I’ve never smoked/vaped and I do not plan to anytime soon, but I’m curious of how quitting is like once you’re addicted.
I started smoking at 14, discovered vaping when I was 19, the first few months I was coughing up black goo, then once cleared my lungs have felt perfectly fine since. I’m 27 now and have no intention of quitting vaping, not for any reason, I just enjoy it. I don’t like clouds though, so I’ve found my self using a vaperesso xros 3 mini and I guess amazing flavour but most important to me I get a nice lovely nicotine hit.
I know I’m addicted to nicotine, but because of vaping I don’t find it necessary to quit my addiction, nicotine it’s self isn’t very harmful in small quantities, so here I am and probably will be until a doctor tells me otherwise.
Terrible at first because I tried it without any medication and I simply could not afford to not be working for the 3-5 days for the worst physical signs to pass.
Afterwards I tried again with medication and it went smoothly, no physical addiction signs, but the mental ones were interesting. I haven’t even realized how rooted in my routine smoking was - every time I knew I’d be waiting for ~5 minutes, I went for a smoke.
Has been over a year now and the strangest thing is I really want a cigarette from time to time, not very often, but it feels weird.
Yeah I know people who haven’t smoked for decades but still get cravings from time to time.
It permanently alters your brain. That’s why stopping people before they get addicted is so important.
It’s easy, I’ve quit multiple times.
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Not a smoker, but…
Do you drink? Like even just a few drinks per week? Try to stop drinking for 2 months. You can feel part of the addiction, there will be a kind of craving to drink.
I tried to quit caffeine a few times and failed miserably each time. Once I had a terrible headache and felt like I was slowly loosing consciousness. Luckily I was next to a Starbucks at that moment.
I used to vape in college but afterwards decided to quit. Part of what made quoting easier was moving away and breaking from routine because for me it became a part of my day-to-day. The other thing that helped me was doing cardio. Running would suck so hard because my lungs had a hard time keeping up. That shitty feeling also helped push through cravings.
I smoked a pack a day for about a decade.
I used a method that was, at the time, recent research. Idk if you remember the quit smoking ad that features a woman going out for a a smoke break at work. She goes to light up, but looks stressed and panicked. She then fucking carjacks someone, looks relieved, and then lights up. It ended with a voiceover “You smoke every time you drive, but you don’t drive every time you smoke…? Think of a new way to quit.” And then had their URL on screen.
I was a psych student at the time, in a research class. Perfect. I dig in, find out what this ad is all about. As mentioned, it’s based on recent peer reviewed research. Awesome. I’m the test subject. Let’s recreate.
The tldr: quit specific cigarettes. Don’t quit cigarettes.
Do you smoke every time you drink your morning coffee? And then your next one after breakfast?
Okay, well, now the first cigarette of your day is the one after breakfast. Well quit that one a little later.
If you’re a smoker, you know certain cigarettes will be harder to quit than others. Space these out. Don’t quit your morning cig and then your after dinner cig. Jesus, man.
One by one, get them outta your life. The discomfort is brief, you know you’ll smoke again soon.
That’s pretty much it. Get it down to the last, most difficult to quit cigarette, and work hard at it, knowing g it’ll be a little harder than all the rest. If you fail, you don’t go back to smoking you go back to that cigarette.
If you drink alcohol, this will be the hard one. The drunk cigarette is tricky because drunk you doesn’t care about progress and will justify chain smoking ‘socially’ while out drinking or something. My recommendation for the drunk cigarette is to do it last. First quit the “drink alone” cigs, then the “social” drunk cigs. Then limit social drunk cigs to like 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 a night.
The magic part is that you’ll still have them… But you’ll start hating them. You’ll realize how much non-smokers smell smokers and how little you noticed. The taste will be overwhelming, you’ll remember how strong it was when you started. I recommend getting hammered and smoking a couple. You’ll puke like Bobby Hill and be more or less done with it.
Easy! Turns out smoking not only is a slow kilñer but it raises your stomachs acidic level so that if you have other stressers (high stress job, no regular meals, no breaks, drink to excess, etc) it’s easier for your body to turn on itself and pop a hole in your stomach (aka a bleeding ulcer).
which then can lead to a moderate (week+) hospital stay, plus special diet for a month, couple weeks rehab, and medication for a time.
Oh, as a bonus your body will then be subjected to all the fun withdrawals: nicotine, caffeine, alcohol. All cool things when you’re young and indestructible.
Needless to say I haven’t had a cigarette in over 26yrs.
A couple of things helped me stop. First, I didn’t set a day I was going to stop because that just made me anxious and want to smoke more as THE DAY approached. I decided I was going to stop soon and then one random morning I said to myself “this is it. Stop now”, which took me by surprise and I didn’t have a chance to get anxious.
Secondly, I kept to my routine of taking a break when I’d normally have a cigarette but I’d go outside and chew some ordinary gum instead. That way I could deal with the physical addiction first and the mental addiction later.
I quit smoking 6 years ago. It’s tough honestly, it helps that there are no smokers in my social group. When I’m out with smokers I usually bum a cig, particularly when drinking.
I was hospitalised for a couple months, I couldn’t physically take myself out for a smoke and the nurses weren’t going to wheel my bed down, so they gave me patches. I figured I’d quit smoking when I got out to continue the work already done.
I still want to smoke, I like that it gives me something to do and haven’t really found a replacement for it, doom scrolling maybe. It also gave me something easy to manage, if that makes sense, low stakes and easy problem to solve every day. I smoked for 10 years and my habit was just less than a pack a day, sometimes more not often less. Hopefully, it gets easier in 4 years when I’ve been a non-smoker for as long as I was a smoker.
Transitioning to vaping was easier, I was at or near the vanguard of that movement, when we were building our own coils and shoving batteries into tupawares and blowing ourselves up. Whenever I craved a real cig, I’d buy 10, smoke them and go back to vaping. I’d buy a pack every week, then every month, then every 2 months… I hoped quitting would be the same, it was not.
One of my friends just woke up a non-smoker the same time that I quit, and our experiences are night and day. I get cravings all the time, this guy: “why would I get cravings? I don’t smoke.” His brain just decided it was done smoking one day.
Wife and I bought a house with the agreement that we would not smoke inside. Then we stopped going out so much, argued a lot because quitting sucks and we did it at the same time. Eventually started going back out and have both been smoke free for a couple of decades.
It really took a lifestyle change to quit since the worst triggers were environmental, physical addiction was secondary.We also had tapered down a bit while house shopping and finalizing the sale so we had whittled down the number of cigarettes per day over time before stopping completely. The house was a nice reminder that we quit at first, and then a reinforcement during later temptations.
I had always been a fan of smoking and chewing. One day, a friend showed me his Strawberry Shortcake vape. I never looked back. Lemon Pound cake vape for days.
Eventually I got into making large bottles of ejuice. Then I just gradually lowered the quantity of nicotine.
Once I hit that 0 nicotine, I just worked on decreasing my frequency. Then one day I bronchitis and I was like: okay I’m done.
I started smoking in high school, and by 23, I was smoking a pack a day.
After college, I got a job teaching children’s martial arts at my instructors gym. I taught ages 3 to 18 full time.
Now, these kids, man, they think you are the coolest fucking thing ever walk the earth, I’m not even kidding. I’d run into them every so often outside if the gym, and I became terrified they’d catch me smoking, and I’d have to explain why their idol was doing something so terrible.
So, I decided to wean myself off. I went down by one cigarette each week. Eventually, I was smoking only 3 a day. Then, I cut out the one in the morning with my coffee. Then the one on the way to work.
That last cigarette I smoked on the way home for that last week, I dream about it sometimes.
Anyway, someone had told me that when you stop smoking, the third day is the worst. But for me, it was the fifth day. I’ll never forget how angry I was that day. But once I got through it, not smoking became a lot easier.
I just never went back. Those kids might have saved my life. Or at least my lungs. :)
Don’t get me wrong, it was hard. I think part of the reason I never got back into it is I didn’t want to have to go through quitting again.
Not directed at OP, but to anyone trying to quit, here’s my story:
essentially quit both last march. I had been a cig smoker for over 30 years then switched to vaping. Don’t let anyone tell you vaping is a way to quit. It’s not. Or, at least- it’s not for everyone. If you’re looking to quit- quit. Don’t crutch yourself into continuing to smoke by lying to your self that vaping isn’t smoking.
It is.
Having said that. My experience is this:
I got on Wellbutrin and it didn’t take the first time. This would have been around January. Though while on it- I could see how it would work. I just didn’t stick with it.
2nd try was successful. And the reason how I know it’s successful, is that since I quit- I lost my best friend in July, and my 15 year old dog on Halloween night. Not once through the grief of either, did I turn to smokes or even think about them once.
If you’re looking to quit- you can quit. Whatever method works best is the correct method. But there will be no guarantee that at of them work work for you.