I vaped for six years. Every time I tried to stop, the first few days were horrendous — headaches, no sleep, snapping at everyone, that awful restless feeling like your skin's too tight.
Which I'd braced for. What I hadn't braced for is that on day five, day eight, day twelve, I still felt terrible. And by then I'd read enough to know that nicotine is out of your system in about two to three days.
So I spent years assuming I was just one of those people who takes it badly. That my body was somehow worse at this than everyone else's.
It wasn't. The nicotine had gone, exactly on schedule. What was still there was six years of doing something with my hands two hundred times a day, and nobody had told me those are two completely separate problems.
01
HiSticks
A+
The only thing that helped with the part after day three
I'll be honest, I nearly didn't order it. A wooden holder with flavour cores sounded a bit gimmicky and I'd already wasted money on things that didn't work.
It isn't a vape. There's no battery in it — nothing to charge, no liquid, no coil, no pods, nothing to leak in your bag. No heating element, no electronics at all. You push a little core into the end of a wooden holder and you draw on it.
The cores are essential oils on a wick. Peach, coffee, mint, cinnamon, grapefruit, loads of others. You get the flavour, you get the pull, you get the whole motion — hand up, draw, hand down. And nothing goes into you, because you're pulling air through it. No nicotine, because there's nothing in it to put nicotine in.
The difference was everything after. Every previous attempt, day four onwards was when I'd fall apart — the chemical was gone, I felt fine on paper, and I'd still be reaching for something that wasn't there forty times an hour. That's the stretch that got me every time.
This time my hands had something to do. The reach was still there, but there was something at the end of it. The cravings didn't disappear but they went from unbearable to just annoying, which is a completely different thing to live with.
The bit I didn't expect to care about: I still get to pick a flavour. Sounds silly, but part of what kept me vaping was that small pleasure of choosing — mango this month, mint next, something different when you got bored. Gum has one flavour and it's horrible. Patches have none. I get a box of cores through the door every month now and I choose what's in it. Peach at the moment, mint in the evenings.
Four months clear now. First time in six years. It cost me less than a fortnight of the pods I was buying.
Get yours now →
This is the one I use — the starter pack with the device and your first cores.
02
Nicotine gum
C−
Postponed the bad days rather than getting me through them
Best of the ones that didn't work, which isn't saying much.
The logic is that it takes the edge off while you adjust. What it actually did for me was keep nicotine in my system, so the two or three days I needed to get through never really started. I was still on it, just in a worse-tasting format. Every time I tried to stop the gum I was back at day one, except now I'd been doing it for three weeks and had no fight left.
The taste is genuinely unpleasant, it made my jaw ache, and it gave me heartburn if I had more than a few.
And it did nothing at all for the reaching. I sat there chewing a piece of gum with my hand halfway to my mouth looking for a vape that wasn't there. Chewing isn't the same movement. It doesn't scratch it.
03
Nicotine patches
D
Same problem as the gum, with even less to do
Same issue — you're still taking nicotine, so you're not actually getting through the two or three days, you're just moving them further down the calendar.
But at least with gum there's something to put in your mouth. A patch sits on your arm and you forget it's there. There is nothing to hold, nothing to reach for, nothing to do at half past three in the afternoon when the urge arrives.
They also wrecked my sleep. I had the most vivid, exhausting dreams I've ever had and woke up feeling like I hadn't slept at all, which is not what you need in a week where you already feel terrible.
I ended up vaping over the top of one, which tells you how little it was doing for the part I was struggling with.
04
Cold turkey
F
The worst of the lot, and it's the one that made me feel broken
I tried this three separate times and it's the reason I spent years thinking something was wrong with me.
Days one to three were as bad as everyone says. Headaches, couldn't sleep, unbearable to be around. I could handle that, because I knew it had an end date and I'd read that the nicotine would be gone by then.
Then it was gone. And I still felt awful. Day six I was staring at the wall at 2am. Day nine I cried at something on the telly. Day eleven I bought one on the way home from work without really deciding to.
That's what did the damage. Not the pain — the confusion. I'd done the hard part, the chemical had left, and I was still a mess, so I assumed the problem was me. It wasn't. There was just nothing left in my hands and six years of habit with nowhere to go.
Going in with nothing is going in with nothing. It doesn't build character, it just means you're relying entirely on willpower at the exact point in the month when you have the least of it.
If you've tried to quit and felt fine-ish on paper by day four but still couldn't get through the afternoon — you're not doing it wrong and there's nothing unusual about you.
The chemical part really does end quickly. The habit part doesn't, and almost everything on the shelf is aimed at the first one. That's the whole reason I kept failing.
This is what finally got me past it →
— Hannah