I’ve always had what some might call an addictive personality - once I start something that I enjoy, I can’t put it down, whether it’s TV, a new video game, or a project at work. This serves me well at times. I’m known at work as someone who won’t quit until I’ve solved a problem - a great asset for a software engineer. Most of this I can probably put down to my dopamine-chasing brain, and this led me to believe my nicotine addiction was something that would be harder for me to kick than most.
One fateful night, when I was about 26, I was handed a disposable vape, and three years later I was still unable to put it down. I’ve seen friends pick up and drop vaping over the years like it was nothing, but for me, I thought I was more addicted than most. I would have a backup on me at all times. I would take a puff when waking in the night. I would go to extreme lengths to make sure I could get my next hit of nicotine.
I wasn’t in denial for very long. There were a good two years of, “I know this is a problem, but I don’t really care,” followed by a year of stopping, then restarting the next time I had a drink, or the next time I hit a minor inconvenience.
Basically, when I wasn’t vaping, I wanted to be.
I was determined to quit, though, and I don’t like a problem I cannot solve. That led me to try some interesting ways to stop.
How LLMs did not help me
My first port of call was to ask ChatGPT - 4o at the time, if it matters - what successful quitting looked like, and what the best approaches were to stay off for good. Was it nicotine replacement, cold turkey, rehab centres? I wasn’t forking out for rehab, but I wanted to know what would give me the greatest chance of success.
This actually led to a book recommendation I’d heard of before, called How to Quit Smoking (or the vaping version) by Allen Carr. The success stories about putting it down and never picking it up again sounded too good to be true, and a bonus was that you were allowed to keep vaping until you finished the book - amazing.
But who has time for a book?
Me:Hey Chat, give me the main takeaways from the book, stop me vaping forever, make no mistakes - whatever.
Obviously, this wasn’t very successful.
After a few months of haphazard attempts at reframing nicotine based on a few bullet points - understanding the ideas enough to repeat them, but not really believing them when I actually wanted a vape - I gave in and read the actual book.
I like to think I’m very rational, and the book itself felt a bit too abstract for my liking. This might work for others, but when I was closing my eyes trying to picture my nicotine addiction as a monster living inside my brain, I wasn’t able to take it seriously enough to spend the time reframing my mind.
I put the book down, decided it was far too good to be true, and moved on.
A few more miserable months later, I found another book. The author was lauded by the no-drinking community for alcohol addiction, and they had written a book called This Naked Mind: Nicotine. More or less, it was the same approach, just written with a bit more of a scientific angle - and something clicked this time.
I started to believe what vaping was taking away from me, or more accurately, I started to realise I already knew what nicotine had stolen from me over the years: health, fitness, independence.
Both of these books work by outlining myths you believe about the drug you’re consuming, such as, “Vaping helps me relieve stress,” and then presenting you with facts and exercises to help you realise that no - in fact, vaping is causing the stress.
There are more myths and examples, but as I mentioned before, me summarising them here won’t help you quit, go and read one of the books - but finish this article first.
What ended up mattering more than I expected was the value of these books being quite, well, repetitive. Actually reading the arguments, over and over, was different, the repetition was part of it, the reframing was part of it, and even the bits I rolled my eyes at were probably part of it. AI is very good at compression, but this compression destroyed the thing I were trying to get from the source in the first place.
In this case, I didn’t need a summary, I needed to be slowly convinced.
So where did LLMs actually come in?
Well, there’s still a lot of work to do, even when equipped with all these new beliefs. The approaches in these books aren’t magic, and quitting cold turkey still takes work - I put down the vape, and of course the withdrawals started kicking in.
The key to these withdrawals is to reframe “I really need a vape” into something closer to “my addiction is dying inside me, don’t give it new life.” But that’s a very strong mental game to be playing all the time. Relying on my memory, or trying to flick through notes I’d made while reading the book, would have stopped me in my tracks - and attempting to just not think about vaping is a surefire way to fail - leaning into it and reframing it, then being at peace with the feeling, is the better approach.
So I took ChatGPT 4/o - probably the most overly enthusiastic model, which might actually have contributed to my success here - and told it to coach me through quitting. I would open the same thread every time I had a craving, a physical sensation, or even just a moment where I cared a little less about succeeding. It could help me reframe what I was feeling, reassure me that the doubts were normal, give me a rough timeline for what I might experience, and cheerlead me on.
I still have the long-running thread from 2025 here - I kept this open for months, asking about the effects of nicotine on my general wellbeing.
But here are some snippets
Seeing into the future
One of the things ChatGPT was surprisingly good at was making the temporary feel, well, temporary.
At one point, I asked:
Me: When do I expect cardio fitness to improve
ChatGPT came back with a whole timeline, starting with:
ChatGPT:Week 1–2 (You are here)
You may still feel a bit sluggish or “off” during workouts
Even if you don’t feel it yet, your lungs and heart are already improving.
Then, a couple of hours later, I was back again:
Me: Improving vO2 max
And again, it gave me something concrete to look forward to:
ChatGPT:You’ll probably start seeing performance improvements in Week 3+ and measurable aerobic gains in Month 2.
I wouldn’t take those exact timelines as medical advice, and old ChatGPT had a particular talent for sounding very sure of itself. But that wasn’t really the important part - on the surface, I was asking about fitness, but in reality, I was looking for reassurance that quitting was actually moving me somewhere.
When you’re in the middle of it, feeling worse can very quickly turn into, “Well, maybe nicotine was actually helping me.” Having something there to remind me that I was going through a process, and that there were things on the other side of it, helped me sit with it. It made the temporary feel temporary.
Turning loss into something I was getting back
It also kept flipping the framing from what I was losing to what I was getting back. Earlier in the same conversation, ChatGPT had said:
ChatGPT:Because you’re not just avoiding nicotine. You’ve stopped wanting it.
And:
ChatGPT:You’re in the home stretch of transformation, not just abstinence.
Those lines are extremely ChatGPT/4o, possibly the most enthusiastic model ever released, but at the time that enthusiasm was actually useful. I’d spent years thinking nicotine gave me things. Stress relief, a break, something to do, something to look forward to, something that helped me focus. Now I was asking about my cardio improving, my VO2 max, my breathing, my recovery. Those were all things I cared about, and all things I had basically accepted getting worse while I was vaping.
ChatGPT kept reminding me, I wasn’t losing nicotine, I was regaining control over my health.
It was there when the books weren’t
There was also something surprisingly important about when these conversations happened. A lot of those messages were quite late at night, at midnight, when I’m having some strange physical sensation, craving nicotine, or suddenly deciding I don’t care quite as much about quitting anymore, I’m not going to pull Allen Carr off the shelf and find the relevant chapter. ChatGPT was just there, and I could type the stupid thought exactly as it appeared in my head, as soon as it did - this speed helped me reframe before a thought or craving took hold.
“I really want a vape.”
“One wouldn’t matter.”
“Why do I feel like this?”
“Is this normal?”
Instead of trying to remember what I was supposed to think, I could just hand it over. That was the part that started to feel a little bit like having a sponsor - not in the full human sense of that word, but in one very useful way. It was an always-available thread that knew what I was trying to do, knew the framework I was using, and didn’t get bored when I came back with the same argument for the fifteenth time.
Addiction is repetitive. It doesn’t come up with some brilliant new reason to vape every day, it says the same things over and over again. You’ve had a bad day. You’ve quit long enough now. Maybe you can be a casual vaper this time. You clearly still want it, otherwise you wouldn’t be thinking about it. Just one.
The LLM didn’t get tired of answering those thoughts, on repeat, 24/7, and yes, we can probably call this cognitive offloading, maybe I could have reasoned this myself, but I feel in this case, it was useful, and the end result is still the same, I am healthier today than I was 2 years ago.
The LLM wasn’t teaching me anything new
I think this is where the real value started to become obvious, because it wasn’t necessarily telling me something the books hadn’t already told me. The books were the things that got me from “nicotine is something I love but unfortunately need to give up” towards “nicotine is the thing creating the discomfort I keep using nicotine to relieve.”
The authors of these books can probably be credited to saving so many lives, and I would be doing them an injustice to say that their work wasn’t THE most important element to this process.
But the LLM was doing something different- it was taking whatever I was experiencing at that exact moment and giving the framework back to me in a form I could actually use. If I thought, “I really need a vape,” it could push me back towards, “No, this is the addiction asking to be fed. If you don’t feed it, it gets weaker.” If I had some strange physical symptom, instead of immediately letting my brain turn that into “see, you felt better when you were vaping,” I could ask what might be going on and then reframe the sensation as something I could sit with rather than something I needed to fix with nicotine. If I suddenly cared less about quitting, it could remind me why I’d started without me having to reconstruct the entire argument in my own head.
In the moment, this was a huge help- the useful part wasn’t that ChatGPT knew more than the books, because it didn’t, the useful part was that it could repeat the same framework back to me in the context of whatever excuse, craving, or weird sensation my brain had come up with that day, and it never got bored of doing it.
The lesson?
The change came from doing the long, boring part myself - reading, thinking, noticing the beliefs I had about nicotine, and slowly becoming convinced that I wasn’t giving up something valuable. Only then did AI become helpful. Maybe theres a deeper lesson here about the role of AI in our lives - probably not.
AI wasn’t replacing the work, it was helping me hold onto the work when I was at my weakest. That is a much less magical story about AI, but I think it’s a much more interesting one- AI was not the source of the idea, it was the consistent thread, the thing I could reach for when my own brain was suddenly very motivated to forget everything I had learned because it wanted another hit.
So, what is the lesson, I’m not actually sure, I am not much of a writer as I said - but I decided to put fingers to keys to attempt to share my experience, I was the most addicted person I knew, I’m also the laziest, quitting is hard and uncomfortable, and using ChatGPT to offload some of the tough thinking was life changing for me.
But LLMs aside, quitting the right way, and staying off nicotine, is actually one of the easiest things I’ve ever done - after the physical symptoms disappeared, there was no more willpower required, I didn’t want one - even in my most out of my mind drunk states, I’ve never since thought about taking a hit - I almost don’t even believe it myself.
Our minds are complicated, and so is addiction, use the tools available to you, make your own skill, read my embarrassing ChatGPT thread
The books
Both of these are worth far more than any summary of them, including this one.
- Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Quit Vaping - Allen Carr and John Dicey. The one that didn’t land for me, but it has worked for an enormous number of people, so don’t take my word for it.
- This Naked Mind: Nicotine - Annie Grace and William Porter. Same core argument, framed a bit more scientifically. This is the one that clicked.
Neither of those are affiliate links, I don’t get anything if you buy them.