I quit smoking on March 25, 2025. As of this writing I’ve been smoke-free for 158 days — roughly an 83% success rate (17% chance of relapse). Here I share both my failures and what finally worked.
My failures
First: failing to quit is completely normal. Don’t give up. One failure doesn’t matter — I failed many times before it stuck. So let me start, as someone who’s been through it, with how I failed.
My most recent failure was in early 2024. I had just changed jobs, wanted to start a brand-new chapter, and figured this was the moment to quit smoking, lose weight, and live a healthy, sunny life all at once. That, as it turned out, planted the seeds of failure.
New job, new stress
Starting anything from scratch is hard. After switching jobs and leaving my comfort zone, the early months meant 996 overtime in a field I wasn’t familiar with. The new company had just been founded — no product, no revenue, burning cash with nothing coming in. That made me anxious, and the anxiety planted the seeds of failure too.
Dieting
After the job change, full of confidence, I decided to slim down as well. Every day I ate “healthy meals” — the boiled-vegetables-and-boiled-chicken-breast kind. That caused blood sugar swings. Our brains run on blood sugar; no sugar means unhappiness, and it pushed me into mild depression.
New job, healthy life, quitting for a future pregnancy — of course I was going to quit! And of course, I failed.
My body started acting up
As all this was going on, one night at my computer my heart suddenly raced, my ears rang, my vision went dark, and I broke out in cold sweat. I went to the ER, and that’s where the story really began.
Simple checks found nothing but tachycardia, so I went home. Searching my symptoms on my phone, the internet and AI models told me I might have a stroke or heart attack and could drop dead any moment — which made me even more afraid (anxious), and I started going to hospitals nonstop.
Every morning, just sitting up in bed doing nothing, my heart rate would hit around 100. Standing up, 110. A few steps, 120+, and my watch started firing high-heart-rate alarms — which scared me even more (anxious).
I went through neurology and cardiology: brain MRI, cervical spine, carotid arteries, ECG, cardiac enzymes, every blood panel there is. All said nothing was wrong! But the physical symptoms kept me terrified (anxious), my appetite suffered, and my stomach followed: bloating, acid reflux, nausea. I lost 10 kg fast, and the speed of the weight loss scared me (anxious) all over again. So I landed in gastroenterology.
The gastroenterologist was a well-known specialist. After hearing my story, he sent me for psychological testing. The hospital’s diagnosis: severe anxiety, mild depression, somatic symptoms. They prescribed psychiatric medication. I didn’t take it — since nothing was actually wrong, I figured I could relax a little.
Western medicine said nothing was wrong, so I went to a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. After taking my pulse, he said it was “liver qi stagnation” and asked whether I’d been angry, whether I couldn’t let things go. I needed to regulate my emotions and soothe the liver. Made sense to me — I started believing in TCM. I got into TCM theory, the I Ching, Ni Haixia videos, Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind. That’s what pulled me out of the mental spiral; I stopped being anxious.
Honestly, the soothing-the-liver herbs probably weren’t doing much. But the moment I believed they worked, I was already more than half cured. The rest just took time.
Why it failed
After the symptoms started, I decided my mood mattered most and went back to smoking. Every cigarette brought my heart rate down and bought a moment of calm. The quit attempt was over.
Looking back now, watching myself from a third-person perspective: the failure came from stacking a new job with overtime, a diet, and quitting smoking all at the same time.
The new job’s overtime created anxiety. The diet destabilized my blood sugar and tipped me into depression. And quitting smoking produces its own discomfort: anxiety makes the brain’s threat-detection system overactive, so minor discomforts get magnified and interpreted as serious signals. Mild depression, though mostly low mood, often comes with distorted body perception, making you notice — and over-interpret — every tiny physical change. Cutting calories through dieting makes blood sugar swings more likely, which brings palpitations, cold sweat, dizziness — and in an anxious state, the brain reads those as danger signals and triggers even stronger physical reactions. In early nicotine withdrawal, the sympathetic nervous system is easily excited: heart rate fluctuates, mild dizziness and ringing ears appear. An already-anxious person fixates on these changes, and the loop of “notice → magnify → get more anxious” takes over.
So if you’re planning to quit: do only that one thing. Stay happy, stay sunny. If your mood is bad, there’s no shame in putting it off.
What finally worked
I quit on March 25, 2025. As of this writing: 158 days smoke-free, roughly an 83% success rate (17% relapse risk).
At this point I have no physical craving, and almost no psychological one either. Only very occasionally does a flash of nostalgia for smoking appear, and thinking about something else makes it pass immediately. By my standard, I’ve quit successfully.
First, based on my experience: start quitting before you go to sleep. Not a single cigarette from the moment you wake up! If you start midday, you’ll almost certainly cave. Want a cigarette in the morning? Go brush your teeth. Still not working? Go for a run.
Next, commit for real. Don’t tell yourself “finish this pack first.” If you’re quitting, throw away the remaining cigarettes right now. Burn the boats.
Watch your mood. If you really can’t hold out, nicotine gum is sold at any pharmacy. Chew a piece and you’ll feel much better — and don’t beat yourself up: chewing gum is not failure.
And don’t be anxious. If you’re in the middle of crunch at work or dealing with a mess, this is not the time to quit.
Success rates by milestone
If you can make it past the first three days, it gets easier. Past one week, it gets much easier.
- 1 day: 40% (60% relapse)
- 3 days: 50% (50% relapse)
- 7 days: 60% (40% relapse)
- 14 days: 70% (30% relapse)
- 30 days: 75% (25% relapse)
- 90 days: 80% (20% relapse)
- 180 days: 85% (15% relapse)
- 1 year: 90% (10% relapse)
- 5 years: 95% (5% relapse)
Personally I think the critical checkpoints are day 3 and day 7 — past those, it’s simple. After a month the symptoms are basically gone, after three months you rarely think about it, and after a year you can call yourself a non-smoker.