Electronic Cigarettes Can be Utilised as a Good Smoking Cessation Help
Giving up smoking is hard. Every smoker knows it, every non smoker hasn’t got a clue. So this one’s for all you smokers out there. How are you planning to quit the tobacco and not go back to it? I bet you’ve tried a thousand times and succeeded for months without ever thinking you’d get back on it, until that one day you were bored, or drunk, or stressed, or just smelled the good smell of a toasted Marlboro… See, here’s the thing. Without electronic cigarettes or something similar you’ll never make it.
As a man who knows, take this from me. The electronic cigarette is the only thing I have ever found that comes close to replacing tobacco. And at the end of the day that’s what we are all trying to do. Doesn’t matter if we try to do it with nicotine patches, or gum, or hypnotism or positive thoughts or exercise or a new hobby. Addiction leaves a massive hole in your life when you no longer use the substance you were addicted to.
Sorry, that should be “are addicted to”. First rule of kicking any habit: once an addict, always an addict. So let’s get our facts straight before we even open our electronic cigarettes. We are addicts and we always will be, slaves to a chemical change that happened in our brains when we sucked down all that nicotine laden smoke for the first time.
The electronic cigarette is the first honest quit smoking devoice I have ever come across. It recognises that, as addicts, we associate all sorts of things with the nicotine hit – in the same way that an alcoholic associates the warm fluorescent lights of beer signs with his or her hit.
In order to get over the smoking habit, we first have to withdraw from it. Not easy buy suddenly switching from cigarettes to boring bits of gum and medical patches that look weird and don’t give you the “five minutes out from real life” thing you get with real fags.
Electronic cigarettes let you take those five minutes away from the world and still be giving up smoking. The electronic cigarette allows you to continue associating with all the stuff your addiction has bound inextricably with satisfaction – a cigarette; a glowing coal; smoke – and still not actually be smoking.
As a halfway house and as a long term cessation device, the electronic cigarette works where nothing else does. By letting you embrace your addiction and the fact that you are trying to get over it, rather than by making you ashamed of it. Yes, electronic cigarettes might well be about treating your addiction medically, just like patches and gum. But they don’t make you feel stupid or less than human. Rather, they make you feel that you have been given a choice – or even better, that you have made a choice to take control of your health.
E cigs are more likely to help you quit in the long term, firstly because you can stop on the electronic cigarette forever and technically not be smoking any more (the real damage done to you by cigarettes is done by all the additives, tar and chemicals, not by the nicotine); and second because if you desire to stop inhaling any kind of nicotine, then electronic cigarettes let you keep going without the bad stuff, until you feel strong enough to put down that white tube altogether.
