How to Quit Smoking

My friend has been a smoker for five years. She is a pack-a-day smoker. Not only is this habit expensive (she may spend upwards of $50 a week on this habit), but it is also not very good for health, as numerous studies have shown (Agaku, King, Dube et al., 2014). I would like to help her quit smoking so that she can save her health, save money, and just be an altogether more enjoyable person to be around. (It is not that much fun being around a person who smokes all the time). To solve this problem, I have applied the six-step problem solving process. This paper will review the steps and explain what I did step-by-step to help my friend quit smoking.

The problem my friend was having was that she was smoking a pack a day and did not know how to stop. If she went a short time without a cigarette, she became antsy and annoyed, and became intolerable to be around. After a cigarette, she felt calm again. However, she usually needed to take a cigarette break every half hour or so. She didn’t really like being known as a smoker and she had started around a different set of friends, but since she was no longer with that set and instead was around a bunch of non-smokers she wanted to change her habit. Also, she was at a new job where she could not get away every half hour to go smoke and she was beginning to sneak them at work wherever she could get away with it. She knew she had to stop. The problem was she couldn’t. She had tried to quit cold turkey, but that did not work. She tried the nicotine patch but that did not work. She tried gum, but that did not work. How to help her quit: that was the question.

I asked her what the benefits of smoking were. She said it gave her a few minutes to get away from everyone and process things. It helped her keep her stress down. She also liked the motions of taking continuous deep breaths. That was why she did not like the patch or the gum: she missed the breathing activity that went with smoking. I asked her if she had experienced some trauma in her childhood to see if there was an underlying reason that needed to be addressed using therapy. She said she had not, that her childhood was happy and that she had just started smoking around a group of friends that she no longer saw much since she moved away. However, she was hooked and now it was a problem.

It sounded to me like my friend had issues dealing with stress. I offered the following options: 1) get stress therapy to address what I perceived to be her underlying stress issues, or 2) try e-cigarettes or vaping to get her smoking “fix” without the harm of actually smoking cigarettes or having to rush out of work every half hour to do it. She could vape right at work, since it was just water vapor that was being inhaled. We decided to evaluate these two options.

The first option sounded good on paper. We looked online and saw that she could get cognitive behavioral therapy to help her transition from negative thought patterns to more positive ones to help her cope with stress (Good Therapy, n.d.). The idea of therapy was one that she liked but she did not feel she had the time or money for it right now. She wanted a more convenient solution. We examined the idea of vaping or using e-cigarettes. There were two studies that we looked at that reported that e-cigarettes were not likely to help one quit smoking (Grana, Popova & Ling, 2014; Lee, Grana & Glantz, 2014). We noticed that the same researcher (Grana) was associated with both studies. Both studies were negative about e-cigarettes as a way to quit smoking, but we suspected that there might be some researcher bias going on—especially as the last thing the tobacco companies would want is for the vaping industry to take away their market. Vaping seemed to make sense: my friend would get a nicotine “fix,” would get to enjoy the benefits of the breathing process associated with smoking, but would not actually be smoking (vaping just requires a heating coil and an e-liquid, which is essentially flavored water with a dose of nicotine).

We decided to try vaping as a way for my friend to quit smoking. The idea of therapy to help her cope with stress was a good one but not realistic in her current state. She did not have time to commit to it and she did not have money saved for it or good health insurance to help cover the costs. Perhaps it would be the next thing to try if vaping did not work—but for the time being, she would try the easiest, least expensive option, which was buying a vaporizer, choosing some e-liquids that might taste good, and using it at work with the permission of her boss. She asked her boss and he said it was fine to use a vaporizer at work, since it did not emit tobacco smoke. She was happy with this permission and looked forward to being able to “smoke” on the job. She tested her vaporizer and found it had a good throat hit and actually felt like she was really smoking, which satisfied her. She was excited to try it out at work throughout the day.

My friend used the vaporizer at work for a week and loved it. She did not buy any packs of cigarettes at all. The only problem she had was that with a cigarette, you know when you are finished because there is no more left to smoke. With a vaporizer, you can sit and vape for all day long until your tank runs out of e-liquid. So it was a different situation. She also realized that one of the things she missed about smoking was the alone time that it gave her—but she did not miss having to get up and find a place to sneak them every so often. However, using the vaporizer at work did have some drawbacks as some co-workers gave her funny looks and thought she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing. She figured it was still better than sneaking cigarettes and risking getting caught. So for now it appears to be working. She is going to try out some other e-liquid flavors but she is happy with the vaporizer she selected. She is avoiding going into gas stations for the time being (as that is where she buys cigarettes). She still thinks she may want to try stress therapy at some point in the future because the vaporizer has not completely eliminated her stress, but it has helped to mute it to some extent.