Attempting cold turkey after 8+ years smoking a pack a day

Longtime Reddit user, first time poster! Also longtime smoker, first time quitter who just set TOMORROW as my quit date. Feeling slightly excited, but mostly, and overwhelmingly, anxious, uneasy, afraid.

I’ve been heavily addicted to nicotine for the last 8+ years. I say nicotine, because regretably, I developed a fast & ill-fated relationship with nicotine as a result of my summer Juul addiction in 2017. I’ll set the stage- one summer, some hundreds of 20mg pods, and the child of 2 smokers with a broader family history of addiction. Uh oh! In the matter of weeks I went from having smoked 1 or 2 drunken cigarettes, to consuming the amount of nicotine in 2, sometimes even 3, packs of cigarettes on a daily basis.

At the end of that summer, I moved to Ireland. At that point, I didn’t even really consider that I was addicted to nicotine, which is laughable in retrospect. Ireland didn’t stock Juul products at that time, so I vowed to leave my USB-stick vaping days behind & didn’t really think about it in too great of depth.

(In the style of SpongeBob) 12 hours later… I started feeling horrible— banging headache and extremely depressed, irritable, anxious, moody. My naivety around my nicotine addiction left me blindsided by the withdrawal symptoms I began experiencing. From the moment I picked up the Juul, I never really set it down over a 3 month period. Less than 24 hours after setting it down, I bought my first pack of cigarettes. And the rest was history.

My heavy vaping transitioned into heavy smoking quite seamlessly. I began smoking cigarettes daily. Within weeks I was smoking close to a pack of day. While I smoked when sober, I always smoked the most when I drank. Unfortunately, I drank quite a lot.

To make an already long story short-ish, at 18 I realised I was addicted to nicotine. I went on to smoke cigarettes/rollies for the last 8+ years & counting. I rolled my own for many years, but have been smoking predominantly cigarettes for the last 2+ years, about 1-1.5 packs per day. At 19, I realised I was an alcoholic. I think I always was an alcoholic, from when I had my first drink. It took a bit of time to realise my drinking behaviours weren’t healthy or safe, but even after I did, I went on to drink and blackout and piss the fucking bed, etc., etc. for the next 6+ year. Recently at 25, I quit drinking for the fourth time. I’m taking it one day at a time, and those days have now totalled to 564 days and counting without a drink.

My alcoholism is a story for another day and an another subreddit, however I mention this because for many years, up until I celebrated my 1 year sobriety from alcohol, I never thought I would or could quit smoking. Not unless I quit drinking, and even then, for some reason quitting cigarettes seemed like an insurmountable task. In many ways it still does.

I consider this to be my first time really attempting to quit smoking. I’ve tried to cut down in the past, only smoking tobacco when I’m drunk or in spliffs. As I mentioned, I drank a lot. I also smoked a lot of spliffs, and was infamous among non-tobacco smoking friends for the heavy handed fill of tobacco in my joints. All that to say, I haven’t been off nicotine since the day I started.

I said the rest was history, and for a long time I really thought it was. But I was able to quit drinking through taking it day by day. Recently had my first ever significant break from smoking weed and took it day by day and felt far better than expected.

I’ve also fallen madly in love with the most magical & beautiful woman in the world, my literal soulmate, and want to share the rest of my life with her. I really want it to be a long & happy life. Probably due to a combination of long term mental illness, untreated (at the time) ADHD, and substance use disorder, I was never looking too far into the future. But I am now. Beginning ADHD meds & quitting drinking have been life changing over the last 1.5-2 years, especially in terms of my overall mental health and allowing me to think ahead and plan. All of this, COMBINED with the love I feel for this woman & how deeply I want to be little old ladies together, crafting in our rocking chairs with fully functional respiratory systems & a lifetime of memories, laid the ground work for me to even think about quitting.

Okay that was not short in the slightest, but even if no one reads this, it was incredibly cathartic to write this all out haha. HOWEVER, if anyone does read this, I’m welcoming ANY AND ALL TIPS for quitting smoking. I’m going to start tomorrow. Attempting cold turkey. I’ll consider tapping in some NRT if it gets really rough out here. Any advice, words of encouragement, solidarity, etc. will be most welcome.

I am so fucking scared but will take it one day at a time!!! :)