What's grossing you out today?

[DanaC]

I've done that. During times of serious financial difficulty, and also during times of trying to stop smoking (walked past a pub and seen almost full cigarette left in ashtray on tables outside - fell off the wagon having first made sure nobody was around to see :P)

Heres the thing about nicoteine: it messes with the part of the brain that deals with fear. That's why the scary health messages don't persuade smokers to stop. They're great at scaring people into not trying, but once you have a nicoteine addiction, then that's not going to work.

Fear of germs and disease is a pretty basic human fear. The fact that someone will disregard that in favour of a nicoteine fix isn' just due to the need for nicoteine outweighing the fear of disease, but also that the brain has stopped processing fear in the usual way when the addicted brain is nicoteine starved.