Dr. Keith Humphreys

But that doesn't mean, wow, cigarettes are really good for you, you smoke and you feel really good.

What you're doing is just the withdrawal

that makes you agitated and angry and annoying goes away and you attribute that to the use of the nicotine.

But it could just be you are dependent on this drug and what you actually need to do is persist through the days where you will feel cognitively sludgy and maybe a little bit keyed up and all that, but then once you go through the withdrawal, you won't need it to get to that point.

It happens with cannabis a lot too.

A lot of people say, I can't sleep without it.

One sign of cannabis withdrawal is sleeplessness.

So are you sure that you've got like a sleep disorder that you're treating and not that you basically just are trapped in a cycle of withdrawal and medicating withdrawal.

Opioids too is another example.

People think my pain is coming back and it's like my injury.

Well, it could be, but it could also be you're dependent on opioids.

What's your advice to those people to ride it out?

There are treatments that can make withdrawal easier from different types of drugs.

But yeah, I mean, if you can get past that point, you could be free of using it at all.

And wouldn't that be nice to do?

It's definitely worth running the experiment.

First off, you would say, wow, I'm so glad you told me.

This is something that tens of millions of people experience, and many of them stay silent about it, and therefore people feel.

And you may feel that you are strange or this is shameful or an odd experience when it is really an extremely common experience.

And you're saying that so the person doesn't feel embarrassed and they feel comfortable talking about it.