12/26/2023 0 Comments Take a break vapesI am lucky to have an amazing support system to keep me on track, encourage me, and tolerate me when my mood swings become unbearable. Rewiring your brain and body not to need nicotine is a marathon and not a sprint. Quitting the vape is emotionally and physically taxing. I’m not sure that will ever completely end, but where I am now compared with where I was even a month ago is surreal. I still struggle and I still have cravings. But as someone who loved a good smoke more than anything, I truly believe that if I can do it, anyone can. The steps in this guide worked for me, and may not be exactly right for you. There are a lot of factors to take into consideration while quitting an addictive substance, including your lifestyle, personality, and environment. After searching online time and time again for answers and conversations with fellow smokers, I decided to put something out there that can serve as more than just a checklist. That’s why I decided to write this guide, based on my own personal journey to quitting. What I was searching for was something to relate to, but instead I found everything I’d been hearing since middle school health class. Sitting at work one day, I googled “ how to quit vaping.” Up popped the usual collection of jargon, phone numbers, resources, and statistics on why smoking is bad. RELATED: CDC Finds a ‘Toxin of Concern’ as Vaping-Related Lung Illnesses Continue to Rise But with the consistently growing number of cases and the fact that even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been unable to determine the exact culprit, I decided I wasn't interested in waiting any longer to take action to quit. In all honesty, until the headlines started breaking about mysterious vape-related lung illnesses that caused symptoms like nausea, vomiting, chest pain, and even death - I hadn’t taken the idea of quitting seriously at all. But for an entire generation of teens and preteens, the game had been changed. Now vapor filled my lungs before I managed to fully open my eyes.Īt this point I was an adult with nobody to hide my habit from. Even at my most addicted, when I was nearing a pack a day, I could make it until my morning coffee before lighting up. I had smoked cigarettes for the entirety of my young adult life. Never had I been able to consume so much nicotine so conveniently. Instead of having to go outside for a cigarette every few hours, I could now smoke constantly. If I couldn’t feel the hard outline of it in my pocket, full-on panic set in. Instead of the Juul weaning me off smoking as planned, I became more addicted to nicotine than before. Because it was smaller than a pencil and virtually odorless, I could smoke it wherever and whenever I wanted. That tiny, USB-flash-drive-shaped stick swept me off my feet. It seemed like the lesser of two evils, or at least that’s what I told myself. After one mile, as I sat clutching the curb and wheezing as if I’d just completed an Ironman, I decided it was time to quit cigarettes.Ĭue the vape. It was winter break, and I tore myself away from the warmth of my den to go on a run. There started my decade-long love affair with nicotine.Ĭut to nine years later. We huddled in a circle, shoulders touching behind a bush, and sparked what we didn’t know at the time would be the first of countless “bogies.” Why? We thought they were pretty and, in the interest of full transparency, we probably thought they made us look cool (shocker). The summer before high school, my girlfriends and I got one of our older siblings to buy us a pack of pink Camels. Nevertheless, I fell head over heels for cigarettes. In high school I was a two-sport varsity athlete who worked out religiously and kept a strict diet. Actually, I’ve always been somewhat of a health nut. In fact, my dad is a cardiologist, so I’ve never been naïve about the risks. I started smoking when I was 13 years old. Let me tell you about my first love: nicotine.
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