Quick bit of context in case you've landed here cold. I smoked 20 a day from the age of nineteen. Switched to vaping in 2016 to get off them, which worked — I've not touched a cigarette since.
The problem is I then spent nine years on the vape. Somewhere in the middle of that I stopped tapering down and went back up to 20mg without noticing, and I ended up more hooked than I ever was as a smoker. I think I knew that for a long time before I did anything about it.
So this is the list of everything I tried to get off that, in order of how badly it went.
I'm not a doctor and this is just my experience. Number one is the only thing that worked for me.
01
HiSticks
A+
The only thing that fixed the actual problem
What sold me is that 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. There's no heating element and no electronics at all. You push a 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, plenty 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.
That's the bit every other thing on this list missed. They were all aimed at the chemical. Four days into cold turkey I wasn't gasping for nicotine — I was sat in a car park with nothing to do with my hands. Twenty-eight years of putting something to my mouth, and that motion was in deeper than the nicotine ever was.
I still get to pick a flavour. Sounds daft, but part of what kept me on the vape was that little bit of choosing. Every other quit product is clinical. Patches don't have flavours. I've had a box of cores through the door every month for four months now and I pick what's in it. Peach at the minute, coffee ones in the mornings.
Get yours now →
This is the one I use — the starter pack with the device and your first cores.
02
Zero-nicotine vape liquid
C+
Closest of the failures, and that's the problem
On paper this is the obvious answer. Same device, same motion, take the nicotine out. I lasted about a fortnight, which is longer than anything else on this list managed.
But you're still charging something every night. Still buying bottles. Still changing coils and still getting liquid in your bag. And the shop that sells you the 0mg has the 20mg sat on the same shelf two feet away, for the same money, and there is nothing stopping you at half nine on a Tuesday when you've had a bad day.
I went back to 20mg without really deciding to. It doesn't remove the habit at all — it just removes the nicotine and leaves every single trigger in place, and then puts the nicotine back within arm's reach. Never really felt like quitting. Felt like waiting.
03
Nicotine gum
D+
Solved a problem I didn't have
Gum works on the assumption that what you want is nicotine. After nine years of vaping, nicotine was genuinely the easy part — I'd already come off it once in 2016 and the withdrawal was fine.
What I wanted was to lift my hand to my face. Chewing does nothing for that. I chewed gum and vaped at the same time for about three days, which tells you everything.
It also gave me heartburn, and it tastes the way it tastes. There's one flavour and you're stuck with it.
04
Nicotine patches
D
A sticker that ignores the whole issue
Same logic as the gum, minus even the chewing. You put nicotine into your arm, which was never the thing I was struggling with.
I wore one for four days and vaped over the top of it the entire time. Not because I'm weak-willed — because the patch has nothing to do with the reason I pick the thing up 150 times a day. It's aimed at a craving I wasn't really having.
They also did nothing for the bit where you're sat at your desk at 3pm with your hand halfway to your mouth before you've noticed.
05
Cold turkey
D−
Four days, and not for the reason you'd think
I'd done this before with cigarettes and got through it, so I went in thinking I knew what I was dealing with. I didn't.
With cigarettes there were twenty of them a day and each one took five minutes. The vape was every three minutes, all day, for nine years. When you take it away there's no gap where it used to be — there's just the whole day.
It wasn't the cravings that got me. It was sitting in the car outside work on the Thursday with absolutely nothing to do with my hands, and driving to the shop. Nothing to replace it with, so there was nothing to hold on to.
If you switched to vaping to stop smoking and you meant it to be temporary — go and check what year it was. Then go and look at the number on the box, because I'd put money on you not knowing it either.
The thing I'd tell anyone in the same spot: stop trying to fix the nicotine. Everyone's selling you something for the nicotine. The nicotine is over in a week. It's your hands you need to sort out.
This is the one that sorted mine →
— Mark