i don’t know how many teens are on this app , i guess this could apply to adults as well but i know…
By: Willow Hilbert
Tags: Teens, Addiction

i don’t know how many teens are on this app , i guess this could apply to adults as well but i know i’m not the only person that has this struggle. Your friend hands you a vape and tells you to ‘just try it’ and you hit it once, maybe twice. it’s not a big deal at the moment because ‘ill never get addicted, i have control.’ you like the feeling, the ‘buzz’ so you hit your friends whenever they have one around, and then you by maybe one or two because why not? you can stop whenever you want. two years later you have cant go a day without nicotine and your spending more money than you should to get some. it’s still not a big deal because you can ‘quit whenever you want’ plus you don’t feel any different so it can’t be harming your body, right? you don’t realize it’s having an effect on your well being until you can’t go up a flight of stairs without loosing your breath. but you can still quit whenever you want so you blow it off, until you don’t have control over your need for it anymore, it becomes a necessary part of your life. at this point it’s already too late. you realize you never should of started in the first place, what good is it doing you anyway? wether you were peer pressured into it or you just wanted to try it because you ‘know you can’t get addicted’ eventually we all come to the realization that we need to stop. it IS an addiction. but when something becomes such a regular part of your routine how do you just quit? when you feel like you physically need it how can you just put it down one day and stop? theres many different approaches to this and different methods work for everyone, but some people can’t find a way that works for them. personally i started september of 2016 thinking it wasn’t a big deal. i thought i had the self control to keep myself from getting to into it. it’s december of 2020 and i currently have 135 dead disposables laying in a box in my room, as well as 2 juuls and about 50 empty pods. i, like many other young impressionable teens got sucked into an addiction because i KNEW i would ‘never get addicted’. i’ve played volleyball since the 7th grade and ran track for maybe 2–3 years. i wasn’t in the best shape but i was pretty active. the last volleyball practice i went to i passed out 30 minutes in because my lungs couldn’t keep up with the exercise. i used to run a mile in about 7 minutes (that isn’t super impressive i know). it takes me about 20 minutes to finish a mile now, with repeated stops in between to catch my breath. i realized i was addicted and needed to stop about a month ago when i hadn’t had any nicotine in abt 2 days and i was quite literally freaking out looking through all my old disposables to see if any of them would hit one last time. since then i’ve approached many different quitting methods with none of them really working out for me. although i have not successfully quit (yet) i have learned a few tricks to help at least decrease my desire for vaping and i’ve definitely made a lot of progress. one of them is to keep myself extremely busy with different things, for example more hours at work, where i made sure to leave it at home or in my car so i wouldn’t be tempted to hit it on break or in the bathroom. This really goes for anytime i leave the house, when i would usually keep it tucked in my bra, the waistband of my pants, or at least in a bag, i make sure to leave ANY nicotine devices i have at home. at first it was difficult, i would try to get home as soon as possible so i could hit my vape, but now it kind of slips my mind and i forget about it until i get back and see it on my bed or dresser. it’s not much i know but it is progress. another thing i’ve found slightly helpful to decrease my use of vapes at home is when i’m doing something (studying, chores, really anything that can take more than 30 minutes ) i tell myself i am not allowed to touch it until i’m 100% done, which if it’s a 5 minute chore like sweeping the living room or vacuuming a small area won’t really do much, but i easily spend an hour or two at a time studying for tests or doing something like watching a movie with my family then that’s another hour or two a day i go without any nicotine. not much it’s a big step for someone who used to NEED it on me at all times. any addiction can be hard to over come, and the small steps really matter. my goal is to soon find ways to make quitting much easier, and help people that are in similar situations as i am.