JD, good job recognizing the example and advertisement you set by smoking. Creating a context of apparent consensus for dark things is bad. This motivates a lot of my puritanism.
I strongly advise the gum to all y'all having trouble. It's the mechanism of delivery of nicotine that makes it such an obsessive sort of addiction. Nicotine itself is not particularly hard to withdraw from; it's the pavlovian mechanism of addiction to an instant high linked to an action that is really terrible. It's comparable to addiction to IV heroin; the instant results reprogram your brain powerfully.
I've switched to gum from a 4ish-month habit of constant vaping and smoking in this last week. Now that the impulse to reach down, pick up an item, put it in my mouth and intake drugs (reminds me of my nailbiting habit) is semi-extinguished, I am naturally doing less and less gum already. My nic intake is down by like 2/3. I'm planning a week off of work to withdraw from several of my nerve drugs and bootcamp hiking; I'll probably cease nic in that time too.
Btw, the gum is actually pretty good recreationally. It's like a super-special cup of coffee and it isn't that much more addictive.
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