Asklemmy

Nicotine patches are what finally allowed me to quit. I quit over the course of probably about 5 years, trying all sorts of methods.

I went to vaping, that killed my dependence on the taste of cigarettes by changing the flavours constantly. I went from 12mg liquid to 3mg liquid, but then when I found nicotine salts went back to 10mg but lowered my intake significantly.

After a while, I moved to nicotine pouches, to get rid of the mental requirement to inhale nicotine (and also because I was no longer able to vape indoors). They're not the nicest things when you're starting, but they give a full hour of relief and it's very easy to keep track of how much you're using compared to vaping. I started on the stronger ones, and got myself to the point where I was having 9mg pouches 2-3 times per day.

Last New Year's Eve, I broke my leg rushing out of my house. The nurses at the hospital weren't sure if the pouches were going to be safe before the surgery (it's different dosage than they'd expect, and it's synthetic nicotine) so they put me on patches. And I found that they worked perfectly, so after being discharged I followed the process outlined on the box for them - 21mg/day for 2 weeks, 14mg/day for 1 week, 7mg/day for 1 week, although for that last one I stopped after four days, as my partner was going away for a few days and it made sense to get through the worst of the withdrawal when there was nobody around for me to be snappy with.

So yeah, the point of nicotine patches are to quit, but in my experience they were best as a "last step" rather than a 1 fix solution. Quitting an addiction is not easy, and there's absolutely no shame in taking a long time to do it. In all honesty, if I hadn't been sent to hospital that night, I'd still be shoving nicotine pouches in my face. At this point I've not had any nicotine for 11 weeks, and the cravings stop being so intense, but I do still get them after meals.

At every step in the process, it looked to those around me that whatever I was using was going to be used forever. I didn't set any lofty goals, I vaped for several years, used the pouches for a full year, and even in my own mentality thought that "if I do this the rest of my life, I'm okay with that". Usually moving onto the next method was because it was cheaper, not because I wanted to quit. But it's worked out in the end I guess.

Sorry for rambling, I kinda missed the point of the original post, but I'm hoping this story might help someone if they're trying to quit or at least help people reframe their idea on what quitting can look like.