The problem with smoking is that it's
kind of amazing – this is an irresponsible thing to say – but if we’re going to talk
about it we might as well do so honestly. Smoking creates a temporary problem
and offers an instant solution. Once your brain is used to nicotine,
for up to 72 hours you are itchy, nervous and stressed – but one drag
and instantly, you feel really good. But it's way more than just a physical addiction. Smoking helps you focus at work and
is an excuse to take regular breaks, which is good for you mentally. It's a tool
against boredom, it suppresses your appetite, it makes bad moments feel less bad
and good moments better. It's social, fun together and a good way to make friends as
smokers always group up. Your lips are one of the most sensitive parts of your body and putting
something between them is deeply satisfying. So now that we've given smoking an honest
introduction, let's smoke a cigarette together to see why it makes you feel so good and what
exactly happens inside your body when you do it. The Best Worst Thing A cigarette is dried tobacco leaves mixed
with chemicals that make it burn slowly, helping you to absorb nicotine, and flavours
that make the smoke less harsh. Let’s light it. Cigarette smoke is 95% gases like carbon dioxide
and water vapour. The remaining 5% are particles called tar and they contain the magic sauce:
carbon or nitrogen compounds filled with nicotine. As you inhale, billions of particles
interact with everything they pass through, getting stuck on your throat, tongue and trachea.
Your lungs are like big inflatable sponges and have a filter and barrier; the cilia cells
with hair-like extensions covered by a layer of mucus. They trap dust or bacteria to be
swept away in a sort of dance. Tar particles land in the mucus and turn into a sticky brown
substance that stops the dance and paralyses the cilia – allowing them to get deeper
into your lungs: to the alveoli. Alveoli are little air sacs and here is where your actual
breathing happens. They have very thin walls, so that the oxygen can transfer to your
blood and carbon dioxide can leave. Now the magic is released. Nicotine passes through
the thin walls and enters your bloodstream, reaching your brain so fast that it feels
instant. The positive effect arrives right away. If your brain had a control board, smoking
would be like pressing all the buttons at once, releasing loads of transmitters and hormones
that affect your whole body. Epinephrine and cortisol make your heart beat faster and your
body ready for action. Dopamine makes you feel happy and relaxed and reduces your appetite.
Beta-endorphins reduce pain and stress. Nicotine excites and calmes you at the same time. You
become more alert and able to focus. Your nerves become more sensitive to pleasant
sensations, then your whole body relaxes. Together all of these effects just feel great. But your brain immediately tries to return
to normal and pushes back against the effects of nicotine. Which is fine as long as you have
nicotine inside your blood. But once its effects wear off, your body is left overcompensating,
creating a massive imbalance within itself. The more you smoke, the harder
your body tries to push back, which is why nicotine is so addictive:
You stop feeling like yourself without it. It's still great, but now you
also need it just to feel normal. If that was all smoking did,
well that would be kind of ok. Nicotine comes with thousands of
different chemical buddies. Cadmium, lead, arsenic and cyanide, hydrogen
peroxide or nitrogen oxides cause damage wherever they end up. Carbon monoxide
reduces how much oxygen your blood can carry. In your lungs your cilia cells struggle. It's
hard to push mucus clogged up with tar and some of your cilia cells die. Your alveoli
are super sensitive and can’t handle this sort of stress. A few of your tiny air sacs pop like
balloons, causing irreparable damage. Your body needs to get rid of all of this tar immediately!
Goblet cells pump out extra mucus to compensate, which makes breathing harder, so you start
coughing to get the tar and mucus out. Your immune system activates and macrophages begin
eating up tar particles. Smokers have way more of these clean up cells here because their lungs are
literally full of dirt. But the nicotine makes the macrophages sluggish and inefficient. Worse, they
vomit chemicals that dissolve your lung tissue and cause tiny wounds that turn into scar tissue.
Scars in your lungs are bad if you like breathing. Nicotine raises your heart rate while ordering
blood vessels all over your body to constrict. Meanwhile toxic chemicals get stuck, causing
countless tiny wounds all over your body that will turn into scars. Those scars
leak proteins that create random blood clots making your blood vessels even narrower.
Constricted and narrow vessels put a lot of stress on your heart muscle that has to
work much harder to keep blood flowing. Inside your skin, the chemicals trigger
enzymes that break down collagen, the protein that makes your skin
elastic and smooth. This creates folds and wrinkles. Your skin ages
much quicker and you look older sooner. But maybe the worst thing is what happens to your
immune system: All over your body it reacts to tiny wounds and activates, fighting an invisible
enemy, damaging healthy cells in the process. While at the same time the nicotine makes it slow
and sluggish. Worse at fighting actual diseases. We could go on like this,
but this is getting old. In a nutshell every single one of
your organs is highly stressed and suffers some kind
of permanent damage. Over time fats get stuck in the scars inside
blood vessels, which get narrower and narrower, until they start to suffocate your organs.
Your overworked heart beats even harder to push blood through the extra resistance and your
blood pressure rises. So hard that fluids seep out of blood vessels into your lungs, which
makes breathing even harder. The likelihood of a blood clot blocking a critical
passage in the body rises enormously, which can eventually cause
a heart attack or a stroke. Almost all smokers eventually get Chronic
Obstructive Pulmonary Disease – so many of your alveoli are irreversibly destroyed
that you are always short of breath, never able to breathe freely. Once you have
it, it can only get worse, never better again. Finally there is cancer. You get a sort
of double whammy. On the one hand you flood your whole system and especially your
lungs with at least 70 highly cancer-causing chemicals. And on the other hand you
paralyse the part of your immune system that kills and prevents cancer. This
is why cancer is so likely in smokers. Ultimately, smoking is uniquely dangerous
among the things you are legally allowed to do. The average smoker loses 10 years of life. Which
means that some lose like 5 years and others more like 25. You don’t know which one will
be you. But it cuts into your health span even more – making a much larger part
of your life spent being chronically sick. Ooooof So why don’t smokers not just like, stop doing it? Smokers are often seen as unhinged or
without discipline which is unfair. Nicotine is one of the most physically and
psychologically addictive substances known to humanity. If you ever start using it,
you'll likely struggle with it for the rest of your life. The physical addiction
lasts around 3 days – but the psychological addiction is much harder to overcome,
because you form strong habits and it's connected to many social cues, like hanging
out with friends or winding down from work. The perverse thing is that almost everybody who
starts smoking starts smoking as a teenager. The tobacco industry has to target vulnerable
brains and get them hooked on the pleasurable effects of nicotine or it would go away. Today
about a billion people will light a cigarette, which is a lot but at least the trends are
looking good. In 2000 34% of adults were smoking, in 2020 it was only 23%. Still, in 2023
about 8 million people died from it. But it’s not all doom and gloom. There are many
successful strategies for quitting, we’ve put links to some in the video description. People
who stop smoking by the age of 35 on average don’t die earlier than non-smokers. If you are older
than that, even quitting late can add years to your life! It's a bit like with climate change – every
bit counts even if damage has already been done. We're not the morality or health police.
You do you – but at least be aware what exactly you are doing and why you are doing
it – most of you watching this don’t smoke, so, well, just maybe never try it. Smoking
only really solves a temporary problem – but it creates loads of permanent ones. Good thing I never started – but it’s not like I never do things I know
I shouldn’t. Like using sketchy free WiFis or downloading files without
double-checking the source – cough cough. We tried out NordVPN to relieve some of our
existential dread. Go to NordVPN.com/Kurzgesagt to make sure malicious websites are blocked,
webtrackers stopped and pesky ads are hidden. NordVPN’s Threat Protection scan files during
downloads and remove malware and trackers automatically - and they warn you of any apps
that seem risky – I am looking at you there! On top, NordVPN offers many more features:
Summer is travel season and NordVPN encrypts your connection when you connect to
unknown WiFi stations in hotels, airports or cafés. You can choose from over 6000
fast servers in 111 countries around the world. So you can also access your home content
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thanks to the price difference in different countries - regardless of whether you
are surfing with a computer, tablet or smartphone. NordVPN is compatible with all major
platforms and can be used on 10 devices simultaneously. If you want to discover
all the services NordVPN offers go to NordVPN.com/Kurzgesagt to get 4 months
extra on a 2-year plan. All risk-free with NordVPN's 30-day money-back guarantee. Habits can influence your life in a major way. They are basically hard-wired shortcuts your brain
uses to save energy and make decisions faster. So why not use this shortcut-method to
influence your life in a positive way? We created this Habit Journal to help you do
exactly that. It contains scientific explanations, tutorials and colorful illustrations to help
you build the habits you want in your life. To be honest, we created it as much
for ourselves as we did for you. We use it in our lives to help us
implement habits like working out regularly, eating healthy, learning a language, reading more or simply actually doing
our hobbies instead of browsing reddit. And we also included a few tips on how to reroute
habits you want to get rid of – like smoking. Get it now from our shop, improve
your life in a science-backed way and support everything we do on this channel.