Some wellness influencers promote specific nicotine protocols — such as cutting patches in half — that they say can improve your health without as many risks. But there is no evidence that using nicotine products in this way can improve your health, said Jonathan Foulds, a professor of public health sciences and psychiatry at the Penn State College of Medicine.
Like any stimulant, nicotine can make you slightly more alert, Dr. Foulds said. “It doesn’t make you more intelligent, it doesn’t make you funnier, it doesn’t make you able to write interesting novels, any of those things,” he said. “It makes you able to focus in boring situations and stay with the topic a little bit longer.”
Over time, users can also build up a tolerance to nicotine and become addicted, struggling to concentrate without it, said Adam Leventhal, director of the Institute for Addiction Science at the University of Southern California.
Some influencers cite the work of Dr. Paul Newhouse, director of the Center for Cognitive Medicine at Vanderbilt University, who has led many of the top studies on nicotine and cognition. Dr. Newhouse said that while he has found that a small amount of nicotine can benefit concentration in certain circumstances, such as among some people with mild cognitive impairment, many of the claims around the drug’s benefits misrepresent the research.
Experts said that the data cited by influencers on other claims, including that it could prevent Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease, is preliminary and far from definitive. And they emphasized that, while much less hazardous than cigarettes, nicotine does carry risks.