How to use nicotine gum: My experience

If you have read my first post on quitting smoking, you will be aware that I experienced many failed attempts before I finally managed to quit smoking. Although I give a fairly detailed general outline of my period as a smoker and my problems quitting in that article, I thought it might useful and interesting to go into more depth regarding my experience of learning how to use nicotine gum in a way that worked for me. This is of course a personal account, I am not any sort of health expert, and every smoker is different to some degree, but I still thought it might be useful to let people know about my experience.

For all my early attempts at quitting smoking I used either the ‘cold turkey’, or the 'gradual cut down' approach. The cold turkey approach basically involved me resolving to quit smoking on a specific day and then attempting to cease without any form of nicotine replacement. The idea of gradual cut down was that I would reduce the number of cigarettes that I smoked each day, with the goal of phasing them out altogether after a certain period of time. Neither approach worked for me, however, so I began to seriously look at using one of the nicotine replacement therapy products.

I think each person has to weigh up their own practicalities and psychology with regard to each of the different sorts of nicotine replacement therapy products available. I opted for nicotine chewing gum because I liked the idea of having something on hand that I could turn to if I had a sudden urge to smoke. The gum also supplied me with something to do with my mouth and, to a lesser extent, my hands.

The first think I noticed about the nicotine gum that I bought was how expensive it was. Okay, it was still way cheaper than my smoking habit, but the price still surprised me. I came to terms with it by reassuring myself that I would only be on the gum for a temporary period.

I read through the instructions given by the supplier carefully and used the nicotine gum as it advised. I had a choice of two different strengths of gum. As I was a heavy smoker, I opted to start out by using the stronger nicotine gum. The manufacturers of the gum advised chewing the gum for a month in order to wean yourself off the cigarettes and then to start gradually reducing the amount of nicotine gum chewed until eventually you were off the gum altogether – which should take about 3 months. I chewed about 20 pieces a day of the strong gum, which was the maximum that they recommended. But I was a heavy smoker who lit up as soon I opened my eyes each morning.

One advantage of getting your nicotine with the gum rather than cigarettes is that you feel better physically almost immediately, as all the tar and gunk that sits in your lungs when you smoke starts to disappear. Plus things like your sense of smell and taste return. You realize that much of the problems associated with nicotine addiction are associated with getting it through smoking, rather than the nicotine itself, which as far as I am aware is less dangerous when taken in the form of nicotine gum.

Anyway, everything seemed to be going reasonably okay at first. But after a few weeks, I became concerned that I was losing momentum – I wasn’t smoking any more but I was reliant on the nicotine gum and didn’t feel that there was an end in sight. I guess I was maybe addicted to the gum, but if I was, it was on a low level, nothing as extreme as cigarette smoking. Anyway, one day I felt so disillusioned I lit up a cigarette. I stopped taking the nicotine gum and that was it, my attempt to quit smoking was over.

A few months after my initial failure to quit smoking using nicotine gum, I decided that I was ready to have another go. Looking back at my failed first attempt, I decided that for me, one month of chewing strong gum followed by two months of gradually cutting back was too long. For one thing, chewing strong gum for a month had actually become a little addictive for me, and secondly, I didn’t feel like I was progressing quickly enough to a zero nicotine stage, which was what I really wanted.

For my second attempt, I therefore decided that I would start out on 20 pieces of the strong gum, as before, but this time I would reduce the amount and strength of the nicotine gum that I chewed much more quickly this time. So on the first day of me quitting smoking I chewed twenty strong pieces of nicotine gum. Then, two days later day I dropped it down to nineteen pieces of gum. A couple more days after that, I went down to eighteen pieces of gum and so on. When I got down to ten pieces of nicotine gum per day, my next step was to switch from the stronger to the weaker gum and carry on reducing my consumption of gum by one piece every couple of days.

I carried on until forty days after I had begun the process, I reached zero. This was twice as quick as recommended but all I can say is that it worked for me personally. I was now free from smoking and my withdrawal symptoms were pretty much nonexistent. It was great and the story should have ended there. But instead my freedom from nicotine only lasted ten months. I had a few drinks at a friends wedding, smoked a cigarette, and that set me off again.

Within weeks I was fully fledged smoker again, smoking as much as ever. In terms of consumption, it was like I had never given up. But something had changed in me mentally, I no longer had the enthusiasm for smoking that I had once had. The thrill had gone for me. Six months after I had restarted, I picked a day to give up, used the nicotine gum withdrawal method for a third time and quit smoking without any hitches. That was eleven years ago and I haven’t smoked since.