Quitting Nicotine (vape vs. pouches) cold turkey after 12 years of daily use. My experience and thoughts.

So I've been in vaping since 2013, just when The vaping became popular we had all this huge box modes, atomizers, we were mixing our own setups, liquids, making our own coils, finding the right cotton, etc. We had mechanical Vapes that could short-circuit if you are not careful and blow up in your hands lol

Back then vaping saved me, because I finally quit smoking and I even made some money by creating my own recipes of liquids, combining different flavors, using websites like "eliquid recipes".

It was a fun time, but now vaping is just buying disposable Vapes with a liquid that was made in China by God knows whom and God knows with what ingredients.

And also what changed is that salt nicotine became popular and people just stopped using organic nicotine. And salt nicotine is much more addictive, I tested it by myself.

I had two kinds of liquids in front of me with salt nicotine and with organic nicotine and I never really wanted to use organic nicotine. I always preferred salt one because it gave me such a bigger buzz.

And when I switched from salt to organic, I felt like I'm quitting. I literally felt the cravings for salt nicotine while using organic nicotine liquid.

Then I finally switched to nicotine pouches. At first, I thought that it's a great decision, I I'm a runner. I run marathons yearly, so I thought this will help me...meh

The problem with the pouches and with the addictive personality like I have, is that you literally can have it in your mouth all day everyday. You can even fall asleep with it, which of course I did.

After 2 years of using nicotine pouches (Velo), I realized that I'm feeling pretty tired all the time, and I counted. How much total nicotine do I consume per day.

And I realized that it was much higher than when I vaped. And I felt that. I never had a break from nicotine so that I would start to crave it with pouches because I always had a pouch in my mouth in the shower, while working, while walking. I remember even once at the gym...

And then when I switched back from pouches to vaping I felt that, yeah, I had much more nicotine in my system total when I was using pouches.

So, and one week ago I realized that my reward system is so messed up that my body does not understand how to produce dopamine by itself probably, and I think I became kind of resistant to any exogenous nicotine, I just felt bad and had a litteral panic attack after using pouch or a vape

And I'm like damn, I think it's time to give up on this because it doesn't give me anything in my life anymore.

I'm 1 week in, cold turkey, after 12 years of constant using of nicotine. I feel a lot of physical pain, but I understand that using again will not help, it's time to engrave in my personality that I'm not a nicotine dependant person.

Also consider that the longer you're on nicotine, the harder and the longer the cravings will be when quitting, so don't wait too long.

Just remember that nicotine is not a part of you and you will feel much more free and strong without it!

Stay safe everyone!