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Wellness Wednesday for March 26, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Should I develop a nicotine addiction?

For a while now, I've been curious about nicotine. Smoking, of any kind, is something I've always despised: It smells bad, blackens the teeth, has a terrible risk profile, and almost all my experiences with it have been unpleasant (I had a cigar recently, and it cleared the bar of "I'm not hating it"). Nonetheless, I've always been interested in the "good parts" of nicotine, and with its resurgent popularity, it's more available than ever, in several forms: gum, tablet or whatever that thing swedish people use is.

I am, however, slightly worried about giving it a try: I know myself to be quite a compulsive consumer with a few things (most notably food and candy, but also internet forum discussions), and I fear I might develop dependency. Have any of you guys tried it? Did it make you feel noticably different? Was it easy to quit? Any suggestions regarding dosage?

I smoke cigars, generally about once a week when the weather is nice during the summer. The nicotine is a pleasant part of the experience and that usage pattern does not cause any apparent compulsion to consume more. I probably wouldn't bother with a product that was just nicotine without the tobacco, but I'm also just not much of a drug guy in general.