[video available on spotify] for the last few years, i’ve been trying to quit nicotine. i know it sounds cliche, but it is one of the hardest things i’ve ever done in my life. unfortunately, i’m here today with the story of my relapse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Why is quitting nicotine so difficult?
For the last few years, I've been trying to quit nicotine. And I know it sounds cliche, but it has been one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. Like, when they tell you in those anti-smoking, anti-vaping commercials that nicotine is incredibly addictive and incredibly challenging to quit... They are not exaggerating to prevent you from smoking or vaping, okay? It's true.
It is 1000% true. As a young person, when you become introduced to the concept of nicotine, you're like, how addicting can it really be? It can't be that addicting. No, it is. It is. And when you read the statistics that are like quitting smoking is impossible. Yeah, it makes sense. Checks out. My experience is aligning with the data.
It has been one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. And I know some of you are familiar with my nicotine addiction because I've made quite a few podcast episodes on it. I haven't made one in a while, and I was really hoping that the next episode I made about nicotine would be my story of successfully quitting.
I wanted more than anything for this episode right now to be my story of quitting successfully, how I did it, how you can do it too. But unfortunately, I'm here today with a much less honorable story, and that is the story of my relapse. I was doing so good. I was so close. And then boom, back to it. Vape in pocket. My vape is in my pocket right now. I'm back to square one. And it's so mortifying.
I feel like a failure. I feel weak. I feel ashamed. It sucks to sit here right now and tell the story. But I know from my experience trying to quit thus far that this is an important story because quitting anything is not linear. And to expect it to be linear is to be setting yourself up for disappointment.
And I think my expectation for this experience to be linear led me to feeling the negative feelings that I'm feeling now. And I think they're a bit too harsh because I really thought this wouldn't happen again. In a weird way, a perfect, gorgeous, beautiful story of quitting is less realistic. And I think for those of you out there who are trying to quit nicotine, I think it's comforting.
I hope it's comforting to hear that the experience is not linear and that's okay and that's normal and you're not alone. Let me tell you how this happened. So I think in August of last year, I made the decision, I'm done, okay? And at that time, I wasn't vaping. That wasn't my form of nicotine. I was using the Zin, which is the little nicotine pouches that you put under your lip.
And I think what really inspired me to quit was in California, they banned the product. And I was like, all right, you know what? This is the universe being like, Emma, it's time. Stop playing around. It's time. What you've been using just got banned. That's not a great sign for your health and well-being. You should just be done altogether. And so I did it. I actually did it.
I threw everything away. I had no nicotine in the house and I just went cold turkey. Let me tell you, the first month was one of the darkest months of my life. It wasn't, okay, actually, it wasn't one of the darkest. I've had darker months, okay? But it was a dark, dark, dark month. For whatever reason, for me, quitting nicotine is incredibly turbulent.
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