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.
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
But how many actually follow through?
That’s the thing about quitting you kind of have to want to.
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.
That’s excellent advice. It’s like training a dog - your brain stops associating the release of dopamine with cigarettes after a few bad experiences,
My grandfather quit smoking by switching the habit to lollipops. He always used to say it was a good replacement for the oral fixation and fidgeting
I quit a 20 year smoking habit with jolly ranchers. After the 1st month, I didn’t need them anymore.
A mentor of mine did the same thing but with cough drops since he used to smoke menthols
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.
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.
Quit specific cigarettes. One at a time.
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”
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 👌
Try it, man.
If you need any recommendations, please ask!
This is how I quit smoking actually. Now I haven’t even smoked a cigar in years
There you go! Good shit, man.
Glad it worked out for you.
Ha, thanks! It’s great to have a sense of taste and smell again
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.
Are you stuck on vaping then or is that easier to quit?
I tapered off my nicotine levels over the course of 10 months, then I just stopped once I was down to 0mg vape juice.
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
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.
Honestly sit by yourself one night and actually realize that majority of people who will see or smell you are going to think your the dumbest mother fucker they met that day and they’re likely right if you smoke. You’re paying thousands a year to die young and very horribly. And all you get in return is proving to everybody you met that nobody should respect any decisions you make since you prove to everybody you aren’t capable of making good choices. That’s what got me to quit. It hit me hard one night that this was how I would come off to a lot of people considering what we know noe of cigarettes. Its really the dumbest fucking choice I ever made to get addicted. 15 years and what the fuck did I get out of it. So for me, intense shame got me to quit relatively cold turkey.
Way I quite. First I swapped to vaping. It was an easy switch. It tasted better smelled better and gave me the same rush. Though it did take 2 times for me to guilt switch. After that lowered the nicotine level slowly. Got down to 0. I never said I couldn’t have one. I just played the game of how long I could go without. Started off delaying a few minutes. Then progressed to 15 minutes the half hour. Then I’d skip a break at work. At some point I crave one then tell myself later and if go hours without one. Changed to days. I don’t remember my last one. Also jolly rancher hard Candy or the like helped with cravings or delaying the need to go have a smoke. Could skip the vaping but I found it so much better that smoking.
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.
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.
Cigarettes smell really disgusting to me now.
There is a book my friend swore by. I think it’s called “how to quit smoking”. By the time he finished it he said he had lost all interest.
It’s kind of well known, and I’m sure you can find it if you Google.
Perhaps Alan Carr’s “The Easy Way”?
My favorite chapter of that book was titled the Benefits of Smoking.
The author uses a nice technique - reducing the concept and practice of smoking to absurdity. Reductio ad ab-smoke-dum, if you will.
This is it. It’s not the worlds most well written book, but its repetitiveness and concepts are effective. Worked for me.
Yes! Thank you!
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.
Do it like I did and get pneumonia. No smoking for 3 months and when I tried it again afterwards the taste was just disgusting.
