I smoked about a pack a day but finally decided to quit when I was about 28. I wanted to spare my 1 year old from foul air & we wanted to buy a house. Cigarettes have always been taxed more heavily in Canada & when I did the math, I realized I was smoking one month's worth of mortgage payments. Nicorette gum had recently come on the market & I tried it off & on for about a year but failed each time. One thing that worked in my favour was that I had never bought my smokes by the carton even though it was much cheaper. A carton meant that quitting was always 2 weeks away while a single pack could always be my last. Finally, one Friday night, I ran out & told myself that was it. That Saturday I went through 8-10 pieces of Nicorette gum & never looked back. When you smoke, your body (kidneys I think) produces acid to counteract the effects of nicotine on the pH of your blood. Nicotine is an alkaloid & quitting tobacco causes metabolic acidosis, a.k.a. withdrawal. Like most people I drank coffee when I smoked. Quitting coffee was thought necessary to break the tobacco habit. This is where a science background helped me. Nicotine and caffeine are both alkaloids. So, quitting both at the same time makes withdrawal symptoms even worse. What I did was to chew a Nicorette every time I had a coffee While doing that, I fidgeted with a pencil, even putting it in my mouth & this helped break the mental connection between coffee & smoking. The gum & the coffee together helped me deal with withdrawal. The physical discomfort ended within a week but it took months to get over the psychological need. I got down to ½ a gum per day in about 2 months. Finally, 8 months later, my MD refused to renew my prescription. He said that a ½ gum, since the nicotine was absorbed only in my mouth, was barely equivalent to few puffs. The urge to smoke was still there though. So, I kept a pack of nicotine gum in my pocket, briefcase, desk & glove compartment. When the urge would came, I would reach for the gum. But, I would hesitate since the gum had an awful taste. Fortunately the urge would go away 30 seconds later. It took another year before the urge subsided almost entirely. Now, 40 years later, I am still smoke free after smoking through high school, university & 5 years of work. --Stephan Logan, Indigo Instruments PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/how-to-quit-smoking#stephan