The dizziness you feel from smoking—until you become accustomed to cigarettes, that is—results from the contraction of your blood vessels. The flow of blood to your brain is thereby diminished until your heart begins to beat faster and pump harder. If less blood reaches your brain, less oxygen reaches it. Dizziness is the first symptom of the desperate danger in this situation. The nausea comes from the strenuous—and life saving—effort your system is making to throw off the poisons you've just inhaled.

The release from tension you gain through smoking, then, is psychological and not physiological. It comes from the fact that you have interrupted one thought sequence with another that is "dependable." You've moved from unknowns to knowns. From a problem, perhaps, to a comfortable and habitual ritual. You've shifted your attention; the gears of your emotions are momentarily out of "drive" and are briefly in "neutral." Consequently and undeniably, there is release.

Fortunately, however, there are other ways to obtain release, relief, relaxation. Once you understand the dynamics and anatomy of tension, you recognize their virtues.

Have you ever had a "charley horse"? That terrible ache in your leg that temporarily immobilizes you? You undoubtedly know that this common condition is caused by overstretching a muscle. When the muscle is stretched too far, it compensates by overcontracting, and it may not return to normal until a day or two of unpleasantness have been endured.

Tension is, technically speaking, a similar muscle spasm in which a skeletal muscle contracts and cannot be voluntarily relaxed. The condition can arise from physical causes—sitting in a draft, overwork, over-exercising, working in a continuously cramped position —or from mental causes. You’ve heard of people being "scared stiff," and often the phrase is precisely descriptive.

WHEN YOUR BODY IS TENSE, YOU'RE LIKE A COILED SPRING

Fear and uncertainty and pressure are mental conditions, but they bring about physical results. When your mind foresees an actual or fancied harmful experience, your muscles are held in readiness for "fight or flight." The muscles of your body are taut. The tension, in short, is not just in your mind; your entire body tightens.

Each of us has an extraordinary communications system in our bodies, but even our exceptional network has its limitations. Sometimes it cannot distinguish, for example, between types of concentration.

You are in a jungle, let us say. You hear a strange noise. You rivet your eyes on the spot where the leaves rustled and the twigs snapped. Your muscles tighten.

But let us say that you are at your desk, working on a business problem. Your attention is riveted on questions of profit and loss. Your muscles tighten.
Or you're playing a game of chess, and you think that if you advance your queen pawn, then on the next move take his knight, then on the next sacrifice your bishop, then move your queen to the fourth rank, you'll mate your opponent. Again your muscles tighten.

But here's an interesting point. Let's imagine that the jungle noise you heard was caused by nothing but a silly little frog. And let's assume that while you were working at your desk, you suddenly realized that the profits this year were going to be bigger than ever before—a walloping twenty percent after taxes.

And, by golly, you did move your queen to the fourth rank, and you did checkmate your opponent.
In each case your mind would send out a message. "Hey, there, muscles—everything's jake. Relax!"

My serious point is this. What is popularly known as "tension" or "nerves" is the foreshortening of a muscle or muscles. The mind is holding that muscle or those muscles in readiness. And the only thing that will bring about muscle relaxation is a direct command from the mind.

You can't use muscles to relax muscles

We can express this fact in another fashion: Nervousness and tension are conditions of the mind, not the body. So far as modern laboratory examination can discover, even the nervous systems of neurotics and psychotics are perfectly healthy, and are not starved or depleted or exhausted or altered in cell structure.

Tension, then, is an expression of emotion and concentration as well as a physical reaction to certain unusual physical conditions. When it is the result of emotion and concentration, tension will cease on command of the mind.

Sometimes, as a matter of fact, the mind doesn't even have to issue a specific command. Indeed, it usually does not. Our bodies employ signal systems of various sorts, systems that really aren't too different from the lights and blinkers and semaphores and symbols used by railroad men. You probably employ many "signals" in your daily living, shorthand ways to tell your body to relax. Perhaps you loosen your tie. Or kick off your shoes. Or open your belt. Or flop in a chair instead of sitting in a chair.

One signal which I know you use is lighting a cigarette.

But it's only one signal from among a great number of possibilities, isn't it? And since it sort of contradicts itself by robbing your brain of oxygen and blood, and making your heart work harder, and setting your stomach up against a deadly foe, it isn't necessarily the best possible signal, is it?

Here's a new signal