help

[crullers]

I think a lot of it kay be to do with actually being terrified of startjng smoking again, if thaf makes sense, I know ifk go on smoking irs going to kill me, and I know that whenever I have relapsed in the past after abstinence I have only wanted to stop again almost immediately.

I think I can relate to this. I had some health scares - mostly just getting older and my body starting to feel the negative effects of smoking. I wanted to quit badly and kept thinking that I couldn't, I was too much a slave to the smokes. I tried the nicotine gum and patches and they didn't do it for me. I was back smoking before long and beating myself up because of it. And scared as shit - because I knew cigarettes were killing me. There came a time after several attempts that I found snus and I was finally able to satisfy my nicotine cravings but the smoking habit was still there. It takes awhile and 9 weeks is a good start but the habit aspect is so hard to break. If you can keep up with it and realize that it is likely the habit aspect of smoking you are having a hard time with it will get easier in time. Also as others have suggested, maybe try some stronger snus or try vaping to satisfy the habit aspect. What works for one person may not work for another. Good luck.

[alopezg1]

thanks guys for all the help and the paul harvey diversion to. I was only really ever a ligt smoker 5-8 each day roll upsand I have been
using mostly very strong snus , odens extreme and other extreme stuff but also regular strength . I think am almost definitley consuming more nicotine now than when I was smoking as a result, so I think its must mostly all be psychological. I finally caved kn today and smoked a cig at work, it had beeen buildig for a long time and seemed almost innevitable , 2 months seems to be when I hit the wall so to speak. the good news is itmwas totally ****ing disgusting and I could only smoke about a quarter of the thing before throwing it away, I dont kmlw how I smoked 8 of those things a day.... wo thats a good thing. I think I just need to relax about the whole thing a litttle and maybe even let myself smoke if I feel I really need to, just to see how nasty it is, otherwise it becomes lkke the forbidden fruit when it really isnt. I dont know , small steps I suppose but im just sick of the things and I have such an enormous amount of emotional baggage tied up with it after years of trying and failing to stop and being miserable as a result. thanks again guys for the help and support

[SnusnPA]

keep at it man... once you're free of the addiction of cigarettes, you'll feel 10 times better! If it helps, think ahead to the way you may feel when you finally give it up completely.


Now, on to the story of how I quit smoking...


I used to be a 2 pack a day consumer of lucky strikes. I had been smoking them since I was 17, every day, all day, even getting up in the middle of the night to smoke. The job I have is extremely stressfull and smoking was, so I thought, a good way of easing that stress. 2 years ago after picking up my girlfriend and heading to the races to compete I was smoking a cig when something in my brain just clicked. I looked at the half lit cig, tossed it out the window, grabbed my almost full pack and pitched them out as well and said that I was tired of how they were making me feel when I'd get out of the race car, get home from work, lay in bed, how my habit was damaging my body, her body, my son's body. It was like something just happened and told me that enough if finally enough.

The key is, find how your body feels when you smoke. Go run a mile right after you smoke, then run a mile 2 months after you quit. You'll feel like you could run 2 more miles when you finally are free from their grip.

[Burnsey]

I know exactly what you mean. I transitioned from cigs to snus for about a month and the last week it became vile to me to have the ash tray flavor going into my mouth, but it "seemed" necessary, one day enough was enough.

[Skell18]

thanks guys for all the help and the paul harvey diversion to. I was only really ever a ligt smoker 5-8 each day roll upsand I have been
using mostly very strong snus , odens extreme and other extreme stuff but also regular strength . I think am almost definitley consuming more nicotine now than when I was smoking as a result, so I think its must mostly all be psychological. I finally caved kn today and smoked a cig at work, it had beeen buildig for a long time and seemed almost innevitable , 2 months seems to be when I hit the wall so to speak. the good news is itmwas totally ****ing disgusting and I could only smoke about a quarter of the thing before throwing it away, I dont kmlw how I smoked 8 of those things a day.... wo thats a good thing. I think I just need to relax about the whole thing a litttle and maybe even let myself smoke if I feel I really need to, just to see how nasty it is, otherwise it becomes lkke the forbidden fruit when it really isnt. I dont know , small steps I suppose but im just sick of the things and I have such an enormous amount of emotional baggage tied up with it after years of trying and failing to stop and being miserable as a result. thanks again guys for the help and support

It sounds like it is working, when you hit the point where the actual smoking tastes vile and you don't finish the thing, it's working! It's then just a transitional period and you will eventually find that you aren't wanting one and don't think about them. Sometimes you just need to smoke one to remind yourself it's now not for you, to me that's all part of the psychological process of quitting when you associate it with being bad, horrible, whatever.

With me, I first discovered snus on a trip to Sweden, and used it on and off with cigarettes for years, I didn't want to quit smoking though. When I did want to quit, snus made it so easy, I used snus and have never smoked a cigarette since. The key there is wanting to quit smoking, if you don't want to quit and you don't have the mindset then you won't quit IMO. Everyone is different, you sound like the way lx did it and many others too, it will just take time and eventually you will be off them and onto only snus, just stick at it and it will come.

[alopezg1]

Help (part 2)

Hello good people of snuson

I posted a thread a week or two ago , had a good old whinge and a moan about my difficulties quiting the cigs, and recieved lots of very helpful support , so thank you all very much for that.
Since then ( and after a very brief relapse of 1.5 cigarettes) i have been back on track . I decided that i needed reinforcements in the battle against the cigs , so i splashed out on a decent (i think) e cig or pv or whatever is politically correct term for the things nowadays. $105 new zealand dollars poorer i recieved in the post two days after order two ego c batteries two clearomizers and about 80ml of assorted e-juice. Previously i had only ever tried a cig a like thing i bought in the UK , and while i liked it , it didnt quite do it for me. Well , everything that the cig a like was missing was there in the new device. I was really quite astonished how satisfying and efficient the thing was, so much so , that after a couple of days of use i realised , quite abruptly and with certainty that i didn't even need to think about going back to tobacco cigarettes again. I was very, very happy , for about 5 days . This is when i started noticing problems , after i would finish vaping one time i noticed that i inhaled in a way that alramed me , i thought nothing of it because it was just a momentary thing ,it seemed like a hesistation or something like a forgot to take a full breath and caught myself . Anyway , it soon became much more frequent and i noticed a pattern developing: i would have a vape , take maybe 10-15 hits and feel fine , then half an or so later i would notice myself becoming aware of my breathing being a little off , which then develop over the next couple of hours into the quite distressing shortness of breath. Here is the problem though, i want to call it shortness of breath but i am not quite sure if that is what it is . It's hard to describe, its a feeling of not being quite satisfied with the amount of air i am taking in and then every 5 or so minutes taking a very deep breath and sometimes finding that i cant quite get a full inhale . The symptoms have reached the point where i am really quite distressed by them , but they always seem to subside after a while. Strangely enough , one of the things that abated the symptoms was taking another hit on the vapouriser , which i thought was odd. Also a little pinch of snuff has a similar effect. It has occured to me , being a rather anxious young fellow that the symptoms are anxiety related , maybe there is some small physical symptom but my mind has taken that and run with it . I am now in the position of not being able to tell whether i am causing the symptoms through worrying or whether i am genuinly reacting badly to the vapouriser. It Sucks . It cant be a hydration issue as i am drinking a ton of water before and after vaping . The only thing i can now think of is that is an allergy to either pg or vg. Or it could just be my own hyper anxious mind . I am very nervous about taking something up that could be just as harmful as cigarettes in the long run . I think what really bugs about the whole thing is this not knowing exactly what i am doing to my body , its the unknown factor that really bothers me , i think. I made a deal with myself that would vape only once a day , before bed , and use snus throughout the day. That way , if it does turn that the things are unsafe in a few years , i would have only exposed myself to a minimum amount of risk, that seems reasonable. Unfortunatley even one vape session leaves me with the symptoms cycling off and on every few hours the next day . I don't really know what i am asking with this long and rambling post , i am just very concerned and don't really know what to do.

[alopezg1]

Also, I went to the doctor and he said to me that i would be better off using the vaporiser than going back to smoking , even despite the symptoms i have described. He said unless the symptoms become to distressing i should keep using the device !

[crullers]

It could be that your lungs are feeling weird because you are not sending all that tar and crap into them like you did with cigarettes. It's just a guess and I'm not a doctor but when I first quit my lungs felt really strange for a few months.

[Snusdog]

I am not an x-smoker or an e-cig user....so I cannot address your issue from personal experience.....others here will be able to offer more insight first hand

For now I would say give snus a try (and even nasal snuff)..... they are both nicotine delivery systems......but with no respiratory aspects

Beyond that I will let others with more e-cig experience chime in..........in the meantime....consider snus

Keep us posted....and don't give up.....we will do all we can to help you find something that works for you


Stay strong bro

dog

[alopezg1]

Thanks also crullers but i don't think it is a cessation issue. Before my relapse i hadnt smoked for 9 weeks
and was in really good shape, My relapse was only 1 and a half cigarettes and that was 3 weeks ago now , so doubt
it has much to do with the ciggies , maybe , who knows

[evilfrog]

It could be all in your head, but it can also be the vapor.
Sometimes people get a short term reaction when adjusting to using the pv. Usually it goes away in a week or two.
Sometimes the reaction stays or gets worse. If this occurs, and you believe it not to be psychosomatic, then there are a number of things you can try to isolate the problem - for example: try 100% vg liquid, try 100% pg liquid, try different types of flavors, and try flavorless (it's not as bad as you might think). If none of those things work then it's time to live with the side effects or give up, but VERY few people have unsolvable problems with pvs.

For me, strong cinnamon flavors are not useable. They make my mouth and throat sore... so I avoid them (even though they taste good).