Ah stimulants, a modern application of game theory with our health put on the line.
Nicotine as a useful stimulant
21–30 of 138 posts
Re: Nicotine as a useful stimulant
#22I don't know, but I think cigar and pipe smoking are a perfectly valid way to get nicotine on your own terms while avoiding addiction. I have never seen someone cowering in the rain cradling a big cigar to get their fix.
Re: Nicotine as a useful stimulant
#23Anyone have any notion of the size of the IQ boost suggested by the link to a paywalled paper?
So far the IQ boost from any known drug intervention is very modest. All of the possible environmental interventions on IQ combined appear, from longitudinal studies of IQ in national populations, to have a fairly strong effect, but many of those environmental influences are still very poorly understood. A recent review article,
Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012). Intelligence: new findings and theoretical developments. American Psychologist, 67(2), 130.
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
by a group of all-star IQ researchers who on the whole are optimistic about environmental interventions, lays out some of the current research and shows what is still unknown.
Re: Nicotine as a useful stimulant
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Snus is an awesome alternative to smoking. I've tried chew and nicotine lozenges, but snus is a happy medium. I've come up with a way to get off nicotine, which I do from time to time: dissolve about 8 nicotine lozenges in a bottle of water. Take a sip when craving hits. The craving goes away immediately. ymmv.
So, you get off nicotine by going on nicotine?
I believe it's called "tapering off" The cravings go away as the dosage goes down, since a sip isn't enough to increase or maintain tolerance.
Re: Nicotine as a useful stimulant
#25I LOVE NICOTINE!!!!
Re: Nicotine as a useful stimulant
#26From anecdotal experience, nicotine has quite a similar effect to amphetamine (therapeutic dosing.. i.e. Adderall). Nicotine, in low doses, by itself (i.e. outside of tobacco, which contains MAOIs, which potentiate nicotine's effects), is not terribly addictive. I'll occasionally supplement it for a few days at a time, then stop. I would caution anyone supplementing nicotine NEVER to smoke tobacco, at the same time.…
What kind of bad stuff with gum? After reading gwern i started trying out gum and it's nice. I have no cravings and never have to or want to consume more than a single gum per day. Most of the time it's a quarter or half a chiclet + headphones and a clean desk to get me into a 2-4 hour coding session.
I'm worried about if it will damage my oral health or anything though. Will it?
Re: Nicotine as a useful stimulant
#27I can't imagine life without stimulants. I hope to move off into the woods one day and live a completely natural lifestyle for a while. Reset myself. No caffeine, no nicotine, no amphetamines. Just me, a dog, and a nice ranch property in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile, nicotine is a staple of my day-to-day. I quit smoking a long time ago, now I stick to Swedish snus and vaping. For a period I was chewing gum too. D…
In an attempt to quit smoking I just discovered the vaporization method and WOW -- I'm so impressed. Its actually enjoyable in the way that smoking is enjoyable, and the stimulant kick is very real.
Re: Nicotine as a useful stimulant
#28To the OP: curious to know, are you a user? Have you been off nicotine longer than 2 months in the past year?
Re: Nicotine as a useful stimulant
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by no more effect? No more blood pressure increase? Or no more cognitive stimulant effect?
No more blood pressure increase. You can probably also develop tolerance for the other effects of your chosen stimulant, but maybe not as rapidly.
I'd like to see some studies about it.
I'm 26, I picked up smoking about 10 years ago (damn, that's a lot of time) and I have high blood pressure. That may also be due to genetic factors (both father, mother and grandmother with HBP).
While my BP is usually around 150/90, the three times I quit smoking for more than a week I return to normal values, around 120/80.
Just my N=1
Re: Nicotine as a useful stimulant
#30Interesting, but there is no way in hell I'd risk nicotine addiction again, I quit smoking 4 years ago (it's hard but not as hard as many would have you believe).
Caffeine though you can prise from my cold dead mug.