Stress. Work stress particularly. It’s not like people are lying when they say that it feels good to smoke a cigarette. Especially if you go 10+ hours without one.
There isn’t a smoker alive in the US who doesn’t know the health hazards of smoking. But you’re right, I guess stress-relief is an idiot.
As an amateur hedonist myself, I find it easy to understand that people put off cares of tomorrow in favor of happiness today. Do you really find hedonism so difficult to understand? Plenty of intelligent people are hedonistic. There is no intellectual component that comes into play.
I smoked from 18 to 25. I quit over ten years ago. I know the risks, and figured that I would quit eventually before I hit a certain age. I liked the relaxation that it gave me, and that it was something to do when I drank. I liked the social aspects of smoking when I was in school.
To tell the truth, I enjoyed the fact that it pissed off a bunch of people. To me it wasn’t much worse than people who smoke pot or going out and drinking too much at a bar.
The question was why someone begin the habit of smoking. Not - after becoming addicted - what reason might someone have a cigarette.
Exactly. What is the motivation? The compulsion to smoke enough cigarettes for it to become an addiction?
In my life I have I have smoked probably two cigarettes and a cigar. I think I would have enjoyed smashing my thumb with a hammer more.
Don’t have an answer for you Projammer. I’ve smoked several metric tonnes of weed in my day but never was a fan of tobacco. Nicotine makes me ill, try to avoid cigarette smoke whenever possible.
And now at 14 years old I am too senile to smoke weed or drink alcohol anymore so I gave them up. (unfortunately, I am only kidding about being 14 yrs old)
There you have it. If you would have enjoyed those two cigarettes, you would have kept smoking. Some like it, some don’t. The better question might be ‘why did you even try those two cigarettes’?
Oral fixation. I had a horrible thumb-sucking habit as a child. In elementary school I sometimes ended up with ink on my teeth from chewing the ends of my pens too hard. When I realized that people my age smoked, it became something I had to do. I felt addicted before I ever had a cigarette. All of you people who never once had the desire to smoke a cigarette, consider yourselves lucky. But try not to be so horribly judgmental of the people who do.
But how do you know about those benefits before you start? I’ve experienced stress (not huge amounts but the same as most average people, I suppose) but it never occurs to me to start smoking because I don’t really know what I’m missing. I just found other ways of coping. I’m curious, too, about why it is that some people choose to seek out smoking. What makes you pick up that first cigarette?
What Freudian said.
And I’d like to see some evidence, any reputable cite that tobacco indeed relieves stress/anxiety, that the perceived relief is not simply a response to an already acquired addiction.
Indeed, there even exists Che Guevara cigarettes 
I don’t think it much matters though. I’ve smoked for 16 years and having fallen in love with a hypnotherapist have decided to quit, and have so far cut down drastically. I believe that nicotine largely produces the stress through its withdrawal that it later relieves via the next cigarette. The important thing is that one can control when to apply this stress relief. It is a cure for its own disease, and we control the dosage.
[Cue smug correction that it is nicotine which controls me, like I don’t already know.]
At least 50% of the smokers I know started when they were waiting tables. As a waiter you can’t get off your feet if your liver jumps out of your belly button and falls on the floor but you can take 5 minute breaks every hour if you are a smoker. After about 2 weeks of feeling your feet scream most of them quickly took up smoking to have an excuse to sit on an upside down bucket in the alley for a few minutes. I’ve never smoked or waited tables and it makes me really glad I went the way of customer service drone for high school jobs because otherwise I might have started smoking too just so I wouldn’t have to be on my feet all damn day.
Well, since you asked so nicely…
http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/020328/nicotine.shtml
http://neuro.bcm.edu/_web/danilab/files/390401a0.pdf
http://www.biopsychiatry.com/nicotine-dopamined3.htm
Or…to sum up in an easier to read format with citations, just go to wikipedia:
Nicotine acts on many body systems to produce feelings of euphoria, relaxation and stimulation, depending on how it’s smoked. GABA receptors, glucose, acetylcholine, beta-endorphin, norepinephrine, dopamine…a whole slew of feel-good pathways are affected by nicotine, and it does it from your first cigarette, although the effects of course become stronger with repeated exposure.
I blame the camel.
you are not being clear, are you for or against smoking?
Wow. Ignorance fought here. Thank you, WhyNot
You’re very welcome. And thank you for fighting your own ignorance by reading the links. I’ll be honest, I was sort of afraid you might be so resistant that you weren’t really asking for information but just had your dukes up for a fight. I’m glad I was wrong.
We were discussing the topic in Psychiatric Nursing class yesterday, actually, which is why I knew what to look for in studies. Tobacco use wrecks havoc with antipsychotic medications, simply because it has such a complex relationship with so many body systems. You get a patient’s meds just right while they’re in the hospital where they’re not allowed to smoke, then they go home and start smoking again and it messes up the dosing and suddenly they’re back in the hospital hearing voices again. Most frustrating, and my suggestion that perhaps we should consider letting psych patients smoke in the hospital so we can get the dosing right the first time was met about as well as you’d expect (that is, very poorly indeed.) 
You’re right that I did not want to hear what I heard, or rather read what I read. Didn’t want to believe it. I appreciate the time you took to gather the information.
Interesting about nicotine, Psych patient meds, and the relationship between the two.
Ditto for anyone in retail, although now I’m noticing that it’s mostly the “old guard” out in the smoking area. Very few of the kids smoke.
My husband briefly took up smoking while he was working a factory job. About once an hour, he’d have a 5-10 minute pause while waiting for the next item to come down the line, and since cigarettes were a social thing to do and in plentiful supply, he took up smoking during those pauses.
He quit after about six weeks, though. Too expensive.
ETA: the amount of black dust he inhaled in that factory sort of overshadowed the effects of the smoke, btw.