5 Weird Lessons I Learned from Quitting Smoking Cigarettes… By Using Cannabis

I started smoking cannabis and cigarettes at a young age, and I smoked the last cigarette of a 20 year habit on August 29, 2010. In 2018, when I started regularly dry herb vaping, is when I quit regularly smoking anything and everything. Here are some things I learned from quitting nicotine and quitting smoking 8 years apart.

When you first quit nicotine, your sleeping patterns go haywire.

The crazy thing about being addicted to a stimulant like nicotine is that really disrupts your sleeping patterns, and you’ll start to realize this when you quit. The sleep disruptions aren’t slight, either — for the first six months after I quit smoking, I slept for far less than 4 hours a night. It was brutal.

Cannabis helped me to soothe some of the more difficult moments, but it couldn’t completely solve the insomnia.

While I had quit smoking cigarettes and didn’t use a patch or the gum, I was still smoking cannabis and that helped at least smooth some of the edges off of sleepless nights. Thanks to cannabis, I was able to get some sleep when I might not have.

Every once in a while, I still dream about smoking cigarettes.

It’s been several months since I’ve had a smoking dream, but I still get them. The disappointment and dread I feel in having fucked up is always terrible, and I’m never really sure what leads me to smoke in the dreams — it’s as if the dream starts right at me taking that first puff.

By still smoking cannabis, I hadn’t really quit smoking, I was still addicted to feelings associated with smoking and some of the smoking rituals.

I used to heavily favor glass bowls but once I quit smoking I definitely enjoyed joints more often. The problem was, I was still inhaling a bunch of carbon, but at least it wasn’t also loaded with the poison nicotine. Having a joint in your hand isn’t that dissimilar from holding a cigarette, so I wasn’t unlearning that habit. A lot of quitting cigarettes is having to deal with the nicotine withdrawal and the habit withdrawal at the same time, and I disrupted that by using cannabis as my crutch.

Changing to dry herb vaping allowed me to retain some of those rituals and some of those feelings without inhaling so much carbon.

Part of my ability to change over to dry herb vaping was the fact that for the first several weeks, I didn’t like the taste of combusted cannabis at all. It’s as if something had changed in the way I was perceiving it, but the flavor was so bad that I’ve barely smoked since. My husband has continued to smoke, and I do notice that I can be more sensitive to smells and flavors than he is.