Something Else

How to stop vaping, one situation at a time

Most advice about stopping vaping starts with the whole habit at once: pick a date, throw the vape away, and hold on. That works for some people. For a lot of others it falls apart within a few days, and it is worth being clear about why, because the reason is not that they did not want it enough.

If you write down the last ten times you vaped — where you were, what you had just finished doing — the list is usually shorter and more repetitive than it feels. The same handful of situations come back: the first coffee, getting into the car, a stressful email, after dinner, the phone in bed, the third drink. The rest of the day barely appears.

That list is a more useful thing to work from than a date.

Make the list first

Before changing anything, spend a day or two noticing. Not counting, and not judging — just noting which situation you were in each time. A note on your phone is enough. Most lists come back with fewer distinct situations than the person expected, which is the first useful thing they tell you.

You are looking for a situation, not a feeling. “Stressed” is hard to work with. “At my desk, just after an email landed” is something you can actually change.

Pick one, not all of them

Trying to change every situation on the same day means running several difficult experiments at once, and when it goes wrong you cannot tell which part went wrong. Picking one means the rest of your day carries on as it did — which sounds like less progress and is often a lot more of it, because one change you keep beats five you abandon by Thursday.

Start with a moment that happens most days and is not the hardest one you have. The first coffee is a common choice. So is the drive to work.

Change the situation, not your resolve

Once you have picked one, the useful question is not “how do I resist this?” but “what would have to be different for this to be harder to do without thinking?”

Usually the answer is where the vape is. If it lives on the kitchen counter and the first coffee is your moment, then the change is that it spends the night somewhere else — another room, a zipped bag, anywhere that is not within reach of the kettle. If it lives in your desk drawer and a stressful email is your moment, the change is that it spends the working day in your bag, in another room.

This is not a trick to make yourself want it less. It is a few extra seconds and a deliberate movement between the urge and the vape, at the one moment you are least likely to want either.

Psychologists call the deciding-in-advance part an implementation intention: rather than intending to vape less, you decide the specific thing you will do when a specific situation arrives. A meta-analysis across 94 studies found forming these if-then plans has a medium-to-large effect on whether people follow through on what they intended (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). Research on habits and context change points the same way: behaviour is easiest to change when the situation around it changes, because the old cue stops firing the old routine (Wood, Tam & Witt, 2005).

Decide what you will do instead

Moving the vape handles most days. It does not handle the day the urge arrives anyway, and that day will come.

So the second half is deciding, in advance, what you do instead — something specific, that occupies your hands and eyes, that you can start and finish, and that you can do where you are. Washing up while the coffee brews. Clearing your desk and putting it back in order. Adjusting the mirrors and the seat before you turn the key.

“Take a moment” is not one of these. Neither is trying to relax. The point is to be busy with something that has a beginning and an end, not to be calm.

Expect the first few days to feel odd

Reaching for something that is not there is a strange feeling, and it is the change working rather than failing. For some people it settles in a few days; for others it takes longer, and there is no schedule you are behind.

If you vape in that moment anyway, that is information about the change, not about you. The usual reason is that the vape was still within reach — in a coat pocket, on the passenger seat, in a bag by the door. Move it further and try the same moment again.

Then take the next one

When a moment stops being a moment — when the kettle is just a kettle — you have one fewer situation holding the habit in place, and you can pick another. Working through a list this way is slower than a clean break and it asks less of you on any given day.

What Something Else does

Something Else is an app built around exactly this. It starts by finding your moments, then gives you one small change each morning for one of them, for eight weeks. No streaks, no day counts, no badges. It is an iPhone app, paid once.

You do not need it to do any of the above. The list and the bag are free. What the app adds is choosing which moment to work on next, keeping track of which changes held, and a ten-minute timer with something to do in it for when an urge arrives anyway.

The assessment below is the same first step described at the top of this page: it maps the moments you vape in. It is free and takes a few minutes.

Map the moments you vape

Something Else is £38.99 for the first hundred people who buy it, then £79.99. Paid once, no subscription. Bought here, there is a full refund within 14 days of buying. Bought through the App Store, Apple handles refunds and Apple’s process and timing apply.

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). · More on what the research does and does not show: the evidence page.