Can't you see that the same principle applies to nicotine? Certainly it is not as chaotic as addiction to alcohol or heroin, but the long-term consequences of smoking are even graver.

And consequences apart, the strategy of using a psychoactive drug to suppress a problem and produce a temporary sense of relief is exactly the same.

Do not suppress your stress or problems with drugs of any sort. This is not a moral observation, but a practical one. Suppression doesn't work.


Let's begin to understand stress and look for a better management strategy.


Blame it on the introduction of agriculture!


Stress as experienced by most of us can be traced back to a very ancient evolutionary mechanism that was designed to support our ancestors, the hunter-gatherers.

The lifestyle of these early humanoids, long before civilized cultures appeared on the scene, was close to that of the primates. Their life was better balanced - they 'worked' much less then the average person in the modern era, apparently only about fifteen hours per week. They had plenty of time for play, time for family and for socializing in the tribe.

These humanoids must have experienced some form of stress, but stress took a tragic diversion once we stopped being hunter-gatherers, grew apart from nature and developed a settled existence as herders and farmers.

While evolution is a very slow process of adaptation to environmental circumstances, cultures develop at a constantly increasing speed. This is obviously particularly true in the modern era, with the compounding factors of technological breakthroughs that further accelerate our development.

But despite the machines and computers and corresponding biotechnologies, the human body still abides to the evolutionary code - it evolves and adapts to environmental changes very slowly, over thousands upon thousands of years.

And so the body and its evolutionary codes are out of sync. These codes are deep-rooted and we are often not aware of them, but they are there and they govern many patterns of our behavior. The codes were designed for survival purposes and so they are extremely potent and efficient. But many of these primordial codes are now divorced from our modern lifestyle simply because evolution walks slowly, but technological development moves at the speed of light.