Something Else

Why quitting vaping is hard

People who have tried to stop vaping and not managed it often describe the same thing: it was fine until a particular moment, and then it was not. Four days in, first coffee, and the hand had already moved.

That experience gets filed under willpower, which is the least useful place to file it. Here is a more practical account of why stopping is harder than it looks.

Most of it is not a decision

If you count the times you vape in a day, very few of them start with a thought. The kettle goes on, the hand goes to the counter. The car door shuts, the hand goes to the door pocket. By the time there is anything that feels like a decision, you are already holding it.

This is what makes it hard to argue yourself out of. The argument arrives after the action, and it is answering a question that was never asked.

It is attached to situations, not to the day

Vaping does not spread evenly across your waking hours. It clusters around a small number of recurring situations, and those situations are stable — the same few come back day after day.

That is also the good news, though it does not feel like it at first. A habit attached to eight or ten specific situations is a smaller thing than a habit attached to your whole life, and it can be taken apart one situation at a time.

Quitting everything at once means several hard days on the same day

A quit date asks you to change every one of those situations simultaneously. Each one is a separate piece of work: your first coffee has to become something else, your drive has to become something else, the end of your working day has to become something else — all on a Monday.

Some people can do that. If it has not worked for you, the reasonable conclusion is not that you lack something. It is that you were running eight experiments at once, and when one of them went wrong there was no way to tell which.

The object is usually within reach

Most of the situations people describe have the vape in arm’s reach at the moment they describe: on the counter, in the drawer, in the door pocket, on the arm of the sofa. That is not an accident — you put it there because it was convenient, back when convenient was the point.

It means the gap between the urge and the vape is about a second, and a second is not long enough for anything else to happen. Most of what people call willpower is really an attempt to compress a decision into that second, repeatedly, all day.

Nicotine is real, and it is not the whole story

Nicotine is addictive and stopping is genuinely uncomfortable. Nothing here is meant to talk you out of that, and if you want medical support for it, your GP and the NHS stop-smoking services are the right places.

What the situation-by-situation account adds is the layer built on top: the times, places and objects the habit has attached itself to. That layer is habitual, and it is the part you can rearrange without arguing with anybody about chemistry.

Counting days can make a bad day worse

Streaks and day counts turn one difficult afternoon into a broken record. The vape at 4pm on day nine becomes the end of something, rather than one situation that did not go the way you hoped, and the natural next move after breaking a streak is to stop keeping score at all.

This is why Something Else has no streaks, no day counts and no badges. A slip is information about a change that did not hold, not a verdict on the person.

What actually helps, as far as anyone can tell

Three things have long research records, though mostly in studies of behaviours other than vaping.

Deciding in advance what you will do in a specific situation — an if-then plan — has a medium-to-large effect on follow-through across 94 studies (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). Changing the context a habit lives in weakens it, because the cue stops firing the routine (Wood, Tam & Witt, 2005). And replacing the action with something specific you do when the urge arrives outperforms trying to resist it (Azrin & Nunn, 1973).

None of that is a claim that any of it will work for you, and it is worth saying plainly that the particular arrangement Something Else uses has not been trialled. The evidence page sets out what is and is not being claimed.

A smaller first step

If quitting everything at once has not worked, the alternative is not trying harder at the same thing. It is making the list of your own situations, picking one, and changing that one — where the vape sits, what happens instead — and leaving the rest of the day alone until that one has settled.

Something Else is an app that does this one moment each morning across eight weeks. It is an iPhone app, paid once, with no subscription. The assessment below maps the situations you vape in, which is the part you can do today whether or not you ever buy anything.

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. 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). · Azrin, N.H. & Nunn, R.G. (1973). Habit-reversal. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 11(4). · What we are not claiming.