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Nicotine Effects on Mental Health and How TMS Helps You Quit

May 12, 2021

Everyone knows about the negative effects that smoking has on your physical health. But fewer people know of the effects it can have on your mental health.

Beyond the addiction, nicotine can affect other parts of your mental wellbeing. Like any other drug, nicotine affects the chemical composition of your brain. This can have effects on your mental health.

Luckily, there are treatment options available. TMS, or Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, is one such treatment. A breakthrough technology, TMS can help you kick your smoking habit and reclaim your mental health.

What are some nicotine effects on mental health? And how can you use TMS treatment to quit smoking? Let’s take a look.

Nicotine Effects on Mental Health

We all know that nicotine causes addiction. But that isn’t the limit of how nicotine can effect your mental health. Smoking has effects on mental health in many ways.

Nicotine is a stimulant, and when it reaches the brain it triggers the production of dopamine. This causes an elevation in mood. Initially, many smokers may find their mood improved by the nicotine.

The problem is that, like any other addictive substance, this pleasure becomes dependent on continued nicotine use.

Over time, nicotine changes the structure of the brain. This is what makes it so addictive. If a person goes without nicotine, it hampers the brains ability to produce dopamine, which has become dependent on the nicotine.

This is why many smokers who try to quit experience strong mood swings, including anxiety, anger, and depression.

Because of this, smoking can appear particularly appealing to people with pre-existing mental health issues. For example, people who suffer from depression are twice as likely to smoke as those without it.

The problem is the vicious cycle this creates. When a person with depression or anxiety smokes, some of their symptoms may be temporarily alleviated by the dopamine release.

However, this makes the symptoms of their withdrawal even worse. The pre-existing symptoms of their disease are exacerbated by the sudden lack of nicotine. For this reason, people with depression or anxiety have a much harder time quitting than those without these conditions.

This is where Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation comes in. This technique can help repair the structures in your brain that have been damaged or altered by nicotine use. This makes quitting smoking much easier, and alleviates the stresses caused by nicotine withdrawal.

What is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation?

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation is a breakthrough therapeutic technology. It is a means of non-invasively stimulating the nerve structures in your brain. It is a new technology, but has already seen widespread approval and use.

How does it work? Magnetic stimulators are used to pass small electrical currents that produce a magnetic field. This field can then be manipulated, by varying the impulses, to affect different regions of the brain.

These impulses can be used to create long-term changes in brain structure. This is the heart of its therapeutic applications. TMS changes the plasticity of synapses in the brain.

By using precise stimulation, this can be used in the treatment of all sorts of conditions. Most mental health issues are caused, in some way, by the synapses in the brain. 

By changing the plasticity, they can be rewritten in a way to alleviate mental health symptoms. This makes it a powerful tool for treating issues like anxiety and depression.

It can also be used to help undo the changes made by nicotine dependence. This allows for a much easier experience when quitting smoking.

Is TMS the Right Choice to Help Quit Smoking?

This may seem like a lot of work to quit smoking. After all, nicotine patches and other tools exist to help with this process. Why go through the trouble of TMS therapy?

The benefit of this kind of treatment is that it helps target not just the nicotine addiction itself, but the mental stresses of withdrawal during quitting.

For the majority of smokers who try and fail to quit, these mental stresses play a large role. Nicotine withdrawal can cause anxiety and depression that can last well after the physical withdrawals have abated.

These issues, in turn, make a person much more likely to start smoking again in the future. Properly treating them is just as crucial to successfully quitting as managing the physical symptoms.

By using TMS, it’s possible to modify and repair the neural pathways that have been changed by nicotine addiction. It’s important to remember that addiction has conditioned your brain to associate smoking with pleasure.

This can make it harder to feel pleasure without smoking. By rewriting these synapses, you can reduce or even eliminate this problem altogether. 

TMS therapy can also be used to treat depression and anxiety caused by quitting. This technique is already used to treat clinical depression and anxiety, and can easily be applied to those dealing with it from withdrawals as well.

This has benefits far beyond the immediate quitting process. By treating or preventing depression and anxiety from quitting, it makes you far less likely to find yourself craving a cigarette again in the future.

Use TMS Treatment to Help Quit Smoking

Quitting smoking is one of the hardest things to do. Nicotine is an intensely addictive substance that makes permanent changes to your brain structure.

For a person who’s been addicted for some time, depression and anxiety can remain long after the physical symptoms have ended. Nicotine effects on mental health make it much harder to resist the urge to smoke in the future.

This is why it’s essential to treat these issues as well. TMS treatment is an extremely successful way to do exactly that. Using this therapy will pay dividends for anyone looking to kick a smoking habit.

Now that you know how TMS helps you quit nicotine, it’s time to take the final step. Get in touch with us for a free consultation. We offer plenty of payment options and are proud to support our military with TRICARE coverage.

Get your free consultation today, and let us help you towards a life free from nicotine addiction.

Considering TMS Treatment? Schedule a Consultation!

Tired of the results you’re getting from your standard treatment? Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation may be able to increase your chances of long-term remission, reducing your symptoms and allowing you to live a more joyful life.

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