Definitely agree with this, especially for the first 3-6 months, there's more to cigarettes than just nic and the extra nic makes it a bit more rewarding, Things like the nicotine patch/gum tend to fail after 3-6 months because they taper you off too quick if you follow the instructions, the patch has something like a 3-4% success rate after 6 months and like 2% success after a year, I've seen a lot of people using the patch returning to smoking withing weeks of getting off the patch.
Nicotine isn't the enemy here, smoking tobacco is, take your time!
Yeah, before there was vaping I quit smoking more than once, both cold-turkey and using the patch / gum. I didn’t find those nic replacement methods very useful. In fact, I found quitting with the patch just as hard as quitting cold-turkey.
Vaping, on the other hand, just worked for me. I’m not saying there wasn’t some initial distress involved, but it was manageable. And only lasted for a week or so, where quitting cold-turkey messed me up for months (I did not have a good night’s sleep for the first three months after quitting cold-turkey, and was pretty much just bouncing off the walls when I was awake. I was pretty much a crazy guy for a while there, and it took all my all my qualities as a scholar and a gentleman to not beat random strangers to death for bumping into me on the subway.
I think this has to do with the difference in administration patterns. When you smoke you get to spike your nicotine levels at will, and nicotine addiction is very much about the intentionally controlled ebb and flow of the drug.
The patch, on the other hand, continually distributes a measured amount of nicotine. And I think this misses the point. Addiction is not just about getting a certain amount of a drug over a 24 hour period. It is about getting that drug in varying amounts in the patterns you are used to. Most addicts want spikes of the drug, followed by lulls, followed by spikes. Because that is the pattern we follow when becoming addicted, and it is the pattern of our addiction.
Vaping is, IMHO, the best substitute for smoking yet invented, and I think it is so mainly because it gives the addict the same kind of control they have over titration when smoking. Want more nic? Vape. Have enough nic? Don’t vape.
Smokers turn out to be very good at titration, so much so that “light cigarettes” are pretty much useless, and maybe even counter-productive. A smoker will get the amount of nicotine and other compounds they crave. If you give them a light cigarette they will just smoke more and draw harder. Which might lead, seemingly paradoxically, to somewhat worse outcomes for smokers of light cigarettes than hardcore marb red smokers.
The great thing about vaping is that it allows you to titrate your nicotine consumption in much the same way you did as a smoker, and the nic enters your bloodstream almost as quickly as it would when smoking- I think it’s hard to overemphasize the importance of that point. When I want my nic I want it now.
That said, there are aspects of smoking that vaping cannot replicate. Giving up smoking for vaping is not painless, and I know from reading these forums that it is more painful for some than it was for me. I am inclined to think that going very high nic at first helps.
You might miss a lot of things about smoking, but when you’re close to OD’d on nic lighting a cigarette becomes a kind of disgusting prospect. You’ll light one as a matter of habit and then put it out immediately, because... once you’re OD’d on nic you might not want it.
And that’s the goal. You want quitting to be as effortless as possible. Anything that makes you -want- to avoid cigarettes is worth doing. In my experience keeping yourself close to nauseous from excessive nicotine consumption is a great way to make cigarettes less appealing, and less satisfying.
YMMV, but if you’re having a hard time going from dual use to just vaping I’d at least suggest trying out much higher nic levels, levels so high that they make you uncomfortable. You won’t do yourself any real harm by upping nic levels, but you will do yourself real harm by continuing to smoke.
