people are a drag on society. It’s not at all clear that reducing lifespan is a decrease on net productivity.
You don't need to inhale burnt tobacco to get nicotine, and there are plenty of other ways to get stimulants into your body; patches, teas, etc. and society is still consuming a shit-ton of stims; ain't been to an empty coffeeshop since COVID.
vaping, while shown to be not great for you, is also still not as awful as inhaling tons of smoke, and can deliver the nico just as well.
and it is the smoke that is the problem -- firefighters who handle a lot of cases often have lung cancer rates far higher than the rest of the population.
I think many smokers feel that there's no real upside to vaping for this reason apart from their own health effects. I think they should make vaping more attractive eg allowing it in a vaping area at the office.
Ps I'm not a smoker nor vaper. But I'm getting a bit fed up with this war on nicotine. The current strictness the EU is taking is clearly not working for those who are still smokers. Continuing to increase the price will not either.
Just like the war on drugs is never ending and has not really accomplished much more than increase risk and this rewards that benefit bigger cartels, it's time to evaluate to see what actually works.
I vape nicotine. That's not true in the slightest, unless you're using some wacky definition of 'particle'.
I agree that the restrictions around where one vapes might need to be a little less lax when compared to cigarettes, but to claim that it doesn't 'generate particles' is disingenuous.
Droplets yes but they are just oils. Similar to when you're frying in the kitchen. Probably a lot less than that in fact, considering the amount that goes into a vape pen.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37351135, about https://studyfinds.org/smoking-depression-bipolar-disorder/
It's somewhat similar to what would happen if you banned coffee.