You posted on social media and told everyone that you are now nicotine free. You have made your mind about what you are going to buy for yourself with money you’ll save and you have a list of all benefits in front of you.
You are all set but are these elements enough to do the job?
By making a list of reasons you answered a question “Why should I quit?” but in addition do the opposite thing. Ask yourself “Why should I be smoking?”.
The answers I came up with didn’t make any sense. You can even feel desperation and ridiculousness in these answers. I got only these foolish answers:
1. It helps me relax.
2. I feel bad physically when I don’t vape.
3. I am aggressive and angry when I don’t smoke.
4. Smoking helps me be more sociable.
You might come up with more but they will be variations of these four reasons.
Straight away reasons two and three fall apart as they are just physical and emotional symptoms of withdrawal. Sit it out and they will subside and vanish quickly.
As for the first one, the calming effect, well, it is the same as saying - I drink double espressos every night to help me fall asleep and relax. Nicotine does induce temporal feeling of relaxation and elevated mood but, and this is a very big but - smoking raises your heart rate and blood pressure so what you are actually doing is increasing the tension, increasing your anxiety.
Calming effect of nicotine has been confirmed for women but it lasts only for very mere amount of time it takes to smoke cigarette. For men this effect is not observed and even for women – when you stop vaping you are left with high blood pressure and high heart rate - you are in worse state than you started with.
Smoking did help me be more social...sort of. With a cigarette you can start conversation by asking what liquid they prefer and about their hardware. You probably have smoking buddies, whom you go for a smoke with. Well, you can start conversation probably even more efficiently by just saying hello. What about your smoking buddies? Guess what, you were going for a smoke together because you have the same interests and you don’t need a cigarette to get together.
If you think that smoking helps you be more social it’s great that you are quitting because smoking is limiting you.
Every single other activity has at least one redeeming quality but smoking on the other hand doesn’t have any redeeming qualities. So, it is a bad habit in every single sense.
From now on every time you smoke ask yourself:
Why am I smoking?
Have this conversation with yourself. You will come up with no answers for this question. If you are trying to trick yourself and you do come up with at least one positive reason - you need to take a long hard look at yourself and this reason.
Smoking is useless, harmful and expensive activity. Before you stop using e-cig you need to understand this clearly, vividly and strongly. You need to believe it.