You may have personally experienced, or just heard from other people, of the mental boost that they get from smoking. Perhaps, for a short period of time such boost may be true, however in the long run, the effect of the tobacco consumption may be more dangerous to your brain than what you have expected. If you want to better your brain’s well-being, you have to worry about what affects your IQ.

An Addiction Research Center conducted a research regarding the long-term effects of alcohol on an alcoholic’s brain functioning. As expected, alcohol was found to be associated with mental problems and lower IQ scores. And as an addition to their findings, they also found out that long-term smoking has an effect on decreased brain power.

Alcohol has an adverse effect on memory, problem-solving skills and even the IQ of alcoholic men. The results showed that alcohol has more severe effects on the thinking skills of alcoholic men who have been smoking for quite some time already.

Among these alcoholic subjects, cigarette smoking was seen to be related to reduced mental functioning. However, even though the cause and effect relationship between smoking and the decreased mental performance was not clearly established, there are still some things which point out to the fact that cigarettes are the cause to such effect. In order to prove this point, more studies will have to be conducted.

Aside from these bad vices, there are still other things which may cause the reduction of your brain power.

Poor Thinking Performance – Other Short Term Causes

According to some more studies, foods which include artificial food coloring and sweeteners may be bad for the brain, more especially if they are consumed in large quantities. Usually, the children are the ones more affected negatively by these artificial flavorings and colorings. Examples of these kinds of foods are colas, white bread and hydrogenated oils.

The bad or “hydrogenated” oils can cause clogging in your arteries, which may also then lead to heart problems. Clogging of the arteries also makes it harder for blood to flow to your brain, so that is naturally going to decrease brain power. And getting back to the artificial foods, these cause fluctuations in blood sugar levels… these fluctuations cause “fogging” of the brain and can lead to much more serious problems such as diabetes. Needless to say, just say NO.

If you still want to know about things that may cause brain degradation include things such as egotism. Egotism is when a person just limits their ideas to ONLY their view on an any particular subject. Through egotism, people become settled with just their original thought and think that since their thoughts are more important than others, then there is no more need to look at the ideas that come from others.

As you may have noticed, the effects of the bad eating habits as well as the personal problems may just be temporary. Thus, if you stop eating all those junk foods and start eating healthy; and likewise stop being so egocentric, then your brain functioning may just return to its normal performance. Fortunately, these factors affect the brain efficiency temporarily; unlike with alcoholism and smoking wherein the effects really do affect the IQ.

You should keep healthy all the time by doing things beneficial to your mental health. Whether or not the efficiency of your brain is affected temporarily or permanently, the truth is that it is still harmed for a certain period of time. You should know better, your brain performance should always be at its prime.