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.

Switching from smokes to vapes was pretty easy. Then over time I lowered the nicotine level 1mg at a time until I was at zero. One day I realised I hadn’t touched it for 2 weeks and I’d accidentally quit so I got rid of everything and here I am - smoke and vape free.

It’s easy, I’ve quit multiple times.

Rocky. I quit once years ago for like 3 months and went back, never got the will power up to try again. Then one day my doctor told me there is a good chance I had cancer (spoiler: didn’t have cancer) and it scared the shit out of me.

Knowing technically its probably to late I tried to quit, failed almost immediately.

Then kind of sat down with myself and had a good long thing about why. Determined it was a multi layered problem.

1. The nicotine itself.
2. The act of getting up and going outside
3. The hand/mouth part of it

So I took a multi phased approach.

I switched to vaping, which I found hard. But instead of puffing on a vape non stop I got really strong fluid so each time would just be a puff or two. Then I’d sit on the porch for a min before I went back in.

Later I lowered the MG on the vape fluid. Then about a month later lowered it again. Kept that up until it was the lowest MG fluid.

Started the patch. Still went outside a few times a day and would just have a tic tac and relax a bit. Occasionally I’d get a really strong urge so for the first week so I’d let myself have like one puff off the vape but after a week of that, threw it in the trash.

Patch level down, down again, and then right before the lowest level I actually felt I was already ready. I had to take the patches off each night or I’d have bad dreams and the next day I’d put another on. But that last day I woke up and I just put last nights back on. I’m sure it had very little left in it but I knew it would have some effect. I did this so that I would be totally unaware of when the nicotine really stopped. I was playing a mind game with myself and so at some point that day I pulled it off and went about my life.

Two days later I had an ABSOLUTE HELL DAY. One where later I even had to apologize to my boss because I was being such a raging asshole and then… I was free.

I kept up the sitting on the porch thing a few months, I also picked up a pretty big tic tac habit which I had to later break but thats childs play compared.

Its been over 2 years now. I’ve finally stopped dreaming about smoking or if I do I’m mad at myself (in the dream) about it. The smell to me is now awful instead of something that I want. And I never ever ever want to go back.

I do struggle with my weight a lot more then when I smoked though. Oh, and every scan shows whatever they thought might be cancer hasn’t changed in size and might even have shrunk a little. So I guess if whatever that is doesn’t kill me I can say “Thanks, weird shit on my lung.”

But if you’re reading this and you’re a smoker. Quit. Now. Soon. But quit. Don’t wait until its too late. When the world drops out from under you and you know you’ve fucked up in a way that can never be fixed. Don’t wait until you feel like your whole world is winding down and wait on some sort of miracle. Find whatever path works. Please.

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.

If you’ve got a big change coming up (moving house, changing jobs, etc) it’s a great time.

These changes can break all your mental associations and habits, making it easier to quit.

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.

Once I decided I didn’t want to smoke cigarettes anymore medication made the path easy. My biggest problem was getting out of the mindset. I enjoy the act of smoking and I convinced myself that things would be even worse if I quit cigarettes, that I’d get fat again and be unable to control my anxiety. I trapped myself hard and I couldn’t see it because the addiction spoke for me.

I had “tried” to quit several times before, but they were half assed attempts because I didn’t really want to quit. I even convinced myself that the Champex would give me nightmares and make my mental illness worse ( it did not).

I wholeheartedly recommend that anyone who needs to quit, but can’t, go on the Champex ( Chantix in the US). It worked so well I didn’t even go through the whole recommended cycle of pills and have not gone back to smoking after almost 5 years. It made me nauseous while I was on them and that really changed how my brain sees cigarettes. I thought at first I might relapse, but the smell of cigarettes is disgusting to me now.

Now, I can’t speak to how well it dealt with the physical habit side of it, because I do still smoke pot, but by god I will never willingly put tobacco in my body again. I think it was the start of my self improvement, though I didn’t know it back then.

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.

Ex-smoker/vaper here.

First put down the cigarette after 10+ years of smoking in favor of vaping. This was probably the easiest transition as I like gadgets and the whole vaping culture back then (UK) was huge. Everyone was getting the latest vapes with fancy features, the best juices and flavors. Regular vape maintenance, refilling and coil changes become a great substitute for cigarette rituals.

There was a huge downside of overdoing it. I mean in the beginning a lot. There is no control, no recommendation, and mainly no bad smell. You just whip out the vape indoors, while waiting for the bus, literally anytime.

There is the other issue (at least back then 5-6 years ago it was not really regulated) you could buy juices with any nicotine concentrate, even mix your own. Some of my coworkers even got headaches from overdosing nicotine.

Luckily after a year or so I got kind of bored of the whole vape culture as more vapers developed this self centered asshole personalities, where they think they could start blowing flavoured clouds into the face of others anywhere because “it’s safe, it’s not smoke” and other stupid reasons.

In the last few months I slowly reduced the nicotine content and reached zero nicotine juice state. Also, I made strict “outdoors vaping only” policy for myself. Without the nicotine I felt less and less will to go outside, just to inhale flavoured vape so I stopped altogether.

For 5 years now I am now nicotine-free and about 7 years without cigarettes, never looked back.

In summary: Vaping is a great tool to quit smoking, but needs careful planning and self control.

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 was 2 packs a day for 12 years. I made a bet with a roommate that we’d both quit smoking on the same day, loser lost $250. If we both hadn’t smoked again in a month, we’d put $500 towards a vacation.

Neither of us smoked again. I used the early versions of vapes. Was doing great on those until I got really drunk one night and lost them. And that was the last nicotine I inhaled.

It was actually much easier than I expected. I used to smoke 40 a day about 30 years ago . One day I just decided to give up. The first few days aren’t that bad, you will get cravings but I found the best thing to do was distract yourself. Giving up while I was busy at work was a good way to distract my brain. After a few days the cravings get less and less.

What is harder is months down the line when you accidentally catch secondhand smoke. I couldn’t help but think “I’ve given up for so long, just one wouldn’t hurt”

It must be easier nowadays because fewer people smoke (in most countries) but back then it was common to see people light up when they left buildings.

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.

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.