any piece of advice is welcome
P.S. Thanks to all the people that have taken their time to help me (and not just me, but others as well). It is much appreciated, and, from what I‘ve read, the „cold turkey“ method seems the most appealing to me. I‘ll quit smoking today, on the 7th of November 2024.
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Well, there are several methods:
*Cold turkey: just stop and ride it out. You can do things like chew gum to help deal with the cravings. *Medication: Talk to your doctor *The Patch: follow instructions on box. *Nicotine Gum: use as directed *Vape: not the best method, but works for people.
Not an exhaustive list
I’m going to tell you what worked for me. There’s a very good chance you’ll hate it and I will get flak.
Cold Turkey.
You physically stop yourself from purchasing cigarettes and not ask for them in social situations. You make a line in the sand and never cross that point again.
Honestly, this is it. You have to want it, and you just have to do it. You’ll feel “sick” for a while but you just have to muscle that out.
I know it’s easier said than done, but it really is that simple. Just stop.
Cold turkey worked for me. But it wasn’t this big thing. One day I didn’t want to go to the gas station to get more and that turned into, how long could I go? And now I smoke once a year on my friends birthday and HATE the taste.
This is also the only thing that worked for me
This and a case of pneumonia for me. Grabbed my remaining cigs and vape accessories and threw them all away. Not one puff since.
I did the same and can confirm it worked. First two weeks will be the worst, then it’ll be easier. Just be stuborn and aware that your will is stronger then a habit and that it doesn’t have power over you. The urge to smoke will remain but at that point you need to be aware that even if you’re convinced you want a smoke, it will taste really terrible when you actually do it and you will regret you broke your streak of non-smoking days.
I do confirm that cigarettes taste awful now.
Cold Turkey. Yes. That’s exactly what I did, in 2014, after 20 years of smoking, and it works. You must decide, absolutely, NEVER AGAIN. Not even a brush close to smoking again. After a week, it was easier. After a month, it was a new way of life, and a much better one. You’ll see.
Cold turkey worked for me. Took me 4 attempts. I wasn’t hard on myself for failure, I noted what happened (emotional trauma, stress, alcohol) and prepared myself for the next attempt.
I wanted to quit, so when I relapsed it’s not because I wanted to smoke but because those little cancer stick bastards were trying hardest to kill me. But if they were going to be tough, I could be tougher. I found it easier when I could see the cigs as my enemy.
Same for me. I quit, but I didn’t change the things I did in order to quit. I still went to the same bar with the same friends and hung out with them outside while they smoked. It sucked, but kept getting easier.
The one thing I did do was buy an ozone generator and used it to get rid of the smoke smell in my cars and the house. Everything seemed cleaner.
3 years later, I still always want to smoke. I just don’t.
Alan Carr’s stop smoking book is highly regarded, and encourages you to smoke as you read along, until by the end you won’t want to.
Combine that with a NAC supplement (which doesn’t do anything for withdrawals, but studies show it makes trying smoking again far more unpleasant for your brain which helps you stay off them.
Yes, I recommend the book as well. Don’t ask me why though. I tried quitting smoking many times using many different methods but always failed. On a whim I got the Alan Carr book and read it. I read it in bursts over a month or two. There was nothing interesting in there. Nothing I didn’t already know. I finished it and quit smoking. The next day I relapsed and smoked again. I reread the last few chapters and quit again, this time using nicotine patches. I quit the patches within a day because they made me feel sick. I never smoked again. It’s been 7-ish years and I haven’t had any inclination to smoke again. It went from one of the hardest things to one of the easiest things to do. I don’t care if people smoke around me, it doesn’t bother me anymore. I still don’t know why the book works, but it did for me.
I’ve been trying to quit for 18 years now. I’ve tried gum, patches, toothpicks, welbutron (or something like that), but this time it’s going a bit better. We switched to cheap disposable vapes (Kadobar was what was near the house) which is totally not ‘quitting’ but when picking a flavor, Pick a bad one. I’ve found I don’t like it, it’s way too sweet and that keeps me from wanting to smoke it too much at a time, but when that need arises (bad meeting, car trouble, bad anxiety) it does deliver nicotine which keeps me from buying a pack.
As a side effect, I went from spending around $400-450/month on cigarettes, to around $
16080/month (my wife went with one she likes, but she’s quit before and I think she could do it anytime).Edit: I’m bad a math
Nicotine pouches
I used chantix back in the day, but it also required me basically not leaving the house for a month to really get there. When and where I quit for the first time (I would later start dating a smoker and relapse, then quit again), smoking was still allowed indoors and I had a huge association with drinking and smoking. Same for certain other places and situations. I basically had to do everything I could to avoid those. It got easier with time.
I switched to a vape and progressively got lower nicotine amounts until I was at 0 and then stopping was easy.
Yes. This worked for me as well. Smoked a pack or more a day for 14 years, within a year I just put the vape down. 10 year anniversary of last cig coming up!
Same. I just kept diluting the liquid with 0% nicotine until, months later, I realized I didn’t even want to vape any more.
If you haven’t already tried it, “The easy way to quit smoking” by Allen Carr has helped many people. I haven’t tried his other subjects, but I recall his take on smoking in the book to seem relatively revolutionary to me at the time.
There is a med called Welbutrin which can be prescribed for quitting smoking and it works really well. It’s also prescribed as an antidepressant so one of my smoker friends was on it for that reason and they almost completely quit smoking without even trying to. Of course, it is not without It’s sideeffects but among antidepressants it is one of the usually best tolerated ones. I’m on it for my depression now and the only issue I have is that it can make me really anxious, but I’m also on nearly the maximum dose where for smoking cessation you wouldn’t be taking anything close to that amount.
Nicotine patches. It gives your brain what it wants with little to no adverse effects
The problem with patches is you don’t satisfy the oral aspect of the habit so you may need to chew gum or sunflower seeds to replace the act of smoking.
Nicotine gum or pouches may seem like a simpler option, but you can up your dose frequency too much to be able to ween off effectively if you do not have the willpower to keep to a plan.
Gum and patch also means you can not use a patch after a while and mindfuck your reptile brain into thinking the gum is what it wanted and not the nicotine patch.
My grandma quit using a program that basically attempted to break your habits.
She did things like:
-if you normally have a smoke break at noon, wait til 12:30. Tomorrow do it at 11:30 instead
-If you normally use a lighter, switch to matches, tomorrow use a lighter.
-On Monday, Wednesday,Friday switch to a different brand of cigarettes … next week go the opposite days.
-Smoke, but every other drag put a pen in your mouth instead.
-Only allow yourself to smoke half a cigarette and then chew a stick of gum for the rest of the time you would normally smoke
-Alternate smoke breaks between smoking and chewing nicotine gum or using the patch (I don’t think she used the patch so I’m guessing on that one).
And just a lot of things like that that didn’t specifically stop you from smoking, but attempted to stop it being a mindless thing that you just do on reflex without much thought and made it so before lighting up she’d have to think about what the current rules are … at a certain point, the habit has been broken and you don’t seek it… it worked great for her. Was a 6 month or so process and then she never went back once she finished her last pack.
There was a whole program around it with those types of rules and things you’d do and time restrictions on certain days and stuff … sorry, she passed a few years back and I can’t ask her the name of the program.
Good luck! Just remember that even if you lapse, any length of time that you’re able to smoke less or stop smoking all improve your overall health! Even if you have a setback, any time that you stop is still a win!
If I can offer you one piece of advice on quitting tobacco it’s this: Understand that it may be possible that you don’t succeed at quitting on your first attempt. That is okay. Most people don’t succeed quitting on their first attempt. What is important is that you keep trying to quit.
There are many different strategies for quitting. Mine involved switching to vaping and mixing my vape juice so that I gradually weened myself off of the Nicotine two years later. Prior to that I tried using Rx Chantix which worked until my prescription ran its course. I also tried the gum with very little success, but that’s not to say it won’t work for you, it might. Explore your options.
Yo that is what I’m doing. I appreciate hearing that, it’s heartening, I used to smoke a pack a day.
I’ve been cutting my juice with plain VG/PG so I’m at half of the nicotine of the average juice.
I dont have advice but best of luck with it!
If you have children, remind yourself that you want to be around for as many of their achievements as possible.
