I know it’s gross, unhealthy, a stupid habit, makes no sense.
Trouble quitting cuz it’s something to do with hands, fidgety, restless, oral fixation I think, and it gets me out of the house. Can’t find a habit to replace it with.
Highly recommend vaping for cold turkey quitting of cigs. Once you taper the vaping nicotine dosage down to a few mg/mL., you should consider a product like fum, which is a non-vape flavored oral fixation device.
Not all addictions are equal. The plan I suggested gradually reduces harm. It’s better to aim for harm reduction rather than cold turkey quitting which frequently leads to relapses.
Ok let me say the issue in a different way. Both are nicotine. You have the exact same addiction. You aren’t even quiting your just changing the flavor of tobacco. If I start drinking vodka instead of beer and say I am trying to get over alcoholism, you would say I am insane because that won’t work.
Get a dry herb vaporizer like the arizer air max as the smoke all be much cleaner for you
Buy some cheap hemp flower or pot and mix it with the tobacco, slowly skew the ratio towards hemp flower/pot over time. Throw a little dried lavendar in there too if you have access to the plant
Micro dose on magic mushrooms daily, not enough to trip just enough to feel good, for some reason I hate smoking anything while on mushroom trips and have heard personal stories of people quitting cold turkey
Got a lot of really good tips, thanks to everyone for chiming in. I was a serious alcoholic for decades, and haven’t had a drink in 5 years. So I will be able to quit smoking. Thanks again!
This is going to be really atypical: smoke cigars.
I never really smoked cigarettes so I never had an addiction with them. But I do like cigars. I smoke them occasionally, as do most people with few exceptions. I’ve heard, though, from some former cigarette smokers that switching to cigars helped them mostly painlessly stop their addiction to constantly smoking cigarettes by instead just having an occasional, even maybe weekly, cigar. Cigars may be more intense but also don’t have all the chemicals and crap that some cigarettes have, and cigars even intentionally remove some of the chemicals that cigarettes may add, like ammonia.
goddammit that is so stupid it might actually work! I don’t have a problem with quitting, did it dozens of times, but sooner or later always had the famous “only one cig”.
gonna go for a cigar when that happens next time 👌
It took me 6 tries to quit a 30 year habit. In the end you have to want to quit. Realizing that quitting is the smart move is not the same as wanting to quit. I finally wanted to quit when I just didn’t want to go to the fucking store again and smoke in a parking lot because I can’t really smoke anywhere else. I decided that I was just done with that shit.
Spent another year on lozenges and quit those for the same reasons.
If you’re not opposed to medications, bupropion (brand name zyban) helped me. My cravings lessened almost immediately. Nicotine also feels like it has little to no effect since I started, which was honestly kind of a bummer to find out when I fell off the wagon.
I get medication isn’t for everyone, but just putting what worked for me out there. Funny enough, I didn’t even start taking it for smoking cessation. That’s just one thing Bupropion can be used to treat. It was a two birds one stone kinda situation.
I did the zyban route, it pushed the nicotine withdrawals off until I quit using the med. By doing that, I was able to focus on the habits and rituals that I had built up around smoking and replaced those with better habits (exercise and walks and shit). When the habits were established, I knocked the physical cravings after stopping the med and it worked! I had tried to quit like 7-10 times seriously before that. Smoked for 10 years, 1+ packs per day for over 6 years.
Smoker for 35 years… This might not help you directly, but I went to Australia for 3 months where cigarettes are USD$50 per pack. At that price I’m not buying. Went cold turkey and it’s been 6 months and still not purchased a pack, even though I’m now in another country where a pack is just USD$2.
Not sure if it’s atypical, but you could try reading “Alan Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking” and “The Freedom Model of Addictions”. The basic premise of the books is, that if you really want to quit, you will quit easily, and that in order to really want to quit you need to reevaluate the reward value of your habit instead of focusing on the negatives. You smoke because you find it pleasurable. The books guide you to better understand what part of your habit you find pleasurable exactly. Is it the nicotine rush? Or maybe the you like the social aspect of it? After finding out what exactly you find pleasurable about your habit, the books will give you pointers on how to reevaluate if the pleasure you derive from it is really all that great compared to other activities or whether it really solves the problem that you set out to solve with your habit.
Had a good doctor who told me you can’t “try to quit”. You can’t “cut back”. You can’t quit for other people or before you are ready. But once you are… he said every successful quitter he helped, quit cold turkey. You have to stop 100% or you won’t stop. He offered meds to help with the emotional and physical side effects. I declined.
I was a smoker for 20+ years, many of those I was well over a pack a day and I worked in a smoking bar for over a decade. It’s probably too late for me is what I thought, BUT I DID IT.
Quit 2 and a half years ago. It hasn’t gotten any easier yet. I still want to smoke daily. But I haven’t had a single puff. I still hang out with friends that smoke but I did change my normal environment. (Quit while I was moving to make breaking associated habits easier.)
The things I found most helpful when the craving kicks in… Exercise was the best. HARD physical labor. Also sleeping and eating. Luckily I was in decent shape already so eating a bit more often wasn’t a huge deal. The tons of extra exercise just burned it off or helped build up some muscle mass I didn’t know was possible.
Mindfulness. Don’t resist the urges, but every time you smoke, practice being present - literally just try to keep your attention on what you are doing. Don’t judge yourself for doing it, just notice. If you are able to do this, it will help with much more than just quitting smoking.
This is the answer. There are many tricks and coping strategies, but at the end of the day there is no shortcut. Once you truly decide to stop, you just stop doing it.
There’s a TED talk with this advice, super interesting research outcomes too. I think he’d also said paying attention to the experience, how it feels, tastes, smells. Being present in the sensations for the whole experience every time.
A friend of mine is a Doctor. This is what he suggests to anyone who is truly interested in stopping.
Smoke as much as you need to
Start rolling your own, unfiltered.
Put the pack somewhere inconvenient, like car trunk or in a hard to reach box in the garage
Only every smoke outside, under an open sky. No cars, no houses, no awnings, no umbrellas, etc. No matter the weather.
He says this makes it accessible but inconvenient and not as enjoyable. Eventually the inconvenience will start to outweigh the need until you end up quitting. He says he has like a 80-90% success rate with those who actually follow through
Some will still want to quit, but the extra steps might have the opposite effect of just not being able to stick to those self-inflicted constraints. I know all too well how it won’t happen until you actually want to quit, I’ve since quit as well, but I know it wouldn’t have worked for me, I’d have abandoned this plan in a matter of days, not so compatible with my usual ADHD scatterbrain. Too much organization.
Vapes, going down from 8mg to 0mg over a while, then eventually just having the habit left to drop, was what worked for me. YMMV, of course.
The thing that worked for me, which I had literally never heard anywhere for some reason, is to quit drinking for about six months when you quit smoking.
At least for me, all my relapses happened when I was at a bar or a party having drinks.
Add comment