20f. I have a bright future as a premed at a top uni. I initially started vaping consistently 5 years ago because I was a drug addict, and it kept me feeling like I was doing bad things without fully altering my state of consciousness. When friends would leave or when things would become too much, I had it there for me. As times would change and as responsibilities and adulthood would hit, I had a consistency and one thing to stay by my side.

All of the maturing that I’ve done, the major growth that I’ve made, I’ve made while vaping. It’s reached a point where anytime that I visit home from college, I can easily quit. However, the moment I get back here, the moment I’m living on my own again, balancing school and taking care of myself and seeing if I can still be a person during all of it, I fall back. I don’t feel myself even having the urge to fall back on abusing drugs, but I’m so used to vaping as a consistency in my life that it’s so easy to keep going back when the goings get rough. The vape shop is across the street from my apartment for fucks sake. I had had chest pain every so often and noticed that for skateboarding and for needing to do quick sprints to the bus stop, it has gotten more difficult, but I just kept brushing it off.

As a kid, I would get easily winded. I chalked it up to my short stature and muscular legs because I was still a beast in the water. I could beat people in long jump and hurdles, but I couldn’t run a quarter mile. Getting winded for me meant wheezing slightly.

Fast forward to these last few weeks: I developed a cough that just kept getting worse. It wasn’t just occasionally after I vape; it was all the fucking time. For the first week it was coughing up phlegm, and then the phlegm was gone. The cough just kept going, and there would be liquid coming out of all the orifices in my face, and I’d sound like a dying pig trying to catch my breath and sometimes gag on the air in my throat. Literally one vape hit would throw me into one of my episodes.

It got so bad that I was afraid to fall asleep. So I was at the hospital for 3 1/2 to 4 hours two nights ago. I had four different people listen to my chest (and I listened myself before I went), and nothing sounded off. I got a chest X-ray from the front and side, an albuterol inhaler, and was given 12 mg of a steroid. I took the inhaler home with me. Turns out I have asthma, and I’m not dying- thank FUCK.

That was 36 hours ago. I have my inhaler, and I’m now still occasionally getting a pretty strong cough and needing to use it. Last night I tried hitting my vape a couple times, and it threw me into episodes again. I’ve known for a while now that I need to quit, and I know that it’s a better time than any other because I’m not in the middle of classes right now (other than MA), and I’m doing fairly well for myself.

It’s just living on my own (tbf I move home for 3 weeks in two weeks) and being at this place; it’s so difficult to stay away. Anytime things get too much, or I get in my own head, or I feel alone, I have her there for me. Now I have to have nothing. I know it’s for the best, and I have been meaning to try to quit more permanently this summer, but not having a choice in the matter has really fucking sucked.

I’d appreciate some advice, maybe from someone who can relate to me, and encouragement would be nice.

TL;DR: I’m a young adult who has come a long way in healing as a person, and during those years, a lot of that healing was done while vaping all through it. I don’t need a vape anymore to stay away from the hard drugs. I don’t feel tempted to fall back on bad habits; however, when the going gets rough, if I have quit, I will go back to vaping because it’s such a comforting thing for me.

It’s not like I even vape socially; I do it in the bathroom when I’ve reached a certain point in my studies or when I’m casually cleaning or thinking about things. Also, I have ADHD, and dopamine helps me a lot, especially because I don’t scroll and it’s motivating stimulation. Now I’m forced to quit, and I don’t know how, but my body physically can’t do it anymore. I need advice on how to fucking stay clean.

it’s just this is my constant. Everything I ever do is for future me this is the one thing I have for present me. Now I have to let it go?

This is my first ever reddit post. I have been a long time lurker without ever feeling the need to post until now. Sorry if it’s long.

For the first few days after I quit, I kept reaching for a vape that wasn’t there. My hand would instinctively pat my pocket, or drift towards the corner of the desk where it normally sat. I’d only realise halfway through the movement that I’d actually quit.

Nobody had warned me that would happen. In fact, nobody had really explained most of what quitting would feel like. That’s why I’m writing this.

I quit about 7-8 months ago now. 17-Nov-2025, if we’re being exact, which I clearly still am, because some part of me is still counting. I’ve had a couple of puffs here and there since then. I don’t think about it. I haven’t bought one. I’m not addicted anymore.

I’m writing this because that outcome felt genuinely impossible to me a year ago, and I spent a lot of nights awake looking for someone to tell me it wasn’t.

The advice that didn’t work, or didn’t work for me

Every night I couldn’t sleep, I’d end up searching again. And I’d find the same handful of answers, over and over - ‘Use this prescription’, ‘Cold turkey is the only real way’, ‘Keep your hands busy’ .. or my personal favourite - ‘Remove yourself from the situations where you’re likely to vape’. None of that worked. Or maybe it works for some people and just didn’t work for me, which is a more honest way to put it. I’m not here to tell you those methods are wrong. I’m here because I needed something else and couldn’t find it, and I suspect a lot of people searching at 1am are in the same position.

Honestly, for a long time I didn’t believe I’d ever actually quit. Every attempt lasted until the next stressful day, the next beer, the next coffee. After a while I stopped asking myself how to quit and started quietly wondering whether I was just one of those people who never would.

Friends would ask me, every so often, “will you ever give the vapes up?” And I’d usually give some version of “I would if I really wanted to,” said lightly, like it was a throwaway line. It wasn’t. I think some part of me actually believed it, which is a strange thing to sit with in hindsight. I wanted to quit and didn’t believe I wanted it enough, at the same time.

What I actually needed wasn’t a method. It was for someone to break the whole terrifying idea of “quitting” into something small enough to actually win at, one day at a time, and to be honest with me about what that would feel like along the way.

So that’s what I’m going to try to do here. Not a formula. Not a lecture. Just what it was actually like, and why I think you can do this too, even if right now that sounds like a cliche someone says to make you feel better.

I should say who this is really for. It’s for people who genuinely want to quit, especially younger people who got pulled into this by peer pressure, by deliberate marketing and have unfortunately ended up with a habit they didn’t choose so much as absorb. It’s also for anyone who, if we’re honest, still loves vaping a little. I did too. That’s not a disqualifying feeling. It’s just the truth.

It’s also for people who desperately want to quit but haven’t yet read or heard a story that actually sounded like their own. I looked for a long time and never quite found it. So this is really just an attempt to help. If it helps one person, or opens one or two eyes to the idea that this might actually be possible, that’s the whole job done.

How it actually got its hooks in

I’m 37 now but I smoked about 20 cigs a day for around 13-14 years before I switched. When my wife got pregnant, I moved to disposable vapes because I genuinely believed they were the lesser evil. In some ways they were. In one important way, they made everything worse.

Cigarettes have natural boundaries built in. I didn’t smoke in the car with the windows up, or in a meeting, or while i was holding a sleeping baby. There’s friction to cigarettes. You have to go outside, light up, commit to it.

Vaping has none of that friction. I could vape driving, working, standing in the garage, ducking out of a meeting for thirty seconds (or off screen in a virtual meeting), making coffee, basically anywhere I existed. Smoking interrupted my day. Vaping became my day.

Instead of 20 deliberate cigs a day, I was taking what was probably hundreds (or thousands) of tiny, unconscious puffs. The vape almost never left my hand. It became less like a habit and more like an extension of my arm.

What it looked like, hour by hour

This may sound familiar to some of you, but I don’t think “addiction” fully captures how invisible this became. It wasn’t dramatic. There was no moment where I thought “I have a problem.” It was just the quiet rhythm of an ordinary day.

Wake up, reach for the vape. Make coffee, vape. Walk outside, vape. Reply to an email, vape. Sit and think for a second, vape. Get in the car, vape. Have a beer, vape. Play golf, vape. See another parent sneak away from a kid’s birthday party, vape.

The part that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it is that I often wasn’t deciding to do it. My hand would just move. By the time I noticed, I was already mid-inhale.

Working from home made it so much worse

This deserves its own mention because I think it’s underrated in most quitting content. WFH turned my desk into a reinforcement machine.

The vape permanently sat next to my keyboard. Every time I was thinking, waiting for a page to load, reading something dense, between meetings, bored, stressed, or quietly avoiding a task I didn’t want to do, my hand reached for it automatically. A lot of the time I wasn’t even craving nicotine. I was just filling silence with something to do with my hands and my mouth. The vape had become punctuation for my entire day.

What nobody explained to me, I couldn’t find - and the one idea this whole article is built on

Almost everything I read focused on the chemical side of nicotine. Half-lives, receptors, withdrawal timelines, which prescription to use. Useful, but incomplete. Nobody explained why I’d instinctively reach for a vape that wasn’t there anymore. Nobody explained why my coffee suddenly felt unfinished, or why getting into the car felt strange and slightly wrong, like I’d forgotten something.

Here’s the idea. Nicotine wasn’t the only thing I was addicted to. I was addicted to transitions.
Waking up. Finishing a task. Starting a task. Coffee. Driving. Boredom. Stress. Every one of those moments used to get marked by a vape, whether or not my body actually wanted nicotine at the time. I wasn’t reaching for it because I was craving something chemical. I was reaching for it because my brain wanted a full stop at the end of a sentence, and the vape had become that punctuation.

That’s really two separate addictions running at once, and almost everything I’d read only talked about one of them.

Chemical addiction is your body expecting nicotine. That part is real, and NRT genuinely helps with it. I used 25mg Nicorette patches and 2mg gum, and I’d recommend anyone quitting at least talk to a GP about it. But it’s only half the problem.

Transition addiction is your brain expecting a vape at specific moments in your day, regardless of nicotine. Nobody hands you a plan for this part, because it’s not really one problem. It’s dozens of small ones.
That reframe is what actually made this winnable for me. I stopped trying to quit vaping as one enormous act of willpower, and started treating it as a long list of small, specific transitions I had to individually get through without it. Coffee didn’t need vaping. That was one battle. The drive to work didn’t need it. Another battle. Each one small enough to actually win.

The milestones that felt impossible until they weren’t

Every one of these felt like a wall before I got to it, and became proof afterward that I could actually do this.

Morning coffee without reaching sideways for anything. Driving with both hands doing nothing but driving. My first day back in the office. My first full day working from home, at the same desk, with nothing next to the keyboard. The gym. A round of golf. Picking my son up without patting my pocket first. A few drinks with friends. A music festival. A boat party where, a year earlier, I would have gone through at least 1-2 disposables without noticing.

None of these were dramatic victories. They were just ordinary moments that quietly stopped needing a vape attached to them, one at a time, in whatever order life happened to throw them at me.

What I actually missed

At some point I admitted something to myself that felt embarrassing at the time. I actually loved vaping. Not the addiction part, the actual experience. I was scared that admitting that meant I’d never really quit, that some part of me would always be looking for a way back.

I think it’s also fair to say that quitting felt a bit like grief. Not because vaping was ever good for me, but because it had quietly worked its way into almost every enjoyable moment of my day. Coffee. Golf. Friday beers. Finishing work for the day. I wasn’t just removing nicotine. I was saying goodbye to a version of my daily life I’d spent years building, and it’s okay to admit that loss was real, even while knowing it needed to happen.

Then I noticed something else underneath the grief. I didn’t miss the battery dying at the worst moment. I didn’t miss buying disposables, or that low hum of anxiety about where my vape was, or the general feeling of being controlled by a small plastic object.

None of that.

What I missed was the first inhale. The pause it created. That ten second reset in the middle of a stressful email or a boring meeting or an overstimulating day.

That was the actual breakthrough. I wasn’t missing the vape. I was missing the pause.

What changed physically

I’ll keep this part honest and undramatic, because overselling it does a disservice to anyone reading this who isn’t feeling amazing yet. My resting heart rate dropped. Sleep improved. Exercise felt noticeably easier, especially anything involving actual cardio output. My stress response felt less spiky. Generally I just felt better in a low-key, unremarkable way that snuck up on me rather than announcing itself.

The puffs here and there

Somewhere along the way, there were a couple of social occasions where I had a puff on a vape floating around friends. It wasn’t planned, and I wouldn’t recommend deliberately testing yourself this way.

What surprised me wasn’t that I enjoyed it. It was that I didn’t. I didn’t buy one afterwards. I didn’t spend the next day thinking about it. It simply reminded me that I’d moved on.

I think that’s worth saying plainly, because a lot of quitting content implies one slip means starting over from zero. For me, it didn’t. It was just a puff, and then life carried on exactly as it had before.

Where I landed

I used to think quitting meant giving up something I loved. Eventually I understood that wasn’t quite right.
I wasn’t missing the vape. I was missing the pause. And once I realised I could keep the pause, that ten second reset between one transition and the next, without needing a vape to get there, everything else got a lot easier.

I know “if I can do it, anyone can” is a cliche. I’ve read it a hundred times in other people’s stories and rolled my eyes at most of them. But I actually believe it here, and I think the reason is that I never did this through pure willpower. I did it by breaking one impossible thing into hundreds of small, individually winnable transitions, most days getting most of them right.

These days, I don’t reach anymore. Coffee is just coffee. Driving is just driving. Work is just work. The space the vape used to occupy has quietly filled with nothing at all, which turns out to be exactly what freedom feels like.

If you’re reading this at 1am the way I used to, still loving vaping a bit and hating that you do, still not sure this is actually possible for you: it is. Not all at once. Just one transition at a time.

Abt one month ago I made a post about tapering and how I finally hit 0% nic. Today it has been 1 full month since I last used that 0% vape and I could not be happier with myself 🥳🥳🥳🥳 It’s possible to stop yall

If anyone is quitting vaping today and wants a quitting buddy please dm me🫶 I'm 23 F and have been vaping juuls -> dispos for over 8 years! i'm done today

I have been a vaper for the last 10 years; ever since I turned 18. I’m 28 now. The last time I tried to quit about 2 years ago, I tried cold turkey and failed pretty miserably. This time, I’ve used Zyn pouches as replacement and it actually feels slightly.. easy?

So I was wondering if anyone could help me make sure that this is a good plan. Yesterday, I had 4, 3mg Zyn punches for the day. I had them at 7:30, 12:30, 6, and then 9:30. I probably could have gone without the 9:30 one. Today, I’ve had one at 7:30 and 12:30, I haven’t yet had my 6:00 one and I’m feeling alright, having cravings a little bit.

When I vaped, I vaped a 5% disposable nic 13mL. A white Gummy Raz was my go to. I vaped 24/7 even in the middle of the nights when I woke up. I can’t believe I survived yesterday on 4 Zyn pouches.

With all of that being said, am I on a good taper plan? I figured I’d go to the 1.5 mg after about a week of this. Also, will I still feel benefits of not smoking even though I am still feeding the addiction through zyns?

I quit 4 days ago. Today I’m feeling so hopeless and can’t stop thinking about getting a hit of nicotine. I have intense brain fog and I’ve been on the verge of tears all day. I’m tempted to go get a black n mild or a pack of cigs idk . I’m just so fucking sad

I've had a cold with a nasty cough for over a week now so i decided to temporarily stop vaping five days ago in hopes of getting better quicker. I've weirdly had zero withdrawal symptoms or cravings which didn't pass within 5 seconds even though ive been vaping since 2020. I'm now thinking I might just use this as my lucky escape since the worst of it is said to already be over (even though ive had no symptoms?) If anyone is struggling to quit i think what has helped me be unbothered is telling yourself that it's just a temporary break, less pressure means less opportunity to crack. I'm beginning to question if i ever had a dependency on the nic, I think it was the hand to mouth action.

As the title says I quit 2 months ago and so far it’s been an easy journey for me personally. First few days were hard but after that it’s been fine. However this last week and a half I’ve been desperate for a vape again and it’s making me question quitting. I loved vaping so much but I’m just scared it’ll give me cancer or something in the future. Does this feeling ever go away?

Has anyone noticed their lower back pain has calmed down? I'm 5 weeks in. I'd always have to rest my back when taking dog for a walk. Now went 4 days without stopping at a bench to rest my back

Yesterday was a lot easier, i definitely felt a lot more confident in my abilities to quit. Today feels hard because I’m craving the nicotine more, so much that I’m like “do I even wanna quit?” And I won’t give in to that, but the cravings make me doubt my reasoning for quitting (which is a lot of things). I’ve only vaped for 1 year so I imagine quitting will be easier, still hard though especially miss the head rush. Maybe just need someone to help me get through this day.

I was heavily addicted to nicotine for about 12 years.. I quit using the patch 3 1/2 years ago and it was the BEST thing I ever did. Don’t give up! You can do it.

Not sure I mentioned this in past posts but my main motivation for quitting was getting a consistent blood pressure reading of 120 on the bottom number. That’s stroke zone. Tons if BP meds out there but all the potential side effects scared the shit out of me. And it would be basically like taking meds just so I could keep vaping. 3 weeks quit and I’m 17 points down in BP. I’m told it can take months for the vascular effects of ling term nicotine use to diminish. So yeah, staying on quit

Need help on methods of combating cravings and the anxiety, I’ve tried quitting several times throughout the last ten years and obviously have been very unsuccessful, my wife and I have a baby on the way and I want to be a better husband and father but this is the one bad habit I’m really struggling to quit. Please help me.

17 days without vaping.

I’m not going to pretend it has been easy. Some cravings still come out of nowhere, especially during moments when I would normally reach for my vape without even thinking.

But seeing the days add up, the cravings I’ve managed to get through, and the money I haven’t spent makes the progress feel real.

39€ saved already and 22 cravings resisted. Small numbers maybe, but they mean a lot to me.

One day at a time. If you’re struggling today, you’re not back at the beginning. You’re still in the process. Keep going.

Sorry if this ends up long just feel like I need to vent and put my feelings out.
I’ve been the heaviest vaper i personally know for about 8 years. I got to a point where I couldn’t do a single thing without vaping before during and after. I was probably going through a 20-25k geek bar every two to three days.

It got to a point where I could tell the only thing I was really living for was hitting my vape. It’s the only thing I would look forward too and I’ve become such a shut in zombie because of it; mindlessly hitting my vape all day and avoiding any situation where hitting my vape would be difficult.

I’ve tried to quit a few times, always using nrt of some kind. While I’ve had some success I’ve found I end up usually just addicted to the nrt + start vaping again… so cold turkey is the only way I think I can go.

This sub helped me finally hit by far my longest streak since I started. 7 days which is nothing but I could tell I was really starting to turn the corner. Just 7 days and I feel more hunger to actually do more self fulfilling activities, feel like I can actually breath, the cloud of what obstacles I was avoiding with vaping finally began to lift…
Which makes my relapse feel so heartbreaking. I went through 2-3 days of agony tweaking out and crying. I really felt okay I don’t know what compelled my to buy a vape.

Anyway I just hit it about 6 or 7 times, walked to a park nearby and threw the vape in the garbage. I’m trying to not let the inner addict get in my head and catastrophize and convince me it’s not worth it to start over again. I think it would be really good to hear some encouragement from others who went through something similar and maybe have some accountability buddies to check in here and there and make sure I’m keeping this garbage out of my lungs.

Been smoking 5% HQD Cuvies for 7 years. Did a 25 hr break last week and couldn’t hold it anymore.

Just bought Desmoxan and flavored infused tooth picks with a similar flavor to what I vape.

Any advice?