re: #140 Dr Lizardo

I’ve quit because I was finding it well-nigh impossible to breathe. I figured in a few more years - I’m 45 now - I’d be lugging around one of those little oxygen tanks with tubes up my nose and it would certainly limit my mobility.

No thanks. So far, BTW, the quitting’s going easier than I thought. Maybe because this time, I really do want to quit.

I smoked periodically…basically as a kind of self-medication for anxiety…through my 20s. It was never a full-time habit, but deciding to quit outright was still tough. The biology of it—the body adjusting its own coping mechanisms to accommodate the nicotine stimulating you brain’s reward center (via FosB in the nucleus accumbens)—is freaky. The cigarette becomes natural, integrated into your biology.

Honestly, man, it’s good that you quit at any age. Those things are horrid. My dad was a chain-smoker, and utterly convinced there wasn’t any risk right up until they found the cancer that killed him. He was a jerk, but nobody deserves that kind of affliction.