Well, considering you are telling the truth:

a) you never trained your IQ using methods designed to increase IQ, meaning your self-assessed avg IQ would increase significantly within 150 hours of IQ practice

b) 1 cigarette is irrelevant, which makes c) irrelevant in context.

d) It's common to feel smarter than the rest. Especially if you surround yourself with people who tend to keep their intelligence back for the sake of recreation and fun OR they never really tried for reasons.

Chess is cool, ELO 1350 - 1450 after 3 years of regular playing is also cool and shows that chess is something where you actually are trying, pointing at the fact that your self-confidence issues are merely the result of lack of practice aka consistent increases of mastery in subjects you care for (or want to care for).

Bottom line: You (most likely, > 0.97) did not lose any IQ points due to smoking. :D

Isn't this dictated by your available free time?

Or project-based? If you are a writer, for example, it's usually project based.

Otherwise, if you really have a hard time setting boundaries, then you might be the type to orient yourself around the states of your social circles. They definitely have boundaries when they stop listening or caring.

If you can't say enough is enough yourself, let someone you trust, or in whose competence you trust, do it for you.

I would say something like "when does it stop being useful" but the 'real' infinite game is all about curiosity and there's almost no players, just uninterested and destructive shareholders, so I'm gonna go with "do you have a thread that connects it all or not?" If you don't, and it only leads to more and more excursions, fix that point of depth where some subject still interfaces with the other stuff and stop there.

This is a "wild" hypothesis. A scifi WIP.

The desires of certain character types culminate in leadership. Those with this character type who have actual visions that fit withing the symbiotic nature of our reality were about as wanted among their peers as alphas were wanted in human tribes where betas felt treated unfairly and thus ganged up on alphas and their offspring, then establishing fraudulent hierarchies alienated from individual competence, which was compensated by collectively established complexity that served to maintain and uphold the fraudulent hierarchies.

Over time, in IT, engineering and science, this lead to narrower and narrower fields of possibilities, aka probabilities that certain behavioral locks and refused directions and angles will be unlocked (after emerging).

Business psychology, marketing, sales, and culture and psychology are entangled and "envelop" instead of developing. It appears like an evolution but it's an alienation, a contiguous/continuous self-imposed, self-reinforcing isolation from and within a symbiotic, open system.

The complexity forces the reduction of productive points of friction in order to create atomic points of contact with the parent system that minimize even productive and constructive influence. This then enforces rules of self-preservation instead and dictates dogmas of engagement with the rest of the world.

It's the obfuscation of the oldest Ponzi scheme which prefers isolation in singularity rather than a symbiotic evolution. The first who makes it to the patent office vs FOSS. Factory farming for a fancier dinner table. Who cares how much is thrown away, how much energy is wasted and how any of that impacts the chemical cycles of a symbiotic system that kept optimizing for exactly that for billions of years--by design, via self-organization, not necessarily as a hard-coded yield. The world wide web feels similar, btw.

Again, it's a WIP. (I just whipped those paragraphs up, but there's an imaginary pin board with a lot of sticky notes ...)

Nope. Not necessarily.

a) fuck IQ. But since you are using it as a benchmark (here, at least). What is your IQ? How did you gain most of it?

b) How much are you smoking? Are you getting sub-level espresso effects from nicotine? (If you don't drink coffee, got anything to compare it with?)

c) How's your breathing? How often are you sick(ly)?

d) Where do you see yourself under the Bell curve? Professionally and or any other way you might believe is relevant.

Just think high frequency, max amplitude bell curves under bell curves. And then ... yeah, who says you didn't?

It's not enough to explain the problem, IMO. And it's a problem that is worse in some population segments than others. Even in poor countries.

The mechanisms that separate more from less affected segments go back one and more generations, which is why it's not harder for parents to keep their kids on track despite "more stuff" but a lot of parents have it harder because their own brains/organisms are more affected than those of others.

And "some take more care of themselves than others" loops right back into my argument, which is so damn annoying.

It's taken me a great big freaking while to "rewire what fires together", including motivation and attention and I've looked at so many angles, while so many more and important ones require a bio-chem lab, an fMRI and PhD level knowledge in Molecular Bio-Tech.

Anyone wanna sponsor some of it :D? I'm serious, but among the elderly (37).