🌀 Does the "stress-relief cigarette" actually reduce stress?
Is tobacco removing stress, or just filling the restlessness that tobacco itself created?
On the way home after a bad day at work, you stop outside the convenience store.
Smoking one feels like it would settle things. The words going round your head recede a little; the churn in your chest eases. As you breathe out, it looks as though what had built up inside you went out with the smoke.
So tobacco gets treated as stress relief.
The NHS is quite blunt about this feeling. Smoking can feel like it eases stress, when in fact it may simply be satisfying, for a moment, the discomfort of nicotine withdrawal. It also explains that smoking can feed a cycle that worsens anxiety and low mood over the long run.