Simply put, each time we light up a cigarette we are suppressing an emotion, and by doing so we are allowing ourselves not to feel that emotion for a while. The habit of not feeling becomes strong in the subconscious mind. Those suppressed emotions pile up on the inside. For every cigarette we smoke we add a little more tar to the lungs and degrade their functioning. The pain of tar build up is gradual so we don’t notice how much pain we are in because it has increased slowly. This is the classic case of the frog in the boiling water. If we were to throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will instantly try to jump out. When we put the same frog in a cold pot of water and slowly heat the water up, the frog will be boiled to death because it will not notice the gradual increase in temperature. Similarly, if we were to insert all the tar and tissue damage caused by a few years of smoking into a fresh pair of lungs, we will experience intense pain and possibly die. If we on the other hand were to add the tar and tissue damage slowly over time, then we will, like the frog in the boiling water, smoke ourselves to death without perceiving the pain that is smoking. We don’t realize how much pain there is in smoking because we have slowly raised our tolerance level for it. This trade-off between felt emotional pain and unconscious physical pain makes addiction so dangerous. As the pain of smoking grows more intense, we grow more tolerant of that pain and we fall into the trap of fallacy thinking. We rationalize that if smoking was really that bad, we would be in more pain. We simply don’t notice the amount of energy that leaks into suppressing emotions and repairing the damage caused by smoking. The constant state of exhaustion that is a smoker’s life.