Comment by bbarn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbarn | Hacker News Reader

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I think as a culture (speaking here in the US) we've made quitting smoking out to be much harder than it actually is. One of the problems with this massive marketing campaign saying things like "You can quit with help!", etc.. is it's focusing on how difficult it's supposed to be.

After 20 years or so of being a smoker, I just decided I didn't want to be embarrassed about the way I smelled in elevators anymore, and quit. I was a competitive cyclist, despite being a smoker, so it wasn't helping me in those social situations either.

When I did stop, it was hard for about a single day. Irritation and not being sure what to do with your hands are the biggest "withdrawal" symptoms you'll have from quitting. If I'd known just how easy it is to stop, I would have 10 years prior.

So yes, listen to the above poster. It won't kill you to quit, it will kill you not to. If you honestly think you can't, it's a very simple problem to solve. There are really only three components to quitting. Nicotine addiction (easy to taper off with substitutes like gums, switching to vaping with decrementing nicotine levels, etc), Habit (the act of smoking, vaping/e-cigarettes/gum chewing/going on walks instead can help replace this) and the social pressure, which is usually smoking with your smoker friends or partner. Fun fact, they all want to stop too, even if they don't say so. Get them to quit with you, and if one or more refuse or abandon, ignore them and be selfish with your health.

All that said - the "pain" of cold turkey lasts a day and all the anecdata that I've collected seems to make it the most effective way to stop.

The difficulty of quitting varies a lot from person to person. I knew a couple back in the nineties, where one partner was able to quit using the patch. It just worked for him, and was reportedly not that difficult. He was done with tobacco immediately, and done with nicotine entirely within the month.

The other partner tried everything. Cold turkey, gradual reduction, patches, gum, change of location plus each of those, the works. As you can imagine given the domestic situation, she had exactly the right kind of support. None of it helped for over a decade. She was finally able to quit for good around 2010, and just a month later discovered that it was too late. Smoking had already given her the cancer that would end her life.

That said, this story kind of agrees with you. The partner who quit is still alive, and quite healthy. It might be easy, or it might be the hardest thing you've ever done. No matter how hard it is, though, lung cancer is even harder.

I guess the point I was trying to make wasn't to brag that it was so great and easy for me to do, it's to say that maybe we have culturally made it seem harder than it is. The more press it gets the more the belief is reinforced.

We have tobacco companies still cranking out the same garbage, almost with the attitude that they are forced to keep making this horrific product because people are hooked on it. They keep taking our money, apologetically, as they kill us.

You can't generalize from personal experience.

I smoked less than 3 packs of cigarettes in my life, stopped 15 years ago, and I still get cravings. Alcohol on the other hand has zero pull for me.

> stopped 15 years ago, and I still get cravings.

I stopped 6 years ago and have zero cravings. But I am curious how you define "cravings". Is it a physical sensation? Is it a mental "pull" when you see someone light one up?

It's associative. If I think about smoking I get a strong urge to do it. I stopped the first time I noticed the craving when seeing someone I did not know smoking and had the urge to bum a smoke.

Selection bias explains a lot of this.

Smoking is easy to quit for most people, and ridiculously hard for most smokers. When I was 17-20 50% of my friends smoked cigarettes and 80% of my friends quit by the time they were out of college a year or two without any problems. The remaining 20% of my friends couldn't quit for the world. They've tried quitting 20 different ways and never succeeded. I think the difference is some people are just wired for quitting smoking to be hard, but most people aren't. And the former population is way over represented among the smoking population.

I quit cold turkey after 7 years of smoking and I'm really glad that I did.

So with that I can say: the pain of quitting doesn't last only a day, it's good you didn't experience depression, I never had depression before or after that but I was clinically depressed for 3 weeks, I was apathetic about life in general, would wake up and not feel motivation to do anything, I'd do them anyway because it was a routine (eat, shower, work) but I really felt I'd never be happy as I was before.

It began to fade after the first week, during the second week I'd still feel urges to have a cigarette after a coffee or lunch, or just when I was bored. Third week was easier and by the end of the first month I was over the initial withdrawal symptoms.

But again: it's not "just a day", it's not really "omg, this is so easy, I'm over it". I had to constantly remind myself to NEVER had a drag, I got drunk during the third week and it was a pretty good feeling to deny a cigarette a friend wanted to share.

I was a 2 pack a day smoker during the last year of smoking, that might have impacted how much the withdrawal symptoms lasted or how strong they were.

It's on of the best things I've done in life, it also gave me a huge boost of confidence to do other stuff, my mindset nowadays is "I quit smoking cold turkey, I can do almost anything when I commit to".

It's not to say I didn't have urges.. doing something for almost 20 years, anything, is hard to let go of. But that nail biting aggravated irritableness lasted about a day for me.

Part of it may be that because of the whole bike racing thing, I had had several occasions where I'd been through weekend long periods I couldn't really get to smoke, or had to make due with patches or gums. I would also immediately light up when I got away from those friends. Those times, I'd also tried white-knuckling through weekends, been just as irritable, but it kept going for days like you said. When I mentally made the switch to not smoking anymore though, it was different, much easier than those 3 day weekends ever were.

I've heard lots of people say the same thing to me, once you do it, you know it's done. You're not just holding off for a few days or seeing how long you can go, you're just mentally done with it. Or maybe I just tricked myself and it worked. :)

Yeah that first time you quit is easy. Then something bad happens in life and you smoke because you're sad. Now you know how easy it is to quit so paradoxically you don't actually quit. You turn into a every-other-weekend smoker. Then after months or years of on-off smoking you realize that it's no longer as easy to quit as that first time. Now that one smoke is actually going to matter.

Also, nicotine has the highest capture rates of any drug (over 30%) and the third highest dependence rate (after heroin and cocaine). Startup founders with unbelievable amounts of determination may be able to just give it up and say it was "easy" (I said the same thing the first time I quit) but many people are not so gifted.

A lot of this impression about the difficulty of quitting smoking arose in the 1980s and 1990s. At the time, smoking was omnipresent and taken for granted. Nobody asked permission to light up any place. If you were a nonsmoker out with friends, you'd sometimes be left nearly alone by yourself when everyone went out to take a smoke break together. I never smoked, but I reckon that these social factors made it much, much more difficult to quit and to stay quit.

A critical mass was reached in the 2000s, though, and now the bulk of social pressure is on helping people quit and stay quit. Frequently it's the smoker who will be alone in the cold on their smoke break. & besides, we have effective smoking cessation drugs like Chantix (how my wife quit).

Back in the army you quickly realized that when taking a smoke break, the guy who didn't smoke was volunteered to fetch the truck or whatever. So you learned to smoke, to avoid extra duty.

The pain of cold turkey stopping and the hardship of quitting in general vary widely between individuals; and even to a lesser extent at different periods of time for the same individual, I think.

I once stopped smoking for ~3 weeks and I too found it easier than advertised, but not nearly as easy as you; also, the most problematic symptom for me was irritability (I was a complete irrascible bastard while stopping). And I know people for which it is very, very hard (cold sweats, migraines, etc. for two weeks).

14 year ex smoker here. 1 week of sweating hell and tic tacs followed by 3 months of hell and tic tacs and now I'm a few years free :) Not easy but just requires certitude.

As another anecdote, I've found that it takes about 3 days for me to pretty much lose all the physical addiction. That part is pretty easy as long as you can find a 3 day chunk of time in which you don't have stressful obligations and fill it with some activity (even if it's just binge-watching Star Trek or something).

After that, it's all habit. That takes closer to 3 weeks to break. Here I find it helps to create another habit, maybe buy a bunch of candy and eat one when you feel like a cigarette.

It's all very doable.

I've quit a couple of times (and I will do so again--for the last time, obviously) and my experiences are pretty much the same.

Best way I found to get over those 3 days is to be sick, drunk, hungover or all of those, coinciding with a strong urge to quit and running out of tobacco (or throwing it out) at the start of it.

And it's not easy. But it might be for some. But I wonder if the ones that can quit really easily are really the ones that need all this anti-smoking advertising, anyway? I mean they can just have a moment of clarity, realize the health risks and quit. Well good on you (I mean it). I'm glad there is all this negative pressure nowadays, means I will have to say "no" less often, and feel supported by it.

And even though I feel quitting is hard for me (compared to people who can smoke once every two months or so, or maybe never, just like that), when I hear these stories about people having physical withdrawal symptoms for weeks, that sucks, I feel for them and wish them strength too.

It's great that you had it easy. I didn't. When I quit nicotine about two years ago, I got kicked into a deep depression that lasted about 3 months (Worth noting: I had a history with depression). I developed panic attacks (and I had no previous history with those).

On the plus side:

1. I quit and stayed quit.

2. I'm mostly back to my old self. No more depression or panic attacks. Not now, and never again!

3. The whole experience cost me so much that I doubt I'll feel much temptation to use nicotine ever again.

I hear about this depression. I was the opposite. I felt artificially manic/high/excited about quitting I think. It wore off pretty quickly but I was super happy the first few weeks.

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