Also having smoked for almost 20 years, and finally kicked it about a year ago, in hindsight I found this kind of advice very unhelpful.

There's lots of different people, and there's not really a universal way that's going to work for everyone. I doubt that there's solutions that work for the majority. I believe most smokers wish they never started, so if it was as simple as 'deferring for 5 minutes' or 'have willpower' we'd have a lot less of them.

> "Giving up smoking" is very hard. Deferring one cigarette for five minutes is easy.

For me, it definitely wasn't, but when I read things that are written as 'general advice' that I couldn't follow it made less motivated to try to find a way to quit. It's was also frustrating to read other people being successful with seemingly 'simple tricks'.

"Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking" is another example that has near universal praise, and was mentioned here on HN. Also a total dud for me, which only made me more depressed; there must be something more wrong with me...

My suggestion now would probably be to treat it as an illness and go talk to your family doctor. But also: your mileage may vary and perhaps just waiting 5 minutes at a time will do it for you!

Hang in there.

Exactly. Smoking wouldn't be so widespread if those "simple tricks" everybody is fond of sharing were actually effective. Delaying your next cigarette is as effective a smoking cessation tool as praying your deity to wake up tomorrow and be reborn a non-smoker. I'm certain it has worked for someone.

I have quit January 2020, and it's taken me 12 years of hating myself, 3 years of electronic cigarette, 6 months of patches, a pandemic where I was away from people and temptation and now the rest of my life of constant vigilance and fortitude not to fall into the pit again. I am happy and don't think about smoking anymore, but I can feel the good old mental pathway faintly light up whenever I'm a little bit distracted or vulnerable.

It's incredibly fucking hard to transform yourself back into a non-smoker.

Yep, I started when I was 15. Quit many times, and finally managed to get off them about 10 years ago. But I could take it up again in a second, the thought of having one never completely goes away.

Want to add to the testimonials of people that this absolutely didn't work for. For me this was just an excuse to open another pack of Juul pods, "oh this time I'll wait longer between puffs, I'll be puffing less and less this time until I'm not addicted". I would open pod after pod, pack after pack, every time thinking this exact thought. The only thing that worked for me is switching off juuls to some other brand where I could mix my own liquid and titrate down.

I would also be very interested in the percentage of people for whom deferring a cigarette for five minutes is easy. Maybe if you were waiting five minutes for a smoke buddy.

> I would also be very interested in the percentage of people for whom deferring a cigarette for five minutes is easy.

I would be too. But I can’t imagine it’s very low. It’s like holding your pee for 5 minutes, uncomfortable, but eminently doable as long as you know you’ll find a toilet soon.

I think the problem is with knowing that those 5 minutes are supposed to mean deferring the smoking forever.

> It’s like holding your pee for 5 minutes, uncomfortable, but eminently doable as long as you know you’ll find a toilet soon.

Does it get worse with time? The first five minutes might just be uncomfortable for holding your pee, but the discomfort rises until by the tenth or twentieth it may be physically impossible.

In my (non-smoker's) understanding, withdrawal symptoms/cravings also increase with time between cigarettes, at least at first. Maybe not as strongly?

I mean, it's doing something you love, that you get to do all the time. Knowing you could do it but choosing not to...yes it's uncomfortable but you eventually get to a point where you forget you were ever a smoker. Maybe some people have "symptoms" but I believe it's psychosomatic.

I think there was a study that showed psychopaths don't get addicted to drugs. Something something brain reward centers something. Or maybe it's anecdotal, a drug dealer's one customer who's "like a machine" and can quit whenever he wants.

It is likely Juul pods contain monoamine oxidase inhibitors just like natural tobacco. They could even have been added to the mix.

Big tobacco knows, but they won’t tell you.

Over the last decade, your family doctor would've likely prescribed a drug like Chantix. One that has very recently been recalled due to increased risk of cancer:

https://khn.org/morning-breakout/pfizer-recalls-chantix-anti...

Unfortunately, your doctor's recommendation is not necessarily the ideal option for your overall health.

As a former smoker, I applaud any and all strategies that could be effective without pharmaceutical intervention, at least as a first option for addicted individuals.

>Unfortunately, your doctor's recommendation is not necessarily the ideal option for your overall health.

What method would you suggest that would be more effective than evidence-based medicine? I seem to recall that there is somewhat of a cancer risk for continuing to smoke. So if Chantix is effective at getting you to quit, you would still be at a much lower cancer risk overall. It is also worth noting that the drugs were recalled because of an impurity in batches that could cause a cancer risk, not a risk from the drug itself.

This just seems like terrible logic to me. Don’t use evidence based approaches to help you quit something that is definitely increasing your risk of cancer by a lot, because at some point down the road it could maybe be found that the approach you took had a much smaller risk of causing cancer. This is just fear of active risk vs passive risk. Accepting a much larger risk of maintaining the status quo over a lower risk of actively seeking out and taking a drug.

The news was also mischaracterized as it's not the active ingredient that is associated with cancer risk, it's a contaminant/by product of the production process, so it's more of a product safety recall than a drug safety recall. As far as I know, this was a voluntary risk-reduction recall by the manufacturer and not an FDA recommended or ordered recall based on safety data.

I'm still a 25-year smoker, and my experience with those things has been that yeah, I can delay for 5 minutes, or an hour, or 15 hours on an international flight, but I swear to god the speed and volume of nicotine I suck in from the next cigarette is directly proportional to how long I delayed it. If I land after 15 hours, that cigarette is gone in the time it takes to get in a taxi. If I were ever to quit, I don't think allowing myself any outs to return to it would be a good idea. It would put me right back where I started, instantly. And I also don't have the willpower to go cold turkey. So I'm mostly hoping there will be a cure for cancer before I'm sixty.

Smokers are not addicted to nicotine per se. Your craving is towards the monoamine oxidase inhibitors in tobacco smoke.

I take it you have tried alternatives containing only nicotine, but they just weren’t the same?

Note that successfully quitting smoking usually means quitting coffee, too, since coffee contains the exact same monoamine oxidase inhibitors.

I don't know anything about this other chemical. (1) It is true that no other nicotine product produces the same "fix" as burning tobacco. But (2), other nicotine products definitely do fill 70-80% of the craving, and I think the rest is mostly down to habit.

Bollocks. I chain-vaped (juice which contained only propylene glycol, glycerol and nicotine) as much as I chain-smoked. Perhaps more, as vapour wasn't as hard to my lungs as actual smoke.

MAOI just make the addiction stronger, but are not the addiction themselves.

Does Juul contain those? Because I know plenty of people who quit smoking cigarettes for Juul and get lots of cravings towards that instead.

Unlike liquid-based vapes which use pure nicotine, Juul pods contain a tobacco leaf extract. I don’t have a source to confirm, but I find it likely they do contain MAOIs.

"Two young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs set out to rid the world of smoking with an incredible new product."

This seems a little like revisionist history? Apologies for awful forbes link, but it has some of their early ads: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2018/11/16/t...

I don't really hold a strong position on this issue, but it seems obvious their early ads targeted high school kids (and it worked). It was only later after their success (and regulators started looking at them) that they focused on smoking cessation and being an alternative for smokers as their purpose (rather than getting non-smokers to vape).

That plus it came out after the success of their weed vaporizor Pax which they made first right? I don't really know if nicotine vapes are dangerous or not, almost certainly better than tobacco - but I don't buy that it was about switching smokers to vaping early on. Maybe the podcast gets into it more and I'm over indexing on that subtitle. If so, I'd be happy to read your reply.

I listened to the entirety of this podcast and felt it to be friendly to Juul to the extent of being sort of bizarre. The host routinely brought up criticisms of Juul but then immediately dismissed them and moved on without further analysis---seemingly never even entertaining the idea that Monsees and Bowen could have been complicit in their ignorance of underage abuse, and much less that they might have been intentionally deceptive (which seems, to me, like a pretty strong possibility). Juul was repeatedly depicted as the victim in the whole thing.

Even odder, the podcast makes it sound like Monsees and Bowen invented the concept of the electronic cigarette completely from scratch, making no mention of the decades-long history they have in China. It's completely possible that they were unaware of the Chinese precedent and working independently (I feel like e-cigarettes in the Chinese style had started to appear in the US, although not yet taken off, by 2007 when they launched Pax but I could be remembering this wrong), but the host not mentioning it at all was another factor that made the podcast feel very shallowly researched and, in general, like a puff piece for Juul.

Further, the podcast makes it sound like the popularity of Pax for cannabis, which was not yet legal anywhere at the time, was unforeseen and unintentional. Maybe this is true, but it strikes me as a bit odd as I have never known the Pax brand to be associated with anything but cannabis, and my first exposure to it was around 2009. I would be very interested in digging into old Ploom/Pax advertising around this point. I don't begrudge Pax as a cannabis product but this just felt like another questionable and self-advantageous claim by Pax/Juul that the podcast just took for granted.

I don't necessarily know that I'd allege the podcast to have been bought off by Juul or something, but it very much had the feeling of a newspaper article about a company with that company's own press release as the sole source. I think it may have just been lazy rather than malicious per se.

Yeah the Pax was obviously for cannabis and the wink wink copy on the website about tobacco or “herbs” was just what everyone did back then prior to recreational legalization. If they’re not acknowledging that in the podcast I’d have little trust in the rest of it.

Yes, it was made by the same people who invented the Pax. I don't think they'd ever come out and say it but I would fully believe they were just looking for a better way to consume nicotine, in that the Pax was supposed to be a better way to consume THC. I think they probably just wanted to make a better cigarette using technology. Whether it was used by people trying to quit or people who had never tried before, I suspect was orthogonal to their cause, though I believe they were themselves smokers.

What you are doing is a core tenant of survival training. When in a situation that seems doomed (ie: lifeboat in the ocean, lost deep in the woods, etc), you don't focus on what will happen tomorrow, you just do what you need to do to survive the next 4 hours. You repeat this over and over until things get better.

Check out the book "Deep Survival" by Laurence Gonzales if interested.

Same thing in endurance sports racing (running, cycling, etc.). Mentally break the race down into little pieces. Just suffer for one more minute. Make it to the next mile marker.

Hah! When I’m doing reps at the gym, I’ll count down the Fibonacci sequence, so a set of ten I’d count five, then three, then two. Works like a charm when each subset is “easier” than the previous one.

It’s good advice. Although from my experience this is truly automatic and effortless when you’re extremely hungry, tired, and cold. I went through USAF SERE school and you have little opportunity to start worrying about tomorrow, or even 4 hours from now really ;P

In a similar vein I "stopped drinking" 18 months ago with no set goal for how long (but one year was a desirable milestone) and I sometimes say I "quit drinking" but really it's more about deciding not to do it for a while and then not deciding to do it again. Maybe I will some day but I actually don't desire it right now and I do like having this long time period "18 months no alcohol" so if I drank it would reset that. Which some day may be fine, but it's nice for now.

I also quit smoking in my 20's. I succeeded by focusing on how physically bad a cigarette made me feel. There was some kind of tobacco buzz but also an obvious depressant effect and it made me feel like shit. During the period I was quitting I would sometimes smoke a little more to make myself feel physically worse so that I would be reminded of this bad feeling and want to avoid it. It worked!

Interesting and probably highly effective. Immediately reminds me of a study where they got people exercising to focus only on the track ahead of them and only on the finish line, in some trial to the point of putting horse-blinker like glasses on them. Alternate sessions were to widen their focus to the entire workout.

Those who were in the narrowed focus trials ran on average 22% faster and simultaneously felt that their effort was subjectively 17% easier.

Similar advice I read from a former Navy Seal about their training sessions and in particular "Hell Week". He succeeded by narrowing his focus to 'just last until the next meal - they have to feed us every 6 hours', and he made it through, but many in his entering class did not, and he noticed that they were overwhelmed by 'how am I going to last this whole week?'.

You just narrowed your focus to the next 5min, and succeeded - congratulations!

I was a heavy smoker once (2+ packs per day for 15 years) and stopped abruptly. My motivation was simply that being a smoker was horrible. Everywhere I went the only thing I could think about was, where are the tobacco shops, when do they close, do I have enough cigarettes with me to get me through the day, or the evening, etc.

(Also I smoked so-called "brown tobacco" which meant I couldn't really ask other people for a smoke -- I could, but I strongly disliked more mainstream cigarettes; so I had to take care of my own supply).

The first two weeks of quitting were horrible, it was as if somebody constantly pulled on my arms to elongate them; in fact during those weeks I stayed in bed most of the time. (In a way it was so horrible and strange that it seemed kind of enjoyable; the pain transforms into something bizarre where you're a kind of "pure pain" that isn't, somehow, insufferable.)

And then after those two weeks the carving was gone, and I was free.

It's been 20 years since I quit and I have never wanted to smoke again; I still remember vividly how painful it was to quit, and this is an excellent deterrent to wanting to start again.

I think you're on to something. Similarly, doing this one exercise, one more time can be easy, but committing to a lifetime of it? No way.

> When the urge came up, I put it off five minutes.

I smoked for 13 years and stopped 13 years ago. I have had maybe two or three cigarettes since. I started by gradually cutting down then after a few weeks adopted this exact strategy. When the urge arose I just waited a few minutes and it usually pass. It's also worth noting that in addition to the nicotine addiction, I had to deal with built up habits and being used to having a cigarette in my mouth but after a few months these went away.

To this day I have the occasional craving but these pass much quicker (generally in a few seconds) than they did 13 years ago.

Looking back, it was fairly easy for me but I understand that it's not the same for everyone. My dad quit after 2 decades of smoking, he had vomiting spells and chills for weeks. I know of at least one person who had quit for a decade, had one cigarette and is now back to regularly smoking.

”he had vomiting spells and chills for weeks”

These are effects of MAOI withdrawal. Nothing to do with nicotine.

I’ve just about had it with the half-truths surrounding tobacco, coffee and alcoholic beverages. MAOIs from the Harmala alkaloid family as well as various flavonoid families are prevalent in all of our ”legal highs” in copious quantities, yet all we ever hear is ”nicotine”, ”caffeine” and ”alcohol”.

Could you please cite peer reviewed work that supports your repeated assertions about the role of MAOIs in cigarrete addiction?

This works pretty well for establishing an exercise routine as well. I wouldn't feel like exercising, but I could convince myself to exercise for 10 min. What's 10 min?

Then once you hit the 10 min mark, what's another 10 min?

Is there anything you picked up instead when you had the urge. I’ve never tried quitting, but I have ceased for up to a week (visiting family, etc.) and get incredibly agitated and fidgety after a day or so.

If you really want one, have one, don't fight it.

Just ensure that every time the urge comes up, you say to yourself:

"Do I really want this cigarette RIGHT NOW, or can I have it in five minutes?"

If you cannot wait then have it.

In five minutes time when. the deferral has expired, ask the same question.

Don't fight yourself, agree with yourself.

And don't attack yourself for making the decision to have one - just ensure that the next cigarette gets the same question.

This process might happen hundreds of times but don't worry about it, just keep asking the question.

It's a long series of very short term decisions.

It doesn't work if you have a rule in place that you cannot have a cigarette - this approach means you can, so your subconscious can relax - you are not depriving it of what it wants.

A different perspective is that it's decoupling the impulse from the reward. Very powerful at taming these kinds of habits.

i find this utter hogwash. Nicotine is physically addictive and tolerance builds up. When one that has been smoking moderately to heavily for years quits smoking, one goes through days of physical withdrawal.

These "simple tricks" are just another way to fail. You can postpone 1-2-3-4 cigarettes, but eventually you will smoke 4 in a row to get the nicotine high with the intensity and duration your body is used to.

Which is why the patch is effective, it helps with physical withdrawal. These jedi mind tricks don't.

Thanks, will try this out soon (with a different addiction)

The book that had an amazing impact on lots of friends who smoked is Easy Way by Allen Carr: https://www.amazon.com/Allen-Carrs-Easy-Stop-Smoking/dp/0615...

(No affiliation).

Friends report there are no lasting urges, no mental blocks, no inner demons etc. etc.

reddit testimonials: https://www.reddit.com/r/stopsmoking/comments/odyv6/anyone_t...

There is nothing, you will have to run the gauntlet of addiction. It isn't pleasant but in the end it is incredibly rewarding. You're basically given your life/freedom back. Quit a 2 pack a day habit cold turkey back in 2009. These days I get nauseous when I'm around smokers and can't believe I was once one of them.

Anecdotal, but things get much much easier after like 2 months. The first few weeks are the worst.

I gave up smoking 20 years ago. The one thing that helped was that I moved for work which means I had no smoker friends to party with. I picked up on my swimming and running to pass the time. Luckily the exercise and lack of company to smoke made quitting relatively painless for me. At the time of quitting I had probably smoked for around 8 years and had a 1 pack/day habit of Marlboro reds.

I agree with the parent comment. I took it one at a time and in about a month felt no compulsion to smoke.

I inadvertently did the same with sugar in my tea. Where I worked we each prepared our own tea and coffee from our own supplies. I forgot to replenish my jar of sugar and eked it out by putting less and less in each cup. For some reason that I can no longer remember I forgot to fill it up so of course it eventually was empty. But by then I was taking so little sugar that it was a small step to taking none at all.

For me the catalyst for change was a period of personal transformation fueled by psychedelics. Another “addiction” I gave up during this time was meat. It’s been 20 years and I’ve been fortunate not to have any desire for either.

I want to acknowledge how incredibly difficult it can be to give up smoking and express my support to all of you who are trying. I hope you find your path.

This is interesting. It reminds me both of a common piece of advice for meditating ("If you feel overwhelmed by the task of paying attention to your breath for X minutes, just ask yourself if you can pay attention to just one breath, then just one more, etc.") and procrastination. Two things that I don't normally associate with each other.

Quitting by induction...

By procrastination, really.

Interesting. I quit smoking in a similar fashion. Actually, I still consider my self a smoker. I can have a cigarette whenever I want to. But I chose not to.

It helped me finally stop trying to quit. And just chose not to smoke.

> I "stopped smoking" about 20 years ago. I'm still a smoker but just haven't had one for a long time.

Nicely put, and congrats. Your health says thank you.

This advice works excellent for natural procrastinators! But sadly, does little for other personality types.

You can stand anything for 10 seconds!

https://youtu.be/xSX3KG1hisk