A Survivor's Guide to Quitting Juul

I was fourteen when I bought my first pack of cigarettes. It was 2009 and I biked from my childhood home to the boardwalk in Venice, California. At the time, beachside merchants didn’t ask questions when kids came in to buy packs of Marlboro Lights or cans of Four Loco. As long as you had cash and no cops were in sight, no questions were asked.

Nothing about my story is unusual. I bought the cigarettes to feel mature, a prop for my teenage rebellion. I anticipated James Dean levels of coolness to seep into my bloodstream with my first inhale. In actuality, my first cigarette resulted in a spluttering fit of coughing and nicotine-induced nausea. So. Not. Cool. Undeterred, I was committed to the bad girl aesthetic and continued smoking until I learned to enjoy it.

This might be the most dissonant characteristic of nicotine use. We force ourselves to like a noxious substance thinking that we could never get hooked on something that tastes nasty and makes us feel kind of sick. But by the time we realize how idiotic we are being and stop, our body has already developed a craving for the chemical and we find ourselves smoking when we don’t want to be smoking and hating ourselves for it.

Throughout high school and college, my smoking habits ebbed and flowed in tandem with my anxiety levels. It became my go-to method for self-soothing, but it wasn’t until I was introduced to the Juul that my flirtations with nicotine morphed into a beast of an addiction.

I was living in San Francisco my first year out of college and smoking 2–3 cigarettes a day when I picked up my first Juul. I’d tried other vapes before, but refilling sticky fluid containers and shoddy design turned me off. The Juul was different. It was sleek, low profile, and cartridges took the guesswork out of choosing nicotine solutions.

San Francisco in 2017 was a Juuling haven. You couldn’t go to a social event without spotting twenty-something venture capitalists stealing hits off the metallic devices before slipping them back into their tailored Chinos. Forget James Dean, this was the new cool kid aesthetic.

The first few times I used the Juul I nearly threw up from its intensity. A hit from a Juul pod contains a much higher concentration of nicotine than a drag from a traditional cigarette. But just like in high school, I trained myself to like the device. Within a month I was bringing the Juul everywhere I went and without conscious awareness, I stopped smoking cigarettes altogether.

I’d sneak to the bathroom to take hits during meetings. I kept it on my nightstand and in the mornings I started Juuling before I even got out of bed. Nicotine provided a head rush that dulled my senses enough to quell my relentless social anxiety and Juul made this temporary relief accessible anytime, anywhere. Soon, I was going through a pod a day (equivalent to a pack of cigarettes).

Let’s get one thing straight: Juul is not a smoking cessation device. Everything about it is designed to be addictive. Its minimal, Apple-inspired aesthetic, ease of use (no need for a light), compact size (no bigger than a flash drive), and low-profile (no sickly smell) means users like me start hitting the Juul more often than they would ever dream of lighting up a cigarette.

I spent five years smoking Juul, and five years trying to quit the Juul. I went through years of lunacy buying and throwing away pods and devices in my attempts to quit. I spent thousands of dollars on nicotine products and thousands of dollars on products/services to help me quit. I had stints of sobriety lasting 2–3 weeks before I allowed my nicotine-addicted brain to justify that the particular stress I was under could only be resolved by a hit from a Juul. And during every stint of Juul sobriety, I had to temporarily go back to smoking cigarettes to ease the transition.

Let’s underscore that. I had to go back to smoking cigarettes in order to wean myself off a “smoking cessation device”.

In the past 10 years, I’ve had to limit my use or abstain altogether from a number of different drugs. But none of these substances or sobriety attempts have inspired more self-loathing and cognitive dissonance than trying to quit the Juul.

Today I’ve been Juul-free for two months, my longest streak by far. Undoubtedly, I’m still early in my journey, but my conviction is stronger now than in any of my previous attempts. I’m done with the insanity and I want every other Juul smoker to be done too.

Over the years, I’ve tried countless tools and strategies to help me quit. I documented all of the strategies I've tried over the years on an Airtable spreadsheet and ranked them in order of effectiveness. You can view the spreadsheet here.

There are many resources for smoking cessation, but less for vaping so I compiled this spreadsheet with notes on what helped me and what didn’t. Some of these techniques are backed by research, and some are just things I found personally helpful. As much as I’d like to say I meditated my way out of the urge to smoke, sometimes the only thing that kept a vape out of my mouth was eating an entire bag of gummy candies. It’s not something I’d necessarily recommend, but it did work for me.

My latest (and final) quit started on April 17th, 2021 when I unintentionally lost my Juul. This kicked off the routine all Vapers are familiar with when they can’t find their little crutch: heart racing, anxious sweating, manically ripping apart my house, mental calculations of the distance between me and the nearest Juul dealer.

Luckily, I had enough awareness to observe myself spinning out and decided to experiment with responding to this predicament differently than I had in the past. I knew that every time I’d given in to my cravings it had only worsened my mental anguish. So I stopped searching for the Juul with a commitment to simply observe how I was feeling and not go out and buy another one.

Over the next few hours my cravings grew so strong I literally wanted to rip the skin off my face. I hated everything. I hated Juul for making a product that had completely undone me. I hated myself for allowing my addiction to get this bad. I hated every other non-smoker/non-vaper around me for being so unaffected by something that seemed to control my life. I let myself get so angry that I screamed and so sad that I cried, but I didn’t go out and buy another one. The intensity of my emotions gradually subsided, but something about my lingering anger inspired a growing sense of righteous indignation and suddenly not buying another vape became an act of protest.

Navigating the next week was one giant landmine. I relied on every tool I’d ever used to keep myself from vaping. The ironic thing about abstinence is that it is simultaneously the most simple and the most complicated thing you’ll ever do. You would think it takes far less energy to NOT DO something than it does TO DO something, but fighting a craving to suffocate yourself with chemicals makes literally no sense and this cognitive dissonance systematically undermines your willpower, self-confidence, and mental clarity.

For the last 61 days, I’ve woken up and chosen not to vape. I have to reaffirm that commitment 20–30 times throughout the day when cravings threaten to get the best of me, but instead of letting the triggers wear me down till I eventually crack, I’ve been acknowledging what’s happening in my body and using it as a reminder to rebel against the chemical and the industry that landed me here by never buying another vape.

Today I have confidence in my ability to succeed that I’ve never had before. Sometimes sobriety of any kind simply happens when it happens. For me, there was no specific tipping point. In fact, every time I woke up sick from vaping too much and swore off the Juul for good it seemed to make my cravings and eventual slip up worse. This time I started my quit without any grand proclamations of the “last time” accompanied by some kind of ritualistic destruction of my pods. I think for whatever reason, I’m just done. I’ve relapsed enough times, I’ve spent enough money, and I’ve got enough tools from previous attempts that I’ve been able to start making it stick.

Every day I go without vaping increases the likelihood that I’ll never vape again. I’m beginning to feel the benefits of my abstinence and my momentum increases the stakes of a slip-up. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life obsessing about something I hate and never want to do again. Because if it’s still taking up that much space in my brain, I haven’t really overcome my addiction.

Today, I’m piloting different techniques to reduce the amount of energy I spend experiencing and resisting cravings. I’m working towards the freedom of a day where nicotine never crosses my mind.

If you’re reading this and trying to quit, I have complete faith in your ability even if you don’t right now. We can get through this together. I would love to know if you tried any of the tools in the article and what has and hasn’t worked for you. You got this. Good luck!