Chapter One: Where You Are

Begin where you are. In this chair, with your feet on the floor and the book in front of you. Your hand knows where the vape goes, even if you no longer keep one there. The place comes to mind without your having to look.

You are reading this because you vape and you do not want to, or because you know that division and want to stay clear of it. You may have stopped, or be using nicotine replacement, or be stepping down, or be here only to look. Wanting the vape and wanting to be free of it can sit side by side, and if you look at them they are strange. You do a thing many times a day that you do not want to do, reaching for the device before you have decided to. You feel the small relief, and under it, faintly, the small disappointment in yourself. Twenty minutes later you do it again. The hand can still begin that movement when the pocket is empty.

Most people in this situation spend enormous energy avoiding the plain sight of it. You tell yourself it is not that bad, that it is better than cigarettes, that you could stop any time, that everyone does it, that it helps with stress, that you have earned it. You say these things while putting the device on charge, or looking under a cushion for it, with the cushion on the floor and your hand down the side of the chair, feeling among the crumbs. You could stop any time, and you cannot sit down until you have found it.

So stand still for a moment. Let the arguments quiet down. You do not need to answer them. Notice that beneath all the reasons there is a plain feeling. It may be unease, or shame, or a kind of tiredness. The hand holding the book is tight at the thumb. Let the feeling be there while you keep reading. The page stays open whether you have an answer or not.

There is a version of this moment that happens in a bathroom mirror. You are brushing your teeth, or you have come in to wash your hands, and you look up and there is your face, and for a second you see it the way a stranger would see it, before the argument about vaping has time to start. Tired around the eyes. The light above the mirror falls into the creases beside them. And somewhere in the pocket of the dressing gown, or on the edge of the sink beside the soap, is the place where you keep the small device, and the face in the mirror knows all about it. Look, and do not look away, and do not start the argument.

Nobody here is going to read you the damage. You know it. You know it while you reach, and the knowledge does not move your hand. You read a warning on the phone with the vape in your other hand. The words are clear. You understand every one of them, and then the hand goes up as it always does, and the screen goes dark.

You may also hear, as you read, the voice that speaks up after an earlier attempt. It says you have tried this and it did not work, that you are one of the ones who cannot, that the vape is part of you now. Listen to how it talks about you. It talks about you the way nobody who loved you would. What it says about you is false. What it knows is how the last attempt went, and it draws a line from that day through the rest of your life, and the line is a story too. People who stopped, and stayed stopped, mostly tried before. The earlier attempts were where you learned what catches you, and that knowledge is in you now, and you carry it into this.

No one in this book is asking you to stop as you read. If you still vape, you can leave the device where it is and see what you do with it without making a promise first. The pocket has a shape where it sits, and your hand knows the shape. If the pocket is empty now, notice the hand going there, or the craving that comes without a movement. Start there. Use a remembered reach wherever these pages describe vaping that is no longer part of your day. Remember the place and what your hand did. The reach can be remembered without a device in your hand. Nothing here asks you to pick one up again, or to set aside the nicotine replacement you are using in order to feel a craving.

When the mind keeps circling

Sometimes the hand goes to the phone. You feel anxious, and you reach for an answer. A search. A message asking whether this is normal. One more account of how somebody else stopped. An answer settles you for a while, and then the doubt returns, and the hand reaches again. You recognise the first words of the page before it has finished opening. You have read this answer. Your thumb scrolls down to read it again.

Take an evening when you sit down to watch a film and cannot stay with it. The thought comes: I will never be able to watch anything without vaping, or enjoy it if I do. You stop the film and look for reassurance. Twenty minutes later you are still looking, and the film stopped halfway through seems to prove the thought. There was a real difficulty at the start. Now the film sits paused and the remote is on the arm of the chair. You have read several accounts of other people's concentration since you last watched a minute of it. The scene you left has had no chance to hold your attention.

At the bottom of the page there is another link. You want this answer to do something the others have not done: make you certain that your evenings will be all right. You read it and feel a little easier, until you wonder whether it applies to you. The answer cannot show you every evening ahead. However much you read, that is still more than the next page can give you. Your thumb is over another link. The tea beside you has gone cold.

With the phone in your hand, you can see two different questions. There is the difficulty you are having now, which you can describe to someone: you cannot follow a film, and the searching takes up the evening. You can ask for help with that, or make an appointment to talk about it. Something genuinely new about your body is worth a call, and you make it. Then there is the question that follows every answer: what if every evening feels like this? You can tell someone about that fear too. No reply on the phone can settle the whole future for you.

The film is still paused. Tonight your concentration has been poor; you know that much. But the thought says never. You look once at what that leaves out. Perhaps you can still repeat what someone said on the phone earlier, or remember the message you read and answered before you sat down. There is a part of the conversation you followed. You do not have to search your memory until the evening looks different. Tonight is hard, and you have taken something in. The thought can be smaller than never without your having to promise yourself an easy evening.

You pick up the remote and start the film again, just for one scene. The phone rests beside you. When the scene ends, you notice what you have taken in. A person comes into a room. Someone asks a question, and you remember the answer, though you miss what comes after it. You can still want a vape while following that exchange. Or you find that very little stays with you. That too belongs to this attempt, in this chair. You have something from the film itself to put beside the prediction.

With the remote still in your hand, you can make a mental note of the evening so far. You lose the thread of the film and think you will never watch anything without vaping. You search, feel easier for a while, then search again. When you try a scene, there is a little you can recall, or very little. You can notice where one thing leads to the next without getting up from the chair. If you want to write it down, you can. The noticing is there already.

Then your hand goes to the phone again. The same words are waiting in the search box. You can look again in a couple of minutes. For now you leave the phone beside the remote and go back to the film. The question is still there as someone begins to speak. You miss a few words and hear the next ones.

You pick up the cup. The tea is cold. There is a ring on the table where the cup stood. You wipe it up while the question about concentration remains unanswered, and take the cup to the sink.

The two addictions

You feel the pull in your body and your hand starts towards the pocket. Before your hand gets there, a reason arrives: you need to concentrate, or the conversation has been hard. The pull and the reason come together so often that you take them for the same thing. Listen to the words while you notice where the pull is.

The first part is the body's dependence on nicotine. This is real, and its discomfort varies. For some people it is a background restlessness. For others the cravings, anxiety, broken sleep or difficulty concentrating are hard to manage. You are awake with the pillow turned over, or reading the same line again at work. There is help for the physical part, as there is for the habits around it, and the person who helps you choose it is waiting at a counter you walk past most weeks.

You can look at your own experience without using it against yourself. Think of a long meeting when the vape stayed in your coat and you were caught up in what someone was saying. Think of a night's sleep when you did not reach for it. Those stretches without reaching for the vape are part of what happened. So is the broken night when you kept turning the pillow and could not settle. If you were using nicotine replacement, a stretch without the vape was not a stretch without nicotine. The question someone asked in the meeting held your attention. In the bedroom you could hear water in the pipes, and once it stopped you lay waiting for sleep. Notice what held your attention and what made the hours hard, and tell the person helping you about both.

The second is the mind's dependence on the vape. The mind can build a whole house of belief around a small device. The mind believes the vape relieves stress, that it helps you concentrate, or relax, or talk to people, or wake up, or wind down. It believes that without it you will be anxious and deprived and restless and incomplete, that stopping means losing something, that there is a version of you that copes, and that version holds a vape.

Look at one of those beliefs closely, the one about stress. Take a hard phone call. Your chest tightens. You step outside and vape, and the tightness eases a little, and the mind files this away as evidence that the vape helps with stress. Part of that tightness is the hour since the last vape, and that is the part the vape eases. The phone call it leaves exactly where it was.

The belief that you need a vape to cope is false. The relief you feel when you vape is relief from the vape, from the small discomfort the last one left behind. The difficult caller's name is still on the screen, and you still have to decide what to say when you call back. At the start vaping tasted of something and it felt nice. The pleasure went long before the reaching did, and the reliance stayed. In that doorway the vapour has gone from the air and you are looking at the same name.

Knowing this in your head will not, by itself, free you. You can understand every word and still pat the pocket before leaving the house. You have the keys and the phone, and come back through the door because the device is charging by the bed, and unplug it and carry it out with you, and check the pocket again before you shut the door. The fingers can go to that pocket and find the seam. There is no pleasure left to give up. What you are doing is setting down a weight you have carried so long that you mistook it for part of your body.

Say that to yourself the next time the mind tells you that stopping means loss. Ask it what, exactly, is being lost. The break? You can still take the break. The step outside into the air? The air will still be there and the step will still be there. The pleasure? Go and look for the pleasure the next time you want to vape. What is the craving promising? Remember what was there when the vapour went in. For most people what they find is a small relief and then nothing, and then, a little later, the craving again. You can follow that pull through to its end without taking another.

Looking without changing anything

If you still vape, watch what you do with the device. You have reached for it many thousands of times, and almost all of those times the hand was on it before any part of you had decided anything. That is what a habit is. It runs below the level where decisions get made, in the same place as tying a shoelace or finding the light switch in the dark. You come into a room with your arms full, the elbow finding the switch, the bags going down and the hand finding the vape, so that the light is on and the device is at your mouth before you have attended to either movement.

So watch the reach. Watch the moment the hand goes to the pocket or the bag or the surface beside you, or notice the craving before the hand moves at all. Try to catch it once today, the way you might catch yourself humming. You will probably miss most of them, and that is fine, and is itself a piece of information. Each one you catch shows you something. Where you were, what had happened a second before, what you were about to do, what was in your chest. Nothing has to change for you to see the movement. The hand can stop at the pocket, with the craving still there. You are only asking to watch what it began.

Take the front step in the morning. You come out and the air is cold, and the street is doing what the street does at that hour, an engine turning over somewhere and the light coming up grey over the roofs. And the hand is already at the pocket. When did it get there? You did not decide to reach on the step. The door key is still between two fingers of the other hand. You have not put it away yet. Stand on the step with the craving in your hand and notice that you are there and the craving is there and the morning is there. The hand can stay where it is while you hear the engine, and the cold can reach the knuckles before you have decided what to do. The key presses into your finger when you close your hand round it.

Or take the car in the supermarket car park. You have done the shop. The bags are in the boot and you get into the driver's seat and shut the door, and there is a moment of quiet in a small sealed space before the engine goes on, and in that moment the hand moves. You know this one. Almost everyone who has vaped and driven knows this one. What is the reach for? It is only partly for the nicotine. Mostly it is for the full stop. The shop is done and the hand wants to mark it, the way people once lit a cigarette at the end of a job. Sit there with the engine off and your hand in your lap and see if you can feel the full stop wanting to be made. Then make it however you like. You have seen that a reach can be a piece of punctuation and nothing more.

And take the bedside table, because for many people that is where the habit lives most stubbornly. Last thing at night the hand goes across to it, and first thing in the morning, before the eyes are properly open, the hand goes across again. You put the device beside the lamp at night where your fingers can find it in the dark, with the charging lead hanging over the edge. In the morning the hand comes out from under the bedclothes and passes the glass of water and finds the same patch of wood, and your cheek has not yet left the pillow. When you wake and the hand goes across, notice that it went before you were awake enough to send it. The fingers can close on the place where the device goes, and the glass and the lamp are still beside it, and you can feel the edge of the table before you have opened your eyes.

One word, and a minute

There is a word to say when you notice the craving, and a minute in which to watch it without sending the hand anywhere. Neither asks for a promise to stop. You can try the word when the hand starts towards a pocket, or when the thought comes that you will want a vape later. For the minute, let your hands rest somewhere safe. If a device is in one of them, set it down and leave your hand beside it.

When you notice a craving or a reach, find one word for whatever you are feeling. Bored, or tense, or fine, or tired, or flat. Say it silently or under your breath, while the craving is still only wanting. Notice the word when you catch another reach. Tense at the desk, with the message still open. Tense outside the door before you go in. Or fine, with nothing troubling you and the hand moving all the same. Leave fine as fine. You do not have to go digging for a grief because your fingers have gone looking for a familiar object. The word belongs to what you felt before the reach, including when you felt nothing much.

For the minute, notice a craving that is already there, whether your hand has moved or you are sitting still and thinking of vaping later. Let your hands rest for a single minute. If you are holding the device, set it down somewhere safe. Somewhere ordinary will do. Notice the pull and the sentence that comes with it. The fridge stops humming. A car goes past outside. Your hand wants to go to the pocket or across the table, and for this minute you can see the distance it wants to travel. If the feeling gets worse or panic rises, stop the exercise and look up at the room. There is no need to stay with your eyes turned inward. A craving asks you to stand in the gap until it eases. Here you are only seeing what one minute contains.

Counting without a verdict

Count the reaches. Before you count, guess. Write the guess down somewhere, because the mind will revise it once the real number comes in and you will want to remember what you believed. Then, for one ordinary day, each time the hand starts towards the device, add one. A reach counts even when it finds nothing. A mark on the back of the hand or along the edge of a receipt, or a number in your head that you say aloud each time. An honest rough number is all you want. If the reach no longer happens, use what you remember of an ordinary day of vaping. Leave the gaps in the memory. You do not need to pick up a device to fill them.

The number will surprise you. For most people it is a good deal higher than the guess, sometimes twice it, and the first response is a small wince. Watch the wince and let it go. There is no verdict in the number. It is a fact about a habit, the way the reading on a set of bathroom scales is a fact about a body. Look at the receipt with the marks down its edge, beside the printed price of the bread and milk, crowded near the bottom where you began to run out of paper. Each marks a reach that had a place in the day, a break you took or the end of a task, or the hand moving while nothing much was happening. If the number is sixty, there are sixty such moments. You can see how the habit runs through the day you counted. It is woven through the day at a stitch every ten or fifteen minutes, and the stitches are so small you never saw the thread.

Do not compare the number with anyone else's. There is no right number, and no number that means you are worse than you thought. Keep the guess where you can see it beside the count. The temptation is to alter what you are counting, to skip the one on the step so the marks stop at forty. Then the receipt records your attempt to reach forty. For this count, watch the habit you came to see. Choosing to cut down is a different act, and you can choose it. You do not owe the receipt another mark if you decide to stop. But do not shave marks off a count and call it the day you had.

What the vape does for you

Take a reach you have watched and say what you wanted the vape to do for you there. Say it aloud if you can, to yourself in the car with the engine off, and then write it down in one sentence. Leave the damage out of it. You know the damage. The sentence is about the job.

In the room full of people, it gives you a reason to leave. You put a hand on the pocket and stand up, and nobody asks where you are going. Or it gives your hands something to do while someone else speaks. It takes the edge off the middle of the afternoon, or marks the end of a task. Outside, you get ten minutes that are yours and nobody else's. Say which of these you were after in the reach you watched, or name the job that was yours. The device is small enough to do all of them without being put away between one and the next. It is still in your hand when you come back into the room.

Picture four o'clock with the vape taken away. The room is full of voices again, and you still want to get out of it. The hand goes to the empty pocket while someone asks you another question. Many attempts to stop fall over here, where the device is gone and its job has been left undone. Name the job in this room. If you need air, there is a door. You can walk through it with nothing in your hand. If the job is harder to name, stay with the moment: who is speaking, what you are doing, what you want to get away from.

You do need a break from people. You do need a full stop at the end of a task, and ten minutes of air, and something to do with your hands when you are nervous. The vape was one answer to those needs, and a poor one, because it came with a bill, and because it made you need it more each time you used it. Stand outside and notice the air on the skin above your collar. The work is still in the room behind you. The door is shut. Your break has begun while you are still wanting a pull, and the cold reaches your face with your hand at your side. Nothing has had to pass your lips for the air to be here.

The paradox of fighting

Here is the first thing this guide asks you to consider. You cannot win this by fighting. Notice the hand you have clenched on the table. The nails press into the palm, and even while your eyes move along the page part of your attention is down there, keeping the fingers shut. You have given the hand nothing else to do.

Fighting means gritting your teeth, white-knuckling through the cravings, treating each urge as an enemy. It feels like being strong, and sometimes it holds for a while. But a fight needs an opponent, and each time you fight the craving you agree that it is real and powerful and dangerous. You feed it. You make it bigger. And when the will runs out, as it does, the craving is still there, and it has learned that it only has to wait.

Think of the last time you tried to stop by force. The first hours were a kind of high, the pride of a decision made. Then the afternoon came, and the reach came with it, and you clenched against it, and it passed, and you clenched against the next one. By evening you were worn out from a day of clenching, and then one arrived when you were tired and alone and had had a hard conversation, and there was no clench left in you, and the hand moved. And the story that followed was the worst part. You told yourself you were weak. Your jaw ached where you had held it shut. You had been clenching all day against a feeling that would have risen and gone on its own, and nobody can clench for a lifetime.

Open the hand on the table. The marks of the nails are still in the palm. You have stopped making them deeper. A craving can be there while the hand rests like this. Feel where the pull sits, and leave the hand open without sending it across the table. The craving does not have to finish before you unclench.

Notice the difference between allowing and obeying. To obey a craving is to vape. To fight a craving is to clench against it, with the jaw set and the breath held. To allow a craving is neither. It is to let the feeling be where it is and as big as it already is, in the chest or the throat or the hands, and to do nothing about it, and to watch. Nothing here asks you to feel more than is already there, or to summon a feeling, or to sit through one heroically. If the feeling gets worse or panic rises, stop watching inwardly and lift your eyes. Look at the edge of the table, the window, the shoe under the chair. Feel the floor under your feet. You can stop the exercise.

You have watched feelings come and go without doing anything to them. The sadness that arrives in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. You sit with it while someone in the next room runs a tap. The flare of irritation in a slow queue, with the person at the front looking through every part of a bag for a purse. The purse is found. You are still standing there, and the irritation no longer occupies the whole of your chest. You did not have to order it out. A craving is a feeling too. The sentence that says it must be answered arrives with it, but the sentence does not move your hand.

Your teeth need not touch while you read. Let there be a little space between them. The tongue can lie in the bottom of the mouth. You can turn the page with the same hand that was clenched on the table, and feel the thin edge of the paper between finger and thumb. The craving can still be there while the hand does this other thing.

Where you stand

You sit with the book open and your hand beside it. There are words on the page you would say aloud, and words you would cover with your hand if someone looked over your shoulder. Notice which ones make you want to turn the page. They tell you where you are standing.

An old receipt has slipped from between the pages. You lay it across the open book. It came from the shop where you bought the vape. You move your hand across to cover the price. Your face is hot, although nobody has asked what you spent. A lighter account is ready, something about how little it added up to. You remember where you stood while the machine printed it out, and wanting another pull before you were far from the shop.

You want that relief now. You also want to be able to go anywhere without checking for the device. Both wants are here, with the book open. You picture yourself outside a shop with no device in your pocket, searching every pocket again. Your other hand goes to your pocket and presses against it.

You are angry with the company, with the friend who handed you the first one as though there were nothing to it. You remember turning the packet over to find the company address in small print, pressing a thumbnail into the cardboard while you thought what you would say to them. You handed over the money yourself, and you resent that too. I can deal with this, you think. I do not need anyone sorting me out. Your fingers find the charging lead you have brought because you do not want to be caught without it. You know the hard end by touch before you know which way up it is. You can plug it in in the dark without interrupting the sentence about stopping whenever you choose.

You think of the person you could ask for help, and of showing them the receipt without making the sum smaller. You want to have stopped before you ask, so that you can hand it over as something finished. But it is here now, across the open book, and you want the vape. You move your hand far enough to uncover the price. Your face is still hot. You swallow without supplying another reason, and leave your hand open beside the book.

If fear is the word you find first, notice what you are afraid of: the empty pocket, the difficult call, lying awake with your hand on the sheet. There is no need to summon the other feelings. Leave the fear unexplained for a moment, with your hand beside the paper and the price still in view.

The view from further on

Picture the end of a meal without the search for the device. Your plate is empty and someone is still talking. You stay to hear the end of what they are saying. When you stand up, you take a plate with you. At the sink the water runs hot over your hands, and there is a smear of sauce that needs the rough side of the sponge. The washing up takes as long as the washing up takes, and when it is done you dry your hands. You can sit down with the person who is still at the table. Or picture leaving the house with the keys in your hand. The door closes. You put the keys away and walk on, without checking for a second object. There is room in a pocket that used to hold a vape. At the corner you move the keys into that pocket because they are digging into your leg.

Admitting what is so

Every real change begins with an admission. You make it to yourself. The sentence can come out so quietly that nobody on the other side of a door would hear. Say what is true of your own habit. Leave out any part that is not yours.

Try saying it, silently or aloud, if these are your words: I vape. I do not want to. I cannot do this by force. Say what help you need, without borrowing a failure that was not yours.

Notice what happens in you when you name the help. There may be a flare of resistance. The mind does not like to admit it has been beaten by something so small. I could stop if I really wanted to. Hear the if. The mind keeps you there while the device charges, leaving the wanted change on the other side of a condition you never get past. The little light comes on, and you are still deciding whether you want it enough. The same if can come back while you are wanting a vape.

Say where your will has run out. At the end of the hard conversation, or alone in the kitchen, or with your coat on because you had decided to go and buy another. Name the place to yourself, with the coat still on the hook or the call ended on the screen. Put the words on paper if that helps you hear them without hurrying past. The call ended, but you sat there with the screen in your hand, or you stood by the door with the coat already fastened and the keys making a lump in its pocket. Leave enough room beside the name to say what happened there, including what you reached for and what you wanted the reaching to end. The word difficult can cover a whole evening. There is room on the paper for the evening itself.

Think of listening to someone you trust who has had the same trouble. You are at a table together, with their cup beside yours, and they describe the search for the device under the cushion. You know the movement. They have put their own hand down the side of a chair and felt among the crumbs, and when they describe how they tipped the chair to see underneath it you want to know whether they found the vape. Their tea sits untouched while they remember where it was. You can ask what they did when their hand went searching, and listen to the answer without preparing your own account to give in return. There is a person's experience to hear, and you can ask another question about the part you do not understand. They tell you how they got through an evening like yours. The help has a voice you can interrupt.

You can say it in the bathroom mirror if you want a witness, and the face there will not argue. Say it on the step, or in the car with the engine off, or lying in the dark with your hand resting on the table by the bed. Say it once and see what it is like to have said it. In the car you can hear how quiet your voice is with the windows shut. On the step the words go out into the street. In bed your cheek rests on the pillow. If there are tears, let them come. If there is nothing much, leave the sentence as you said it. There is no further sentence you have to say to make a feeling arrive.

When the craving comes again, hear the sentence it brings. I need one. There is the feeling in the body and the sentence in the head. Say them to yourself: My chest is tight, and I keep thinking I need a vape. You can make a call while those words are still there, and hear someone tell you about their day while you find your feet on the floor. You can hear them breathing at the other end. You are holding the phone, and the hand that wanted the vape has something else in it. You do not have to begin the call with an account of the craving. Someone is speaking, and you can listen while the feeling stays. The voice at the other end is something more than your own effort to keep the hand still.

What is that something more? You sit at the table with the phone against your ear and your other hand beside the cup. The person loses their place in what they are telling you and starts the sentence again. You have nothing to say. They go on talking. The tightness in your chest rises, stays for a while, and begins to ease. You have done nothing to it. Your shirt lifts with a breath and settles against you again while they are still talking.

Willingness is enough for now. You are not asked to believe you can do this. You can go to the pharmacy counter with the question still folded in your pocket and no belief that you will manage to ask it. You take out the paper. You read the words. Your voice can shake while the question gets asked. You say what happens when you go without nicotine and ask what help is available, or ask about the nicotine replacement you are already using. When you try the minute, you can want a vape throughout it. You can write exactly that, without improving the account, and leave the paper where you can read it again without having to speak to anyone. Include the part you wanted to leave out. The craving lasted the minute. The hand stayed beside the cup. Whatever happened belongs on the paper, even if you had expected something else when you picked up the pen.

The three sentences can stay with you. Take them into the bathroom, where the door closes and there is a towel beside the sink, and look at the face you saw before the argument about vaping began. You have no account to make presentable for anyone else. Say the words that are yours, and hear them in this small room, with the soap lying in its dish and the glass holding the toothbrushes. The face can be tired. You can hear the last word without following it with an explanation. Turn on the tap and put your hands under it.

For now, just begin where you are. The water is cold at first and then warm, and you hold your hands beneath it with the words still in the room, until a drop runs under your sleeve and you pull your wrist back. You turn off the tap and reach for the towel.