Comment by treve | Hacker News Reader

Comment by treve | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com