How is vaping not smoking? You’re still nicotining yourself up. Is that really a thing - “I don’t smoke cigarettes; I vape”? I mean, if one lights up a joint he is smoking pot. If one torches up a dab or hits off a vape pen he is still smoking pot. No?
Am I just too old? This sounds a lot like, “oh I’m a virgin, I just let them do me in the ass.”
I quit just over 10 years ago, my goal was to be a non-smoker by age 40.
With me, I was mentally prepared and I actually wanted to be a non-smoker. No one beside my dentist had told me to quit.
I used Chantix and made it a game. I knew going hours without a smoke and then smoking one standing up gave you a delicious head rush. So each day I would try to set a new record for how late in the day my first smoke was, and the reward was that head rush.
After I made it 24 hours and the Chantix made the head rush go away, there was no looking back. The cravings were gone in a week.
Now 10 years later, I am running 5K’s and don’t get winded walking up stairs. I believe the real key is to actually want to be a non-smoker, imagine it like becoming a celebrity and everyone around you will hoist you on their shoulders and sing your praises. And it is something to be proud of.
It’s right there in the name, the nicotine is delivered in water vapor, not smoke. So while still a bad habit not as bad. Like the difference between eating a strip of bacon and eating an entire package of bacon.
I smoked for 10 years then quit shortly after I got married. It was kinda terrible quitting, but I used Welbutrin and that helped lots. It was the one and only time that I had ever quit, to that point.
Now about 17 years later, I have spent the last 8 months “party smoking” meaning having a smoke or two when out at a bar or a club. And if I’m honest, smoking more than I meant to while having a drink at home as well. Still through 2017 I could go 2 or 3 weeks without smoking and not think about it. This is dangerous, because it’s about me thinking I can control the addiction, which I really can’t, so my new years resolution is to quit again. It was a pre-resolution actually so it’s been 3 weeks now since my last smoke and no others are on the horizon. Also I still LOVE LOVE smoking. Dangerous.
The one thing I learnt in all the attempts it took to quit smoking is that there’s no such thing as a social smoker: you either smoke or you don’t, and in the end you can’t trick your lungs.
Too old? Your words, not mine. I’m no spring chicken myself. But if you’ll notice, I said that I am not using nicotine. Vapor is not created by burning something. Smoking is. If you use a lighter or matches or perfected the awesome head-over-the-stove-hope-I-don’t-catch-my-hair-on-fire trick from some gritty movies, then you’re smoking. Cause when you burn something, it tends to create smoke. When you heat a liquid to a gas that’s still below its critical temperature, then it’s vapor.
You’ll find vaporizers at Walgreens or CVS with instructions about putting Vicks VapoSteam in them. At no point do those instructions state “Or just put it in a bowl and set the damned thing on fire.” Because fire doesn’t create vapor. Fire creates smoke.
Ok.
Still sounds like a technicality to me.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-nicotine-all-bad/ Sorry, I can’t find the date for the article.
Smoking fills your lungs with particulates and typically exposes them to a wide range of chemicals in addition to nicotine.
Nicotine gets you high. Damn, now I want a mint again.
It is. Vaping is still a shit habit.
Vaping is not smoking; there is no combustion in an ecig and no smoke is produced. Nicotine does not cause cancer; many of the 4000 chemicals produced by burning tobacco cause cancer.
I’ve been vaping for seven or eight years now. I smoked over two packs a day for 40 years; switched to ecigs and quit smoking without discomfort or weight gain. When I smoked I got out of breath climbing the cellar stairs, now I daily walk three miles or ride my bicycle 12 miles. A very nice side benefit is that my nicotine habit costs me less than 50 cents a day (I buy bulk nicotine and mix my own unflavored eliquid) … and I don’t stink any more.
The American press likes to publish scare stories about ecigs but in England doctors prescribe them to people who want to quit smoking. British Medical Journal reported that ecigs are at least 95% safer than tobacco cigarettes – they also stated that they only claimed 95% safer to leave themselves some wiggle room in case some as yet unknown problem came up, but there are no currently known dangers.
Quit smoking after 14 years a few months before my second son was born. I had tried a few times before but not with a lot of effort. This time, I said to my wife and older son, “That was the last cigarette I’ll ever have.” Stopped cold turkey. No patches, no gums, no tablets, none of that. Over eight smokeless years later, I suppose the reason this worked was that I made a promise to the two, almost three, people who meant the world to me and I didn’t want to let them down. Say it out loud, I guess. Expect to be held accountable to it.
Good luck.
If you want to moralize about it, and just do a “drugs are bad” absolutism, then sure, vaping is the same thing.
If you want to talk about quality of life of a vaper vs a smoker, they aren’t the same at all.
I quit smoking a little over 5 years ago. I had quit several times before, once for well over a year. It just couldn’t take. I woke up craving a smoke, I took a shit craving a cigarette, I ate craving a cigarette, I drove to work craving a cigarette, I would be at work craving a cigarette, I would eat lunch craving a cigarette, I would drive home craving a cigarette, I’d eat dinner craving a cigarette, I’d watch some TV craving a cigarette, then I’d go to bed craving a cigarette.
It was a craving that never went away. Now, I was exposed to second hand smoke since I was an infant, so I never really chose to start smoking, I never chose to be addicted to nicotine. Maybe if I had made that decision, it would be easier to make a decision to quit it, too, but that is something that just doesn’t work for me.
Vaping means that I can go up stairs without being short of breath. It means that my clothes, my car, and my house don’t reek of tobacco. It may mean that I get to live another 20-30 years longer than I would have. When I vape, I just take a hit or two off my pen, and I am good, when I smoked, once I lit up the cigarette, I was pretty invested in it, as they cost a fortune these days, and so would smoke it down to the filter, even if my cravings were satiated off the first hit.
I don’t have cravings for cigarettes anymore. I can smoke one with my friends, which I do maybe once a month, and it does not cause me to crave another one, and another one after that, in fact, I find that I barely hit them, never finish them, and mostly just hold them.
I’ve bumped down the nicotine over the years, but I don’t think that I’m going to go to 0 anytime soon.
So sure, being nicotine free is better than vaping, but vaping is far, far better than smoking. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the pretty damn good.
My father did the same thing.
But he didn’t quit, he just hid it (rather unsuccessfully, as I was stealing his cigarettes well after he “quit”) from us. For the last 30 years.
My dad did this. I suspected for years (his truck ALWAYS had the stale cigarette smell, and he “quit” before I was 10) but the day he died 20+ years later we found a near-full pack of cigs and a lighter on the side table of the couch (he’d been home because his vacation had begun that day). In talking to my aunts (his sisters) during the viewing, he’d been doing this for years (going to their house to visit and smoking while he was there).
What was really silly was that as a teenager and even in my first some years as an adult, I would hide my smoking from my parents. I remember once we were at a basketball game, and I had snuck out on the terrace for a cigarette, when I looked down and saw him outside on the sidewalk smoking.
^This - except the dreams and cravings occurred for about 7 years, tapering over time.
Mine wasn’t cigarettes, but “smokeless tobacco”. I was a chain dipper for about 30 years. There were people who knew me for years that never knew I dipped, because they had never seen me without one and I got very, very good at hiding it. I taught myself not to spit so I could get away with dipping at work and anywhere else tobacco was verboten. Putting the snuff can in a front pants pocket keeps the tell-tale ring from being visible. Learning to use the upper lip and side of the lower jaw instead of the common front-and-center helped hide the lump. I knew all the tricks. If I wasn’t asleep or eating (and sometimes even then) I had snuff in my mouth. Every time I got a sore throat I thought “That’s it, it’s cancer”. Still didn’t stop.
One day, for reasons not important here, I quit cold turkey. Just stopped. Haven’t had one since because, as others have said, one would kick the addition right back into high gear - of that I have no doubt. My mantra became “I’ve made it this far, damned if I’m going to fail now.” From day 1 to now I remind myself of that. It’s been about 10 years now, and I think I have it licked. I think.
I told my wife at one point that should I ever start the habit again, I would not try to quit again because it was the single hardest thing I have ever done. Completely worth it, but cunningly difficult.