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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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It's been almost 4 years, and I've found out, to my detriment, that quitting cold turkey is awful. During the periods where I am unavoidably separated from my vape, the best alternative I've found is nicotine gum, which keeps the worst of the withdrawal away. Otherwise? Brother, I'm fiending. I get angry and cranky, it's the closest I've gotten to PMSing, or what I'd imagine roid rage kinda feels like.
Quitting isn't a very high priority for me, right now. Mostly because the physical health risks of vaping are minimal, close to negligible, going off memory of my attempts to review the literature. I still resent the expense, small as it is in absolute terms, plus the dependence itself. I've found that I can cut down on total intake by opting for weaker juice, but that has little effect on the parameters I care about, which are the money spent on the habit, and the addiction itself. It's not in the top 10 things about my life that I need to fix, though I'm grateful for the words of encouragement.
(I knew the theoretical health risks were small, when I initially started. I had avoided cigarettes like the plague itself for most of my life, but I was curious about vapes, which were hard to get in India. When my ex and I landed in London several years back, we ended up locked out of our Airbnb on a cold night in October. We went to a gas station grocery store for food, where I spotted a vape. I wanted to buy it, but my ex was a cancer survivor and was scared of the risk. Being the nerd I am, I sat her down, and we went through multiple systematic reviews while eating a chicken sandwich. Eventually, we concluded that the risks were minimal, especially the carcinogenic potential, and with her assent, I ended up buying one. Still, #BlameGwern.)
Tapering off with weaker juice is the way to go. Once you go from 3mg to 0mg it's a case of a few days of habitual puffing until you think "wait, why am I doing this?" and will stop very easily because there's no longer a deficit demanding to be replenished. After that there's no more addiction and no more expense. Problem solved.
This was exactly how I did it. The easiest part was the way 0mg juice gurgled all wrong.
But there have been crackdowns of all stupid kinds, and AIUI, the community of home-brew stores that would make you custom blend juices are not so much a thing anymore, so it may be harder to manage a gentle decline.
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