Something Else

The evidence

Something Else is built from three techniques with long research records, arranged in a way that hasn't been tried before. This page says what the research shows, and — just as importantly — what we are not claiming.

The three techniques

Deciding in advance: if-then planning. Psychologists call these implementation intentions: instead of intending to "vape less", you decide exactly what you'll do when a specific situation arrives — if I sit down with my first coffee, then I make it in a different room. A meta-analysis of nearly a hundred studies found that forming these if-then plans has a medium-to-large effect on whether people actually do what they intended (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006, across 94 studies, d ≈ 0.65). Every morning experiment in the programme is an if-then plan for one of your moments.

Changing the setting a habit lives in. Habits are cued by context — the place, the time, the thing you were just doing — more than by decisions. Research on "habit discontinuity" shows that behaviour is easiest to change when its context changes, because the cue no longer fires the routine (Wood, Tam & Witt, 2005; Verplanken et al., 2008). The programme's experiments deliberately restructure the context of one moment at a time: the room, the order, the objects in reach.

Giving the urge something else to trigger. Habit-reversal research going back to Azrin & Nunn (1973) shows that replacing an unwanted action with a specific competing response — something incompatible you do when the urge itself arrives — outperforms simply trying to resist. That's why every experiment pairs a change to the moment with something particular to do when the pull shows up.

And one more, for the hardest ten minutes. The Ten Minutes screen is built on Elaborated Intrusion theory (Kavanagh, Andrade & May, 2005): cravings are sustained by mental imagery, and loading your visual working memory with a demanding task interrupts that imagery. Studies using visuospatial games found meaningful reductions in craving intensity while playing (Skorka-Brown et al., 2014, 2015). That's why Ten Minutes occupies your hands and eyes rather than asking you to breathe and feel calm.

Two definitions. A moment is a specific, recurring situation you vape in — the first coffee, the drive home, the wait for the kettle. A clear day is a day you didn't vape in that moment; fourteen of them retire it.

What we are not claiming

We are not claiming the programme has been trialled. It hasn't — it's new. The techniques above are evidenced individually, mostly in studies of other behaviours; their arrangement here, applied to vaping one moment at a time, is our own. The nearest published relative of this approach — stopping gradually rather than all at once — has barely been tested either: a Cochrane review found one trial of gradually reducing vaping, with seventeen participants and results too imprecise to conclude anything (Butler et al., 2025). So the honest position is: the parts are evidenced, the arrangement isn't, and no one has shown this works at any scale, including us.

We are not claiming any quit rate, and if you see one attached to this programme anywhere, we didn't write it.

What we measure

We measure what happens: we report openly how many people who start the eight weeks complete them, and everyone who joins is asked — separately and optionally — whether we can check in once, around six months after their programme ends. That data shapes how the programme develops.

References: Gollwitzer, P.M. & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38. · Wood, W., Tam, L. & Witt, M.G. (2005). Changing circumstances, disrupting habits. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(6). · Verplanken, B., Walker, I., Davis, A. & Jurasek, M. (2008). Context change and travel mode choice. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 28. · Azrin, N.H. & Nunn, R.G. (1973). Habit-reversal: a method of eliminating nervous habits and tics. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 11(4). · Kavanagh, D.J., Andrade, J. & May, J. (2005). Imaginary relish and exquisite torture: the elaborated intrusion theory of desire. Psychological Review, 112(2). · Skorka-Brown, J., Andrade, J. & May, J. (2014); Skorka-Brown, J. et al. (2015). Playing Tetris reduces craving. Appetite / Addictive Behaviors. · Butler, A.R. et al. (2025). Interventions for quitting vaping. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, CD016058.