326. The psychology of nicotine
The Psychology of your 20s
iHeartPodcasts
4.8 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
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Summary
Nicotine is everywhere - but not in the way we once knew it. It’s not just in cigarettes anymore. It’s in sleek vapes, tiny pouches, lozenges, gum, even diffusers marketed as 'wellness'. And somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like a vice and started looking... aesthetic. Clean. Even, normal.
In today’s episode, we unpack the ever-present boom of nicotine and what it reveals about our generation’s relationship with coping, craving, and control. Because this isn’t just about addiction - it’s about soothing anxiety, chasing focus, managing overstimulation, and the ways we self-medicate under pressure.
We explore:
- Nicotine as a stimulant and a coping mechanism
- Levels of conformity and links to the ‘in-group’
- How nicotine got rebranded for a new generation
- The role of dissonance in maintaining the cycle
- How to break the bad habit loop
Whether you’ve used nicotine yourself or just want to understand why it’s seems like everyone has a vape – this episode is for you.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:06.6 | There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. |
| 0:10.4 | You must excise it. |
| 0:12.8 | Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. |
| 0:16.7 | From IHeart podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, |
| 0:20.0 | this is Havoc Town. A new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jules State and Ray Wise. |
| 0:29.1 | Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:38.5 | Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk |
| 0:45.7 | through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for |
| 0:52.0 | our psychology. |
| 0:57.3 | Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, |
| 1:03.2 | old listeners, wherever you are in the world. It is so great to have you here back for another |
| 1:08.8 | episode as we break down the psychology of your 20s. Today, |
| 1:13.9 | we are diving into a topic. I think that hits close to home for so many of us, even if we don't |
| 1:19.5 | always want to openly admit it or acknowledge it. Honestly, my inbox has been just like |
| 1:26.6 | buzzing with requests for this episode. I think I get |
| 1:30.4 | this at least five times a week. We are talking about the psychology of nicotine. And I definitely |
| 1:38.7 | saw a rise in requests for this episode after we did our 20 biggest mistakes people make in their 20s |
| 1:45.8 | episode. And we talked about smoking. And I had a lot of messages from people being like, |
| 1:50.5 | how come you've never done an episode on this? Well, guess what? There was one right around the |
| 1:55.4 | corner. This is that episode. So nicotine is one of the world's favorite drugs and it is in fact a drug. It is |
| 2:04.8 | highly addictive. It is highly prevalent. Its usage is very prevalent. And the stuff it's packaged in |
... |
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