How long it takes for ‘the worst to be over’ when you give up vaping

When you give up vaping, you might hope – if not expect – it to be a relatively breezy process.

Surely it’s going to be nice and simple to ditch the colourful bars and you won’t even be thinking about them after a few days... right?

Wrong.

But that’s not to say it isn’t worth it, because it really is for a large number of reasons from money to health.

The UK are set to have a crackdown on vaping too, so if you’re looking at quitting, it could be a good time.

So prepare yourself, because while you’ll eventually reap the benefits, it’s going to be pretty rough.

After 72 hours of going cold turkey on vapes and nicotine altogether, LADbible’s Chloe Rowland found her ‘physical withdrawal symptoms peaked’.

As well as feeling like she wasn’t ‘with it’ all day she experienced: “Sweating more than usual and still having regular craving spells throughout the day, too.”

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But your health will already be approving by then as Nikola Djordjevic MD – project manager at Med Alert Help – told The Healthy: “After just one day, your heart attack risk starts to decrease."

She explained that this is 'thanks to the lowering of blood pressure, rising blood oxygen levels, and reducing the negative influence on cholesterol levels and the formation of blood clots'.

For Chloe, the struggles of quitting continued for a while as by day four she felt ‘extremely anxious’ and experienced ‘irritability on a whole other level’.

“I'd go as far as to say it felt like I was losing control over it a little bit," Chloe said.

"One positive was that my nicotine cravings had started to subside slightly, and I was down to around five episodes a day. Plus, by this point, I'd become familiar with the feeling so was getting better at dealing with it.”

But she found days six and seven to be the hardest as she had ‘zero concentration’ as well as strong feelings of ‘anger’ – oh, and she caught covid to top it all off.

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Eventually though, the ‘worst was over’.

Chloe found that in weeks two and three, ‘the positives far outweighed any negative side effects’. By then, she was having no physical withdrawal and the cravings were ‘less intense’.

Although she did say: “I found the social triggers the hardest to deal with, like being at the pub where other people were smoking,”

But she continued: “The fact that my skin and oral health had massively improved, my immune system felt stronger and I no longer had that weird, lingering cough, made me push through the fleeting cravings.”

Scientists say the nicotine will be well out of your system after a month and that your lungs will be starting to recover.

With improvements to your overall health cited both by the ex-vaper and science, it definitely seems worth pushing through those tough days.

Topics: Vaping, Health

Jess Battison

Jess is an Entertainment Journalist with a love of all things pop culture. Her main interests include keeping up with the Twitter girlies, waiting for a new series of The Traitors and losing her voice at a Beyoncé concert. She graduated with a first in Journalism from City, University of London in 2021 and has previously worked at MyLondon.

@jessbattison_