Are You Trying to Stop Smoking by Switching to Vaping?
WHY AM I VAPING SO MUCH MORE THAN I WAS SMOKING?
If you’re someone who started vaping in order to stop smoking, you may have found yourself vaping way more than you were smoking in the first place.
In my clinical smoking cessation practice, I have many smokers who tell me stories about how they started vaping to “be healthier”. But now, instead of their former 10 a day habit with cigarettes, they got hooked on Juul or the Puff Bar. They tell me that they’re waking up and vaping all morning, hiding in their office vaping, even waking up in the middle of the night to vape.
DOES THAT SOUND FAMILIAR?
If it does, let’s start with the question...why are people vaping?
The nicotine part of vaping is very powerful but the force that drives people to vape way more than they smoke is dopamine. And dopamine is the reward center of the brain.
Nicotine is part of it, but the majority of that agitated feeling you get is dopamine. Once you understand that, you can see that the key to gaining control over nicotine is in your brain.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY TO QUIT VAPING?
What a lot of people don’t understand is that when you try to quit vaping, there are chemicals sucralose and other sweeteners in the vaping liquid. So, when you vape, your insulin levels go up. And when you try to stop vaping, your body has to go through the process of trying to regulate your blood sugar and insulin levels. This is something that a lot of people confuse with nicotine withdrawal.
That’s because it can be an intense feeling. It’s basically like going too long without food. You get agitated, grouchy, hangry. And in our brains, when we stop vaping, they start to freak out and think we’re withdrawing from something. And that adds to the issues.
THE TRUTH ABOUT VAPING
Vaping isn’t safer than smoking.But as studies are being done, and we’re seeing the results, it just isn’t safer. And it’s definitely as addictive as cigarettes, if not more so, because you’re able to vape more often than you were able to smoke a cigarette, thanks to it being more accepted than cigarettes these days.
YOU CAN BECOME FREE
A lot of my clients who are former vapors, happy, healthy, former vapors say when their head's in the right place, stopping vaping is really not that bad. You CAN stop vaping and it can be a powerful experience, an engaging experience and a warrior like experience. But it doesn't have to be a frightening experience or an experience that you can think about negatively.
I think the more negatively we think about it, the more it makes our psychological experience of it fearful, anxiety ridden, and unenjoyable versus experiencing it as a powerful and positive experience “I'm really healing my body. This is awesome.”
AGITATION VERSUS ANXIETY
I get clients saying, well, I vape because I feel anxious and it calms me, but I want it to remind you that because of that agitation created by the dopamine brain when we vape, then we are not anxious but agitated because our brain expects us to puff on the vape. When we vape we keep our brain in a constant state of agitation expecting the next vaping event--when we vape it momentarily relieves the agitation which may feel like it’s calming you down but it’s not--it’s just keeping you in the same agitation cycle. Many smokers and vapers express that when they stop smoking or vaping they feel so much more calm!
SOME WAYS TO BEGIN THE PROCESS OF BECOMING VAPE FREE
MAKE PERIODS OF TIME VAPE-FASTING ZONES
I would suggest if you want to cut back on juuling or puffing I would start by creating periods of time where vaping is just absolutely not an option for you. Because when it is not an option in your brain, your mind doesn't agitate you for it. So one thing I might suggest is you leave your Juul or Puff Bar at home when you go to work and practice being a non vaper from the time you go to work until the time you come home at night.
Also give yourself a vaping window of an hour or so in the evening and then you put your vape in your car for the night and you come back inside and don't have it by your bedside or you can charge it in a room that's far away from your bedroom. So that you from the time you watch TV at night until the time you wake up in the morning, it's a vape free zone and, and you're looking at it as not like, “I'm trying not to vape” because then your mind will focus on what is missing. But you want to focus on “ I'm vape free for the night” so that you're focusing on what you're doing rather than what you are not doing, which is much more calming and powerful to your mind. Like your vape ”fasting”8:00 PM until 8:00 AM in the morning.
When you see that you actually really can go for sustained periods of time when it's not an option and you start to train your brain watching TV,as a non vaper versus needing to vape all the way through watching TV.
BECOME VAPE FREE--DON’T SUBSTITUTE FOR THE VAPE
When you started vaping it created a void in your brain which then needed to be filled by more vaping. Vaping creates the voids--it doesn’t fill them. So if you substitute, it's still giving the vape power. So no substitutions, you just want to be vape free. Okay? And you know, like in that, not an option zone. Oh, don't start chewing on the sunflower seeds. That's so 1990s.
Don't go to Whole Foods and get one of those fake cigarettes or vaping devices with herbal stuff in them. You're better than that. Honestly, those things take your money away from you and they take your pride away from you. You went, would you want your friends seeing you puffing away on that thing? Heck no, don't do it. You're better than that.
FOCUS ON YOUR FREEDOM NOT YOUR HEALTH
Focus on your freedom from vaping rather than on being healthy.. I know you know vaping is bad for you. And has that helped you stop? No, it just makes you want to vape more. Our mind thinks we are immortal especially before the age of 40--so the healthy reasoning doesn’t mean much to the part of your brain that vapes--your subconscious. BUT your freedom is very powerful to your subconscious mind. That is something that's a higher level ambition.
Our freedom, being powerful and out in the world, being in control. Come on folks. We'd like to be in control, right? And when our Juul or Puff Bar owns us-- we lose it and we're running around just like a toddler screaming because they've lost their blanky, you know, are we really in control? I don't think so. Right? So we want to be free. We want to own the world and we want to own ourselves. And so focus on your desire to be free, not your desire to be healthy, because that will only get you very little distance.
READY FOR MORE?
Okay. So I hope this has been helpful for you. If you are intrigued by, you know, this idea that you could really actually stop vaping and it could be a powerful, amazing experience. I want to invite you to my free online masterclass called how to stop smoking or vaping without withdrawal, cravings or weight gain.
In this class I get into a lot of super cool stuff. We look at how to shift your mind so that you can stop vaping or smoking without any withdrawl, cravings. And we look at the mental secrets that help you eliminate those roadblocks so that you can go and throw that dang Juul or Puff Bar into the ocean and stop giving Phillip Morris your money and take back your power and your freedom and your health and declare being nicotine free for the rest of your life. Wouldn't that be super awesome?
Well, join me. Sign up here.
Take care. Have an awesome day. And I hope to see you in class.
