Let’s cut to the chase. You know smoking is bad for you, so you want to quit. But you know the route you’ve gone down in the past. You’re tired of ineffective patches, hiccups created by nicotine gum after chewing it for only five minutes. Not to mention those horrible inhalers where you can’t get the hit you need to survive a stressful ten minutes without smoking a genuine cigarette. However, you do know the power of electronic cigarettes. You’ve seen other people use them, and you’ve even seen some of your friends quit smoking by using them. So now you, too, want to try electronic cigarettes to quit smoking. Hooray! Welcome to the “light side.” It’s great over here, and I don’t even smell like an ashtray anymore. Neither will you.
Is it possible to quit smoking with electronic cigarettes?
If there’s one thing you need to know, it’s that getting rid of that nicotine addiction by using of e-cigarettes is easy to do. You see, all you’re doing is weaning yourself off nicotine while fighting the physical addiction to nicotine. That may sound anything but easy, and it may not make much sense to you now, but give me five minutes to explain.
The moment you acquire your first e-cigarette is when you get started with the process. So that’s the moment you get online and find electronic cigarettes you like. Right then and there you’ll want to choose the strongest and highest level of nicotine strength available. Trust me, it may not seem like it as I’m describing it to you, but this is a smart approach. You’ll soon appreciate an overabundance of nicotine over too little nicotine. With me so far? Let me continue.
The next step
Now that you’ve been using your electronic cigarette for a while, and you’re sure you’re using it correctly, it’s time to drop down a nicotine level. I know, I know! But trust me, it’s what you’ll want to do. Yes, it’s a frightening thought, and yes, you’ll probably notice a significant difference. But consider the alternative. Consider the reward if what you’re doing works out for you. Think of it this way, doing it is similar to switching to a different brand of cigarette or using a lighter tobacco version.
Do you get the idea? Good! Rest assured that your body will get used to this change just like it will when you switch from cigarettes to e-cigarettes.
I was on high-level nicotine for just about a month or so. Then I decided to downgrade to the lightest nicotine strength. However, I highly advise that you do it when you feel comfortable. Take it from me, when you attempt to get used to a low nicotine level while smoking an e-cigarette, and you don’t quite have a handle on, you’ll get agitated. So take your time. If it takes a couple of months, that’s fine. It’s much better to take your time and do things correctly than rush in trying to get to the conclusion too soon and not be patient.
What’s my point? When you are able to, order new liquids and cartridges but do so at a lower strength, like a medium.
Evaluate the different e-liquid strengths
There will be e-cig companies that offer a variety of strengths. So if you’d like to take baby steps, go with something like Simply eLiquid. They offer a wide selection of strengths. Or go with something like White Cloud, who have the highest strength liquids and cartridges I’ve seen so far.
After you order your medium strength liquid, keep ordering the same one for a couple of months. The first time I quit smoking with e-cigs, the medium phase or the second phase lasted a month before I went for the lower strength cartridge. But, to be honest, it was too fast of a progression, at least for me. So give it a couple of months on medium before you go for low strengths. Say about 8 to 9 weeks.
After you get down to low strength e-liquid
You’ll know when it’s time to go low. At least, that’s how it was for me. I began to leave my e-cigs at home and I wasn’t as dependent on it as I was at the beginning. The nicotine cravings still came around, but I didn’t have anxiety attacks when I knew I had to wait almost an hour to get home and smoke.
In fact, a few times, I left the stuff in my office overnight, leaving me to rely on an old backup kit I acquired years before. You see, when you begin to forget it, it means you’re not dependent on it. Your brain doesn’t always think about it. So welcome it, because it’s a really good thing!
Once you go low strength, make it a habit of leaving your e-cigs at home. When heading out to work, pack them in your bag but leave your bag in your trunk so that you won’t get to it. Try going the whole day without it and measure how you feel. Do your best not to smoke while you’re taking your kids to school in the morning. Leave your e-cigs at home rather than stuffing them in your pocket when you head off to the grocery store. You’re trying to get used to being a non-smoker. What does that mean? It means you can literally be a non-smoker, even if it’s only for a couple of hours.
What’s one step away from being a non-smoker? That’s going low-strength. So, before you know it, you’ll be nicotine-free. Just think about how you’ll improve your health. In fact, many studies show that quitting smoking will increase your quality of life in literally hundreds and thousands of ways.
Don’t you deserve to enjoy life as a non-smoker? Just think of all the money you’ll save, not just on cigarettes but on home air fresheners!
Give yourself another couple of months on low strength cartridges or liquids. And give yourself a few more attempts at purposely leaving them in your car when you’re out and about, or leaving them at home. When you’ve accomplished that, it’s time to go to zero, and that means no nicotine whatsoever.
No nicotine (It’s scary, but not really!)
It’s scary, but you knew that someday you’d quit smoking! That would be the day that you’d be free of the nicotine shackles. The ones that you’ve been chained to for years and years, perhaps even decades.
Go ahead and purchase a couple of bottles of liquid that are zero strength to refill your cartridges, and have on hand. It can be too intimidating for some. But there will be a day, most likely, when you’ll wake up and say “today is the day,” and you’ll make the switch anyway.
As I said, that’s the way I did it, and it worked out well for me. I purchased the liquid, and it went in my drawer of e-cig stuff. I then decided to forget about it for a while. A few days later, the low-strength stuff went in the drawer, and the zero strength stuff came out.
For me, it was about 2 weeks on the e-cigarettes with zero strength cartridges. Then, I put it in the drawer, and I never saw it again. That went on for two years. One day, I had a seriously horrible day at work, and the e-cig wasn’t capable of curbing my cravings. So, regrettably, I bought a pack of ten cigarettes, and I smoked again for three weeks.
But then I went back on the electronic cigarettes and started the process all over again. On the second occasion, I didn’t smoke for approximately 7 months. That just goes to show that it does work. Perhaps I don’t have enough willpower at moment? Even so, smoking e-cigs is cheaper than smoking regular cigarettes. So you can’t complain really!
How do you get it right?
There’s a trick to giving up smoking with the use of e-cigarettes, and that trick is to do it slowly. You see, the faster I tried to quit, the worse it was for me. The third time I quit with the use of electronic cigarettes, I spent only three or four weeks with the different strengths before moving down to the next strength. Within approximately five months, I went to smoking to zero strength. But within approximately three months, guess who right back to smoking was? You guessed it!
So the longer I gave myself to work with the different stages, the better it was for me. What was my best attempt? When I took approximately eight months from the beginning of the process to the end. So, perhaps you should be looking at that sort of time frame?
You’ll never know how well you can deal with quitting smoking with e-cigarettes if you don’t give it a shot. It can cost you as little as under a hundred dollars, and you can have all the e-cig stuff you need for a month. So what are you waiting for?
