Quitting smoking

pretty much down to "only when i drink" status now

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/fashion/mens-style/farewell-my-lovely-cigarettes.html?referrer=

omg the nyt mentioned a party and i knew whose it was

i just quit yesterday because i am home sick with a terrible flu. that article is great.

on monday i promised both my parents i would quit smoking right now, because my 60yr old dad, a smoker for 45 years, has just been diagnosed with COPD.

he could live years and years, but it's not even the death issue i'm worried about - my parents' whole lives are so fucked by this right now, since he can no longer work and they're both lower working class people.

so the allen carr book i got 90% of the way thru about 7 years ago and then stopped is now on my kindle (ironically enough, i gave my dad this book about a week before his diagnosis, and now it's useless to him).

:( good luck, j. A&I got little ecigs to ease our way into quitting but the cigarette I just put out belies how little I've *tried* just yet. I'm sorry about your Dad, gah

Gf and I kicked it on 1 June, both after over 20 years of smoking. I guess I cheat a bit by inserting the occasional hamster diaper (portion snus) under my lip (sorry xelab of 8 months ago), but yeah, v v happy so far. Got a bit fat tho; selected friends and webpages claim it is due to the sudden absence of 20-30x increased heartrate periods a day, but it may very well be due to things I put my hands and mouth to instead of smoking.

Snus is a fairly minor evil, all things considered. I still do 4-5 portions daily, 5 years after "quitting".

be free of the little voice telling you to have your dose BE FREE I SAY! still, way to go obv

Lol I bought more snus today, still feel pretty good I smoked from 15 to 36

thx for collated snus research sanpaku!

time to quit again /:

aerosmith bootlegs is so otm itt

2nd his recommendation of Carr's Easy Way - I'm 9 months smoke free through a combination of Carr's insights/convincing arguments and weekly phone calls w/ a friend I quit together with

1 thing I'd like to add to thread is that I think it's a terrible idea to plan punishments for relapsing - instead your focus should be rewarding non-smoking, since you don't wanna visualize relapsing but staying clean. imo.

2nded - I think the key is to celebrate each passing non-smoking day and make it a challenge of how long it can last (rather than focusing on the negative and whats been lost, blabla)
Carr book tells things straight and helped me cut thru the bullshit of "losing part of my identity"

31 days smoke-free so far and I'm feeling great! It's nice to be able to breathe without feeling my chest is gonna collapse, although the first week was horrendous. This is my umpteenth attempt (the last one was in 2010) and I've gone completely cold turkey. About time too, it was getting stupid.

Good job! Now all you have to do is never have another cigarette.

Weirdly, I'm actually quite comfortable with the idea of that and I never really thought I would be - I'm attempting to breaking an 18 year habit/nicotine addiction here. Of course, 31 days in is still early days in the big scheme of things but I'm just taking each day as it comes, really. The idea of having a cigarette right now feels weirdly alien to me, and I'm past the point of having physical withdrawal symptoms, which giving me this weird feeling of craving for something that I don't actually want, need or have any intention of having. On the plus side, breathing and physical activity has got so much easier that I've realised just how awful and ill smoking was making me feel. On the negative side, I'm hungry all the time and it's turning me into a real moody bastard with no patience.

when i stopped in 2008, it was cold turkey as well and i was doing a lot of sport (mainly bicycle ergometer). which helped not to think about my throat all the time. and my physical shape was getting better from day to day. very nice. i have never regretted the decision to quit. is there anyone who has?

Yeah, I've been making plans to do quite a fair bit of running/swimming etc. - partly because I feel this huge need to do something with all this energy that I suddenly seem to have, and partly because now I'm feeling great I want to keep on top of it. Also, to help keep my weight down when I start to have an attack of the smoking cessation munchies. This time around I haven't found myself missing the feeling of smoke at the back of my throat, which I remember I really, really did the last time I tried to quit. Non-smokers don't realise just how many different ways smoking gets its claws into you. Nicotine is such an insidious drug.

Taking each day as it comes (and avoid romanticization of "never again") is the right way to go about it. Treat it as a challenge to see how long you can last. Good luck!

(...) I guess I cheat a bit by inserting the occasional hamster diaper (portion snus) under my lip (...)
― anatol_merklich, 21. september 2015 22:06 (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(...)

be free of the little voice telling you to have your dose BE FREE I SAY! still, way to go obv
― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), 21. september 2015 23:10 (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Done! :-D Three fully unnicotinic months.

stopped on the 1st and been doing 4mg lozenges and they work fine. the same thing happens to me every time when i make it this far without smoking though. first, life becomes really really boring. and the day is longer than a week. it's so long. i mean i don't have cigarettes to break up my day/night, so that makes sense. but, also, and this is the sucky part, and i realize that i have less patience even with the lozenges, it's like the smoke lifts and it dawns on me how boring and normal and uncool most people are. and then i realize they probably don't smoke and that i'm gonna become one of them.

but whatever. at least i'm past the nothing matters/who cares if i die stage.

you should try the patches, at least you get the bonus of crazy fucking dreams every night as well as quitting ciggies. I think I'm 3 1/2 years stopped now, so them moments that previously seemed enhanced by a smoke don't occur so much anymore. Although I did almost get back into it in the summer when I found 2 bags of weed on my dog-walking route, but once the weed was smoked I lost interest. I think my lungs have been already exposed to asbestos, mdf dust and lots lime/concrete dust on sites for years, so I probably need to give them a fighting chance.

I'm down to smoking only when I go to a bar (unfortunately, I can kill a pack chain-smoking in 2-3 hours) and using 3mg nicotine juice in a vaporizer otherwise. The vaping is shockingly just as satisfying for me, and I keep it from being a 24/7 thing because I won't do it around other people.

Not really doing cardio right now but I definitely feel like 2-3 months of cutting down from a pack a day to a pack a week has made me feel better and I'm pretty sure my BP is down 10 points (though that could be for other reasons).

i like the lozenges okay, but smoking nicotine via cigarettes has always been a VERY effective medication for me. a la prozac or whatever. it really did keep me sane/stable/level and it made dealing with people much easier. but i can get used to the lozenges. and i do really want to quit. so many benefits to not smoking it's kinda hard to count them all up. but it was my smoky valium for 30 years. it got rid of my twitchiness and nervous/panic/crazed/ocd behavior in a very real way. and lozenges are different. but effective. i like the extra energy i have. i get right up in the morning. i do feel better. (it DOES get a little easier every time i try. i feel better about my chances this time.)

and i don't really want to go on actual medication if i can help it.

good luck scott. really wanting to quit is more than half the battle. i know that sounds trite but it's true

hamster diaper (portion snus)

ha ha never heard this term before, though my girlfriend called them "shitbags"
ive been cigarette free for 4 years it seems now, and snus free for 2.5. congrats to all who've successfully kicked it and good luck to all trying.

thinking back now, my initial difficulty with kicking smoking was that going for a cigarette was a specific activity that i did that was no longer part of my routine. i would get the cravings and feel the compulsion to do the smoking activity. on the other hand, snus was something that i just always had in my mouth while doing other things. so when i stopped using snus, there was no empty space in my daily routine that i would feel compelled to fill with tobacco

Smokes while drinking (and after sex) is one thing but the hardest for me is that when I'm doing my monthly orders (the shittiest part of my job), I'd have a cigarette after I finished each company - one after Marvel, one after DC, etc. and they were a nice reward/break from staring at spreadsheets.

I'm lucky that only comes once a month, if I had developed that particular habit around an office job where it was day in/day out, I'd be fucked.

wellbutrin works p well for me

I smoke five cigarettes a day on average, seven max. I quit maybe once a week, and last two days max. I don't patch or vape or anything.

Something magical happened in February 2015. I quit for an entire month and I've never felt better, happier. It's clear that cigarette addiction is a major fucker with my brain patterns. I quit again in July 2015 and got six days in. I remember on Day Four onward feeling like my world had suddenly got so much brighter, I was (actually) skipping everywhere. Skipping down the hallway, down the street.

But my personal life in 2016 continued to be filled with assholism and I kept smoking again. I am getting spider veins on my ribcage, can't be good. Today is my Day One of actually never again.

Did I mention that what I took for cravings for many years actually was a sore throat due to reflux? After almost 9 years of not having smoked a single fag I did not really progress. For the last couple of years I always told myself that I will go on with the non-smoking up till my tenth anniversary. On that day I want to reward myself with a joint! That idea has kept me going. I am a little afraid of what will happen. But it has been planned for so long, it can't go wrong, can it? I mean I want to smoke one joint and then nothing for a couple of years...

I have gone through the 14 stages of grief since January 1st.

1) hmmm, heroin instead?

2) kill you

3) kill me

4) kill everybody

5) can only watch old westerns 10 hours a day

6) wake up in morning and fantasize about fistfights i'd like to have on the street with strangers

7) ritalin? meth? crack? armed robbery?

8) just don't talk to anyone just don't talk to anyone just don't talk to anyone

9) couples therapy!

10) so much ice cream.........

11) okay fine i gotta find a shrink

12) the dreams in which i'm dying are the best i've ever had (also all of a sudden i'm giving blowjobs in my dreams? #freudsucks)

13) fuck the internet gonna go kick a soccer ball with my kids...

14) 15th greatest player of Resogun:Demolition for PS4 in the world

Well, I'm pleased to say that it's been well over a year now and I've thankfully managed to stay quit - it's amazing how much of a long drawn out process quitting smoking actually is. It really does take a very long time, but it does get better and it's totally worth going through. Now I go through entire weeks without thinking about smoking at all, and if I do it's in my mind for a split second and out again.

Weirdly, as an ex-smoker I find people who vape more annoying than people that smoke ... at least people who smoke know that they smoke, whereas people who vape think they don't!

Uhm, no. I'm pretty sure people who vape know they still smoke. It isn't "weird(ly)", you sympathize more with the people who were addicted the same way you were. Not rocket science.

vaping is so much grosser to me. which makes no sense. but it also annoys me more.

See, I don't get that. Vaping - from my Western European view - is def a USA thing. But why does it annoy you? Does it "annoy" in a "I watched a porn but sadly teh guys were wearing rubbers" kind of way? (which I also wouldn't get, tbc)

It's "healthier" than smoking cigs. So where's the annoyance?

i stopped smoking on january 1st. and i have smoked a total of twice since. both times at music shows this summer where friends were playing. i made the decision and i stand by those decisions.

i still use the nicotine lozenges every day. i don't know when i'll stop with that. i still think i would need a couple of days of isolation on the couch with no human contact and i think i could be through with them too.

i took microdoses of psychedelic mushrooms this summer to help me. i was having a really rough summer. and i think it did help! wouldn't recommend it to anyone else though. i've been taking over the counter L-Theanine and Lithium Orotate every day for months. that seems to help too. i've been putting off seeing a pill doctor though. i don't know why. i just hate going to doctors. it HAS gotten easier in just the last month or so. i want to smoke less and less.

i've been smoking pot a little bit recently. which is new. i'm not a big pothead. the good thing is that the pot smoking doesn't make me wish that i had a cigarette. which is a good sign.

"It's "healthier" than smoking cigs. So where's the annoyance?"

i think when i see it i just see the huge plumes of smoke and it looks really gross to me. it seems grubbier in a way. i don't claim to understand why. it just does. i mean i realize that smoking cigarettes can be a grubby thing too.

I think there was a point in 2013 where local house-fires caused by dodgy vape chargers, were becoming much more frequent than fires caused by drunken smokers/sleepy chip pan maestros. I think if I was to start smoking again it would deffo be the ol' killer ciggies. But addictions and their increasing variety of delivery systems in this age is maybe a good thing, the more the merrier perhaps? Maybe alcohol patches/vapers might be next. Getting pissed without putting on the weight wouldn't be much fun, but maybe an improvement on sniffing surgical spirits or glue!

Of course it's "weird(ly)", those are the words I intended to type, did type and meant. You would think that I would find being around people that smoke more annoying than being around people that vape, but it's the opposite.

I know several people over the last year who've told me straight faced that they've stopped smoking, but have merely just replaced cigarettes with a vape. So you haven't quit, then. Also, in my experience, those that vape seem to give even less of a fuck than smokers do, including myself when I was smoking.

(xxxxxxpost obviously)

Having said that, even when I was smoking I could never really see the point of vaping - obviously, there's been decades of medical research gone into the long term health risks of smoking vs. the long term health risks of vaping, so just how healthier it actually is remains to be seen.

i think when i see it i just see the huge plumes of smoke and it looks really gross to me. it seems grubbier in a way. i don't claim to understand why. it just does. i mean i realize that smoking cigarettes can be a grubby thing too.

― scott seward, Tuesday, September 12, 2017 8:47 PM (twenty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah I can see that. Also grubby is not good.

Still a smoker myself tbh, and don't desire quitting for another year at least.

tbf you don't have to set your vape to churn out masses of vapour, that's just twats.

smoked a few hand rolls in Barcelona with my cousin. They were glorious!! first time i smoked in something like 7 years. no desire to start again or anything but they were nice in the moment .

don't tell me these kind of things, i have more than nine years without smoking and was thinking of allowing myself a joint on the tenth birthday. but somehow i doubt that i will risk it...

I did a year and a half without smoking and loved it, but then at a crazy wedding party I started again and have been smoking (at parties) on/off since :'(

Have recently moved and used the opportunity to quit again, hoping I can stay clean this time

Having said that, even when I was smoking I could never really see the point of vaping - obviously, there's been decades of medical research gone into the long term health risks of smoking vs. the long term health risks of vaping, so just how healthier it actually is remains to be seen.

― more Allegro-like (Turrican), Tuesday, September 12, 2017 5:12 PM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

we don't have this research on vaping yet! the consensus feeling is that it is safer than combustible tobacco, but it will be a long time before we really know much about the health risks of vaping

i worked with a pulmonologist, probably in his sixties, who recommended e-cigarettes to a guy in his seventies who had been smoking for over 50 years. i thought that was pretty progressive