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.
My solution: peer pressure. Get your smoking buddy to quit with you. Just go cold turkey - but tapering down a bit before hand might help. Don’t use gum. Don’t use drugs or patches. Just fucking quit. Statistics show that people who use quitting aids like vapes, gum, patches, drugs, etc, fail far more often than people who just go cold turkey.
So cold turkey with a friend. Hold each other accountable. Use each other as a support group. If they fail, sympathize with them but guilt trip them into quitting again so they can be your quit buddy.
I’m not a smoker, but I saw some advice on here a while back that seemed really solid. Basically stop saying “I’m quitting” or “I’m trying to quit”, and replace those phrases in your vocabulary with “I have quit”. Then don’t make a liar of yourself.
I got down to 1 a day. As long as my body knew that one was coming at the end of the day I was fine.
One night I got drunk and when I smoked that one it gave me the spins and I puked everywhere.
The next day I went out and got some of the nic gum and just replaced my 1 cig with that. Eventually I just used less gum and then phased it out entirely.
I’ve been using a Dynavap with CBD (hemp) and it’s worked great: Very similar to smoking a cigarette but it’s a dry herb vaporizer. The main downside is, there’s a decent learning curve to using it well.
No more “after meal” cigarettes. Ooh, that’s rough man.
Okay, now, no more “after work” cigarette.
No more “responding to frustration” cigarette.
No more coffee cigarette.
No more drunk cigarette.
You’re probably more addicted to smoking in the scenes/scenarios/circumstances you find yourself in the most frequently than you are to smoking cigarettes. So quit one at a time rather than “smoking” all at once.
There is a lot of solid research behind this method. If you’re a mid 30s American, you might remember the ad from the mid 2000s where the woman carjacks someone so that she can smoke. Narrator comes on “you don’t drive every time you smoke… …but you smoke every time you drive 🤔”
That campaign, iirc, was called “think of a new way to quit”
There is no way you could reproduce this now, but when I quit smoking, I worked in a place where everyone smoked, so I got it second-hand for quite a while after that.
As a former tobacco user as well, I will share something that I think we should enjoy.
I’ve been re-watching the X-files. I do occasionally let my 5 yo watch. So, the smoking man was in this one, and my kid actually asked what a cigarette was.
I’m so glad how we’ve changed smoking from common to my kid not even knowing what it is after around only 20 years.
It’s not just a habit, it’s a chemical dependence. If you really want to quit, I suggest vaping. It was invented to be a smoking cessation tool as you can easily taper off the amount of nicotine, while still performing “the ritual”.
Once the chemical dependency is gone, then you can go for a walk or something to keep yourself busy, but until then you’ve got an addiction to deal with.
Source: I used vaping to quit a 10-year, pack/day habit.
YMMV. I know it’s a good step down for some folks, especially as you can get carts with decreasing levels of nicotine. But in my case, the accessibility of vaping (which I did inside and in smaller more frequent doses, unlike how I smoked) set me back a bit and I felt like I started quitting all over again.
I quit smoking via vaping a few years ago. Idk how easy it is now, I know some laws have been passed regarding the availability of different juices.
But essentially it just gives you more control. You can gradually step down your nicotine content over the course of like a year or more if you want. At the end I had a bottle of 3mg/ml and a bottle of 0, and I would mix them to get even smaller amounts. Eventually you’re just not using nicotine anymore.
For some people tho it goes the other way. Lots of times it ends up being the case that nicotine consumption goes way up, or people end up vaping + still smoking anyway. Which is…pretty bad lol
So yeah vaping can be a very convenient way to quit. It worked for me. But there’s a reason doctors don’t recommend it
For me, I started thinking about the cost and the smell every time I had one. I quit cold turkey a few weeks later and felt grossed out every time I had one after that. I quit in 2009 and haven’t had a cigarette since 2010.
I'll agree that it's most likely not as safe as not vaping at all but I am also on the side that it's harm reduction and your clothes smell a lot nicer if you vape than if you smoke.
I now mix my own vape juice using premix chemicals and a year's supply cost me something in the neighborhood of $400 and that's including coils and batteries and all of that stuff.
I also use only a very small amount of nicotine, something like 1.5 mg compared to commercial Vapes bottoming out at 3, and on my next batch I'll reduce it to half of that.
I suggested to a friend years ago that he keep all of hit used butts in a jar beside his bed. He came up with this idea that he should add some water to the jar.
The reminder every time he got up or went to bed that the black goop shit was the same stuff he was putting into his lungs every day eventually got him to stop. He couldn’t even look at the jar anymore — and certainly didn’t want to add to it. That thing was nasty.
Always act like you’ve just smoked one. What would you do next? Just go and do that now. Also, roll like 10-20 joints and smoke em when you crave a cig. You can only do that for so long until you’re like nah I’m good on smoking I’m too high to have more.
Also you can still get out of the house, just go outside the house and do what you would do without a cig. I would go on my porch and read a book or my phone while smoking. I still went outside and did that but without a cig. After a while you’re like why am I out here. And do other things to spend time outside like hiking, exploring, pick up a sport, camping, etc etc. some ideas anyway.
Add comment