Nicotine and cigarettes are known to make you feel calmer, and help you to relax and focus. They have a similar effect on the gut, helping to relax and stimulate it into action, speeding up the contractions that move your food through the gut. Nicotine works on neurons. Neurons aren’t only in the brain; we also have them in our gut, intestines, colon, and the walls of the bowel. They have their own nervous system, if you will, controlling the movement of food and doodoo from one end to the other. By working on the gut receptors, nicotine causes regular, strong, rhythmic contractions of the smooth muscle lining which propels the content of the gut in a forward direction during the act of defecation, in this way, affecting the “push” element of the whole pooing process.