Having trouble stop smoking

I stopped smoking just over a year ago, a 20-30 a day smoker for 25 years. I had stopped once before years ago. Both times I used the patches, both times for 12 weeks stepping down the size every 4 weeks. This time I bought 4 packs of the nicotine gum for a little more support & I did use some of it.

For me the patches took away most of the withdrawal symptoms, the volcanic temper & the mood swings being the worst. The downside from the patches were the dreams, oh the dreams. Very real, extremely vivid & either ultra bizarre or of a very strong sexual nature.

As Boojum says the initial problem was breaking the habit. Smoking first thing in a morning & early evening after eating were the worst for me but that faded after a month. I bought one of those squidgy stress balls & carried pens about with me to try to keep my hands busy.

I know people who have just stopped using the glass of water technique, we had a month of fun at work when a colleague of mine did. The first two weeks were murder. To his credit the outcome was worth the frayed tempers, the hissy fits & the odd expletive laden remark.

Stopping smoking was one of the hardest things I've ever done, it is also the best thing I have ever done for myself. More money, no more stinking clothes & it has hopefully prolonged my life. If you want it badly enough you can stop, finding the motivation is the key.

Good luck.

all smokers stop smoking becasue they die

Is it normal that I quit smoking really easily? I think I just did it, cause I thought it looked cool. I was a light smoker for over twenty years.

Just think about the CEOs getting rich off of you slowing killing your body for their profits.

It took me 3 times to quit, but I'm happily smoke free now. I didn't want to die by slow suffocation from lung cancer.

I smoked up to 60 cigarettes a day for about 20 years and I repeatedly tried to stop and – until the last time – always went back to smoking within a few weeks.

For me (and I think for most people) what makes stopping smoking so difficult is primarily addiction to nicotine and, to some extent, the habit of physically handing and fiddling around with cigarettes.

I tried the "cold turkey" approach several times, and it never worked. However, my wife at the time smoked nearly as much as me, and she just decided to stop one day, and that was that. I suppose it is a matter of will-power to some extent, but I suspect that there must be some variation in how the neurochemistry of different people responds to nicotine. If a one person gets a much bigger buzz from nicotine than someone else, then it would make sense that the first person would find quitting much more difficult. Some might suggest psychological factors made it difficult for me to stop, but I don’t have any of the other characteristics of someone with an addictive personality.

What worked amazingly well for me was nicotine replacement therapy. Nicotine gum has been around for a long time, and I had tried that, but I thought the stuff tasted awful. There were also dermal patches, but those did nothing for me. At the time that I stopped, you could get little plastic gizmos that looked vaguely like a cigarette and which contained cardboard tubes impregnated with nicotine. When you felt the urge for a cigarette, you sucked on the thing as you would a cigarette (which dealt with the need to fiddle with something) and received a hit of nicotine.

I decided to stop one day in 1999, bought the little inhaler thing, and that was the last day I ever smoked. It felt a little like I was cheating, because it was completely painless – I suffered none of the usual withdrawal symptoms

These days, you can get nicotine spray, and of course there’s vaping.

Nicotine in itself is highly addictive and toxic in large doses, but the dose you get by vaping or replacement therapy is not harmful. What’s really harmful about tobacco use is all the other crap in the smoke.