1 Week No Nicotine Checkpoint
Well it's been 8 days now that I have been off. I've been using nicotine for 9 years now but this feels like the best attempt I've ever had. In my previous quitting attempts I always liked reading others posts for tips and things to try myself and thought I would share as well.
I've tried cold-turkey, gum, tapering, etc. to no success. This time around I tried the patch. My daily use has been around 60-70mg I would reckon with pouches/vapes, I did one week of 7mg in which day 1 and 2 were horrible but then it leveled out.
After 7 days on the 7mg patch I stopped nicotine. Day 1 was not nearly as bad as any attempt I've had in the past doing cold turkey. I will say I've been using a 0mg vape as well which I will stop of course, but my main goal is to be clear of nicotine.
I think what helped for me was the patch soft-launching quitting cold turkey. One thing I always struggled with was tapering when trying to quit, the idea of having a lower nicotine baseline to quit from is very appealing to me but I could never do it with my own self control, so going to the lowest patch level for a week forces you to lower the level of nicotine that you're quitting from.
The other thing for me mentally was having a 0mg nicotine vape. As I said this is just to help me get over the nicotine but it's been super helpful for me with the whole mentality of it. Whether I used pouches, vapes, or cigs I found I would use them without actually craving them which is why my mg usage was so high, at first I found myself hitting this 0mg the exact same way I would hit my nicotine salt vape which is kinda crazy to think about how much nicotine that is.
Anyway, hope this helps someone out there, appreciate this community, reading peoples success stories and temporary setbacks has been really helpful for me as well on this journey.