It’s quite easy to stop smoking. I’ve done it several times already
Pretty much a Mark Twain quote lol
Holup
Anecdotally, I found that ease of quitting was inversely related to the amount of pressure I put on myself to quit. I smoked for 15 years and always vowed I would never be a self-loathing smoker. I think so little of my attempt to quitting successfully that every time someone brings up quitting cold-turkey I need to remind myself that I attempted to quit on multiple occasions. - I simply didn’t feel bad when a strategy didn’t work out.
Ultimately I weened myself off of nicotine by vaping and stepping down the concentration of nicotine over a long period of time. I quit vaping in early 2020.
First time I quit I’d get the occasional craving, the second time I have maybe had a craving once. I think what helped me the second time was a minor health scare, (why is my tongue sloughing?), first kid on the way, and I reallly got into cardio
Edit: I smoked from 2007 to 2014? And then 2017? To 2020 Amount varied widely, but I probably went through a pack in 3 days average. Only hit a pack a day during finals week heh.
Ask your GP for Bupropion.
I’m doing it for the bit, a week ago i got high and thought how funny it’d be to stop smoking because drugs told me to. So i did lmao
What I don’t understand is how people get addicted to smoking in the first place. It hasn’t been “cool” to smoke in my lifetime. Going near a cigarette as a non-smoker is gross as fuck. Who decides “I don’t care about my health or the gross smell, imma do this thing with no upsides” before being addicted?
All it takes is one low point, friend. I’m glad you’ve never been there around the wrong person at the wrong time but understand that its not just a “hmm I want to smell terrible today ❤️” situation.
Because it’s a drug that gives you a feeling. Some people enjoy the feeling that smoking gives them, the addiction slowly follows after.
The same works for just about any drug. I can assure you that heroin and crack addicts didn’t suddenly decide they wanted to be addicted to those drugs. Curiosity gets the best of people sometimes.
How do you get that feeling without making a decision to do something really gross? Why did they choose to smoke that first gross death stick?
because i was 18, a freshman in college, and just got dumped. i was all down about it and a friend offered me one and i thought, fuck it, why not.
then i bummed another a few days later and so on. bought my own pack within a week.
The Allan Carr method. That is all
How else do you do it?
I did. Pack a day since I was …14?
20 years later, one day I just felt I was done. Threw the rest of my pack out, and didn’t go back nor had the urge to after a week.
Same here smoked almost 20 years and was just done so I quit.
It is for certain people, but not typically. I know two people who quit cold turkey and my fiancee knows another one. Everyone else has fought and struggled, relapsed, or shifted to e-cigs.
Strangely this can be true for hard drugs too. As I understand it, biology is a big part of it, but psychological, social, and circumstantial factors are pretty important too.
I was one of those people and consider myself very lucky. My first puff was at 9 but I didn’t start regularly smoking until I was 14. In a third-world country where the laws, if they even existed, were hardly enforced, it was easy to buy smokes as a minor. It was normal, even.
I smoked through my teens and 20s and into my 30s. Then one day, I decided to quit because I knew it wasn’t healthy and I had seen pictures of smokers’ lungs. I didn’t experience any “jonesing” and didn’t need to replace the habit with gum or patches or anything. It might have helped that I worked from home at the time and was addicted to video games, so I was very motivated to stay at home. I turn 50 this year and haven’t smoked since.
You kinda do, though. I’ve been smoking for 13 years. And I’ve been smoking quite heavily about, 1.5 pack per day on average.
I tried to stop several times and it didn’t work out. Then one day 10 years ago, I realized how crazily much money I spend on that “hobby” and how I’ll need that money for my wedding a year later. And then I just stopped.
I used nicotine free cigarettes as a crutch for a while, but that was it. It was surprisingly easy, when before I was almost shaking during a 2 hour flight because of nicotine withdrawal…
What this boils down to imo is, when you really want to stop, you can just stop. Try to find out why you want to stop and don’t miss the opportunity window. If I hadn’t stopped that day, I’d probably still be smoking.
Yeah seems the hardest part of quitting any habit is really the resolve to do so.
I went a different way to this.
I smoked for about 15 years, i used rolling tobacco and would get through 30-40grams in 4 days, im not sure what the conversion rate is but i was smoking easily 10-20 rollups a day. (Never really counted)
I tried to swap to vaping a few times but always fell back. I tried stopping cold turkey multiple times but always ended up going back even harder and smokk g more every time.
Eventually a friend got me on to a new vape, one of thos big cloudy ones that makes you look like a prick. But it had just the right feel, had good flavours and low nicotine content. (Lowest you could get).
At first i was vaping alot, loads. But the number of opportunities i had to vape was the same as when i smoked. So i would be beholden to that schedule daily. This meant my jicotine intake was drastically reduced and didnt leave me ratty because i was still getting some.
It seemed that as the days passed i was missing opportunities to vape more and more, until one day, i worked straight through without even thinking about it. Its been almost a year now and i just dont miss them at all.
I think that everyone is different and half the reason so many people struggle to quit based on advice from others is that we are all different, we smoke different amounts, we smoke for different reasons and different lengths of times and we all have our own tolerance to maintaining our will power.
For some, the decision to quit is enough and our resolve will be strong, for others we need weening and gradual reduction in order to quit. And everything in between.
What works for you or me may work for millions of people, but not for millions more. The best we can do is pass on our anecdotal experience like we both have and let people do what works for them.
So you’re agreeing. “one does not simply stop, because one needs to be really sure that they want to stop for some reason or another”. The desire to stop doesn’t come from nothing, yet it’s the vital ingredient for stopping successfully. Unless you have it, stopping is really hard.
The contents of your message aren’t a “no”, they’re a “yes, and”
Funnily enough, that’s exactly how I stopped smoking. I smoked for around 17 years and had been trying to quit for nearly 15 of them. I did everything from pills to nicotine substitutions, hypnosis, and even that laser therapy. It would work for a time, but eventually, within a month or two, I’d be back to smoking.
Then, one day, I was in a really foul mood and just didn’t want to deal with people. I ran out of cigarettes right at the end of the evening before bed and figured I’d buy some in the morning. Woke up in a worse mood the next day and decided to just stay home and ride it out. It is best for me to avoid people when I get like that, so that’s what I did. The following day, I woke up in a better mood and was about to head to the corner store for a pack when I realized I’d already gone near 36 hours without one, so thought why not wait an hour. An hour passed, and decided to wait another hour, and then another, and another. Before I knew it, I was heading back to bed for my second full day being cigaretteless.
At that point, I decided to continue my smoke-free streak and just quit. It’s been nearly 6 years since my last cigarette, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.
Context: I’m a disabled veteran with severe PTSD, anxiety, depression, and mood disorders caused by TBI’s. I have days where everything seems to act up all at once, and I’ll self isolate because it’s just safer for everyone if I’m alone during those times. Furthermore, I started smoking while in combat to help take the “edge” off, and as such, the nicotine addiction was extremely difficult for me to get beyond because it got wrapped up in my PTSD and anxiety issues.
Basically, what I learned from my many years of trying to quit is no matter how you “try” if you don’t truly want to quit, you won’t succeed. You have to want to quit more than you want that next cigarette.
Good luck to anyone out there still struggling to break a nicotine addiction. Stay strong. You can do it.
My wife and I both quit cold turkey, independently of one another before we met. It was like we discontinued a hobby our ADHD brains got bored with.
That’s how I quit.
Woke up one morning and didn’t want a cigarette.
Now they’re basically sitting on the shelf with my warhammer stuff, my armada gear, boxing gloves, golf clubs, piles of video games etc.
I wish i could stick a hobby haha except smoking.
Quitting is easy, I’ve done it hundreds of times!
It’s simple, but it ain’t easy.
