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Tobacco. 10,000%.
I smoked 3 packs a day for 25 years.
Then when vaping appeared on the scene, I switched to vaping - HEAVY vaping, loads of nicotine (you could buy 100 mg/ml nicotine base by the gallon for a few bucks back when it was still free). For 10 years.
Then finally I quit vaping. It’s been 5 years.
I’m finally free from tobacco. And it’s entirely thanks to vaping for me. I tried a million times and only vaping finally peeled me off tobacco (and then it took me 10 years to peel myself off vaping, but that was easier).
That’s what it took and how long it took me to get off tobacco. I curse the everlasting shit out of the day I took my first drag on a cigarette…
did vaping make it easier to taper off?
I never tapered off. I replaced hard smoking with hard vaping almost overnight - and when I mean hard vaping, I mean big mods with big drippers, tons of power, tons of clouds, tons of nicotine.
I calmed down a bit with the vaping over the years because I didn’t feel I needed as much. Then one mornng, I simply left the mod at home and stopped vaping cold turkey.
Vaping had two functions for me:
- Inject nicotine into my system in a safer way than tobacco
- Reassure me that no matter what happened, as long as I had a mod nearby, I never needed to touch a cigarette again. And my most pressing source of anxiety was to want to smoke again.
After 10 years of vaping, I really felt like tobacco was well and truly alien to me at that point, so the “crutch” aspect of vaping disappeared. As for the nicotine, I figured I could always smear some nicotine base VG onto my gums. So I quit vaping but I left home with a bottle of nic that morning, but ended up never needing it.
That’s my tobacco cessation story. Everybody’s is different 🙂
I quit a $240 dollar/day opioid habit, but they ain’t takin’ my damn nicotine
$240/day?! How much were you taking?
240mg oxycodone, unknown amount of fentanyl towards the end there
That amount of oxy alone is a LOT, good thing you were able to stop. Must’ve been hard.
Yeah it was gnarly. That was my once every ~24 hours dose, with about 1/3 of the time not being able to afford it and having the equivalent of a severe flu from withdrawal. It was like that for years. Everyone that I ever hear about being prescribed any painkillers, I give them a very serious warning.
For anyone already struggling with opioid addiction, MAT (Suboxone) is a perfectly viable option to get off of that shit, it’s not perfect, and it’s expensive, but it’s no where near as expensive as your habit, and you’ll get your life back.
Excessive amounts of food. I have to eat, but cutting back to the amount I should be eating for my age and physical activity is so tough.
The cause is binge eating in my youth when I was extremely active but didn’t eat three meals a day due to adhd absentmindedness. Frequently I would only have one or two meals a day, but eat two or more meals worth of calories at a time and burn it off in short order.
Now with family and a desk job with a scheduled lunchtime it is basically impossible to eat when I’m hungry instead of when it is ‘time to eat’ and portion control is a struggle. Quitting smoking required buying a house and quitting together with the wife, at least that had a cutoff date that I could say “I haven’t smoked since moving in”. Eating less is something I need to do every day!
When I was assessed for (and diagnosed with) ADHD when I was 39, 5 years ago, I asked the psych whether my obesity was perhaps linked to it. He replied that, “no, probably not. Most of the people I see are thin”.
This had the double whammy of making me doubt my diagnosis and consider that I’m just an irredeemable fat cunt.
Which was nice.
He said most, not all. If my parents had been more regimented about me eating every meal I probably would have had weight issues earlier on.
To spin it positively, being exception to the general trend makes you exceptional!
Since covid, there’s been a lot of food in the house. Something about not being able to get it when we wanted made us buy more, more often and stockpile. Of course, food expires and throwing it away means that it was a bad decision to buy so much, so eating it is the only financially responsible thing to do, right?
Being too damn nice.
Not to claim equivalence or anything, but smartphone and the internet (ironic saying so here I know).
I’m a xennial … old enough to remember living without all this and the middle time where computers were either games or just useful tools.
For me, and I’m pretty sure many others, I’m pretty convinced it’s better that way.
I’d really like to get away from these things, at least just to relearn older habits.
Born in 80, so a similar vintage to you; and yeah, we have connections and information now, but I feel like we should have stopped some time around 05, before smartphones really took hold.
I’m absolutely willing to accept that I’m wearing the highest grade rose tinted goggles, but not having to do everything online certainly felt better than whatever all this is. gestures broadly
I remember what it was like before I could stave off boredom at any time, but even then I don’t think the convenience outweighs the problems. Though in fairness it’s not really the phones, but the companies who make billions from us using them. But those companies had nowhere near the same amount of power, and I can’t help thinking that was a good thing.
I am confronting the fact that I have lost the ability to just be bored. I need to get that back.
Yep! Embracing boredom is likely the path back. Because it’s not a dead space. It’s a canvas.
I’m slightly younger (born in 86) but went through a similar thought process a couple of years back. I remembered being an avid reader as a kid but could barely make it through a book or two a year, and struggled to maintain any form of attention span. I forced myself to read more for about the first month, then I got addicted to it again and ended up reading 42 books that year. I’m very conscious now about pretty much always having my devices in some form of focus mode/app time limits and prioritizing focus/reading time. I feel much better.
I’ve been starting to think that it’s something us older millennials can actually do for our younger friends … remind, demo and teach what a less tech ruled life can look like, how tech can be treated as more humane and not a necessity.
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Weed was easy. Don’t even think I was addicted. For me, I’ve been struggling for with sleeping pills lately. Might go back to the weed but just do oils before bed for sleep. I’m a shift worker in a high stress job so I need something at night to calm the nerves sometimes.
I’m luckily sensitive to most medications, and find good success with herbal stuff like valerian and passionflower, any of the GABA ones really. They don’t make me sleepy as much as they get rid of that little burning anxiety stress that keeps me awake.
It’s worth a shot for some people.
Tried that kinda stuff lol I’m unfortunately a horrible sleeper
I can beat the addiction of playing around on my phone very often throughout the day.
Phone
Gonna have to go with alcohol and benzodiazepine abuse for this one, basically because it’s the only one that I have beaten (citation needed). Only one relapse in the past 10-ish years or so! Though it took a few relationships with it, and I’ve gone through multiple hospitalizations (some even voluntarily), and because of that combo and all the other shit that was going on in my head (not to mention the cocktail of SSRIs and eventual SNRIs like Effexor at max dosage combined with stuff like Seroquel at max dosage for literal years, of which Effexor is still the bane of my existence; and stuff like ECT) there’s like this hazy quality in my own past for me. As if I’m talking about someone else. I can’t even remember most of my life from around 2013-2018 or so.
I’d say the worst part about abusing benzos with alcohol is how good it feels. I still have the cravings. Like even now I’d be up for it. That combined with the fact that it only brings out the worst in me, every narcissistic and sosiopathic tendency is not only brought forth but amplified also. And it’s unhealthy in general.
So if you don’t happen to die in your sleep; once you wake up and realize just how many people you’ve hurt, when the full weight of your own actions and the coming consequences descend upon you, you just might hope that you did. Vice, thy name is me
watching Corner Gas!
Feeding my dog from the table.
Aww
Old school rune scape
I have quit sugar, caffeine, nicotine, weed, and am trying to get my alcohol consumption under control.
Sugar was almost automatic. I just don’t have much of a sweet tooth, so consciously avoiding sugar was really easy. I can’t say I’ve noticed much of a difference since, although overly sugary things like Coke now taste disgusting, and I can immediately tell when something has been sweetened with sugar, even if it’s really subtle. It’s like a 6th sense. You’ll be surprised at the stupid shit people put sugar into. Pickles, mustard, tomato sauce… these things do not need sugar!
Caffeine had the most intense withdrawal effects. The caffeine headache is unlike any other headache I’ve ever had, and I’m a migraine sufferer. The brainfog was horrible too. Coming out the other side is great though. Plus having a coffee from that point on is a fucking glorious experience.
Nicotine took me years, and I wouldn’t have accomplished it without switching to vaping first. I’ve written about this before but that makes it sound easier than it was. There were many many many failed attempts before I put down the vape for good. This one has had the best benefits though. You don’t realise how good breathing is until you’re fully quit for a while.
Weed was really not my choice. I really really overdid it, and I now can’t touch the stuff. I’ve tried, and it’s always a terrible time. I just withdraw inwards and become an anxious, paranoid mess. What’s worse is it takes me days to recover as well. Doesn’t matter how little I have or how “no really this weed is super mellow dude” it is, I consistently have a bad time now. I miss this one the most. I used to really enjoy what it was like in the beginning.
Alcohol is my fucking kryptonite. I cannot get it under control. I think my only option at this point is really to go teetotal. it’s not really bad enough for me to what to be so drastic with it though. I’m not an angry drunk, I don’t spend more than I can afford on it, it’s not really negatively affecting my life… I just drink too much and too often, and I worry for my health.
You and I have extremely similar experiences. Nicotine for me was super easy, though—one day I had my morning cig and I felt like DOGSHIT. The next day I tried again and I just felt horrible, debilitated. Stopped smoking habitually that day, no cravings. I think I got lucky.
Caffeine now makes me feel like an anxious mess. This happened almost overnight.
I miss weed so much, but it ALSO makes me an anxious mess. I still try it occasionally but maybe one in four times it actually is fun. It’s been months since I’ve touched it.
Alcohol… I drink with my partner every evening. It makes everything more fun. We’re trying to cut down/stop, but is it ever damn difficult.
Quit drinking and you will crave sugar like crazy. When I was in the navy, I’d start craving sugar about a day and a half after getting underway. Then we’d pull in somewhere, I’d get hella drunk and not crave sugar, go underway, rinse/repeat.
I know it doesn’t help you, but weed really helped me curb my alcohol use. I’m in the same boat. I self medicate and drink too much. I’m worried about my liver, but I don’t drink and drive and only drink beer.
I stupidly have given myself a nicotine addiction with sachets recently that I need to fucking stop. I noticed nicotine makes me grumpy, which is a drastic change for me.
Alcohol. I never drank until I got an IT internship and the boss was big into craft beers. I started drinking craft beer every night just to have something to bond with him through to try to turn the internship into a full-time job. I did get the job, but then struggled for years with alcohol dependence.
After my dad died I nearly drank myself to death and managed to quit for an entire year. Then I got cheated on, and home was no longer a safe space, so I hung out at the bar every day instead. It’s been 6 months and I’ve gone from ~75 beers / week to ~24. Just tapering myself off slowly. Wegovy helps - I can’t have more than a few drinks without feeling super bloated now.
Coffee/Monster Java. I really feel like I can’t function without either. I can go without Monster Java for a few days, but the coffee is something I can’t go without in it’s absence.
Porn. While this has been gradually getting better with not stockpiling tons and tons of images and not stroking off as much. I do spend quite some time looking at porn and falling into old habits from time to time.
Food Portion Control. I have poor portion control, I really do. I’ve long stopped going to chinese buffets which is a great step in progress. But I’ve substituted it with going to BK time to time and grabbing things that are just as bad if eaten in a day’s worth.
