14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new investigation commissioned by SKYCIG, a distributor of e-cigarettes, men and women tend to smoke for entirely different reason.
Thus, it is being said that, whereas men often smoke when socializing with friends, women are more likely to light up when feeling stressed.
The specialists who took the time to investigate these different types of smoking behavior explain that their findings can only mean that men associate smoking with having fun, while women look at a cigarette as a means of coping with stressful circumstances.
Following their carrying out a survey amongst smokers, the researchers came to realize that 56% of men light up when wishing to have fun with friends.
On the other hand, only 48% of women resort to smoking when taking part in various social activities. Furthermore, 33% of the women volunteers taken into consideration for this study admitted that they smoked more often whenever they experienced stress. Daily Mail quotes behavioral psychologist Jo Hemmings, who commented on the findings of this study as follows:
“This divided behaviour suggests that smoking is seen as more socially acceptable for men. This is surprising, particularly in the modern day, and could be indicative that women potentially attribute an element of shame to their smoking behaviour.”
“As women are more likely to smoke alone as a coping mechanism, when compared to men, the psychological effects of nicotine addiction become more accelerated – if having a cigarette is a 'reward' for overcoming stress or anxiety, becoming dependent on that stress reward cycle is a much faster process,” Jo Hemmings went on to argue.
The researchers speculate that people have a rather hard time giving up on smoking precisely because they have grown accustomed to associating the habit of lighting a cigarette with either having fun, or managing to overcome stressful situations.
More precisely, it is their belief that, because of these associations, smokers do not even make a conscious decision when lighting up.
Quite the contrary: they merely respond in an automated manner to the circumstances they find themselves in.