Many people think that smoking helps when they are stressed or anxious. Is this true?
The answer is yes and no. Don’t know about you but that is not a very helpful answer. Let’s look at this in a bit more detail to understand it.
When you smoke a cigarette the nicotine in the cigarette causes the blood vessels to constrict. This interferes with the blood circulation and your blood pressure goes up. This in turn causes stress in your body so smoking adds additional stress to an already stressful situation. When you quit smoking cigarettes your circulation improves and your body gets the right amount of nutrients and oxygen. This is why shortly after quitting smoking you feel energised. So from this point of view smoking does not help with stress and anxiety.
The act of smoking is a hand to mouth and inhaling exercise. This is the equivalent of putting a dummy or as they say these days a pacifier in your mouth. In fact if you were to go to the chemist and but one and then suck on it when you are stressed or anxious you would feel less stressed or anxious. I would suggest that this is an extreme way to handle stress and anxiety and would look rather stupid. An easier and less obvious way is to breathe deeply on the count of three whilst inhaling and three when exhaling. From this point of view smoking cigarettes does help with stress and anxiety. The problem is that this is an extremely unhealthy way to handle stress and anxiety.
All in all if you are stressed or anxious there are other ways to handle it rather than smoking. An extremely effective way is hypnosis. Hypnosis can help you to achieve a state of calm very quickly and effectively. In fact you can easily learn to hypnotise yourself to help you achieve a state of calm. Why not look a hypnosis to help with stress and anxiety, you have nothing to lose.,