Wow - so you do not vape at all. I do not know if that is my goal but I am curious as to how long it took you after you abruptly stopped and then worked on a plan to stop. It sounds like you did big drops. Did you from a 6 or 3 to 0? I was at 6 for a long while and I felt it when I went to 3 so I dropped by 2 (more or less - I was hand mixing) and then down to the 3. I still mix down at times but right now 3 seems to be working out.
A lot of my quitting was just learning about what works best for me entirely through errors made quitting.. lol.
The first time I tried quitting vaping I went from 18mg to no more vaping. I had wrongly assumed many things about myself in trying to just throw out all my gear and quit like I did.. and that time I ended up smoking again under a time of stress.
I got back off the cigarettes and back on 18mg ejuice again, and stayed there. After the first colossal failure I was afraid to even try to quit vaping again for the longest time, but then I decided that vaping out of fear of failure was dumb.
That time I vaped zero nicotine for a month (just dropped from 18 to 0 all at once again, no tapering) prior to quitting vaping. That time because I was more prepared to deal with the hand to mouth habit as part of the problem, if you will, I was far more successful. I made it 5 months without vaping that time.
I went back to it one day, just had a desire to vape so got out my stashed vape gear with the intention to just take one drag. Well, that one drag lasted a year before I quit again. This last drop was very small, I had only been vaping 3mg from the time I picked vaping back up.
This time it feels different. Since I put vaping down this time the first week or two might have been kind of difficult not to pick the vape back up, but since then I've not wanted to vape but one time when I was under serious stress (and that was when I was walking out of the emergency room this last weekend after hearing my husband would need surgery) and oddly, even under that level of stress the moment of wanting to vape passed very quickly so i never acted on it.
So... while there is some dependency to nicotine, for me the nicotine has been less the issue than the hand to mouth habit we got from decades of smoking, and the mental process of how we deal with stress all our lives - ie: running to the cigarette pack for decades at the first sign of stress....
We are all going to be different on this I think, but from the time I had been away from cigarettes a year, most of my dependency on nicotine itself was likely fairly well gone, and it took some physical adjustment time to get used to not having it was all..
I would calculate the nicotine withdrawals by itself to be around two weeks each time..