The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Should I develop a nicotine addiction?
For a while now, I've been curious about nicotine. Smoking, of any kind, is something I've always despised: It smells bad, blackens the teeth, has a terrible risk profile, and almost all my experiences with it have been unpleasant (I had a cigar recently, and it cleared the bar of "I'm not hating it"). Nonetheless, I've always been interested in the "good parts" of nicotine, and with its resurgent popularity, it's more available than ever, in several forms: gum, tablet or whatever that thing swedish people use is.
I am, however, slightly worried about giving it a try: I know myself to be quite a compulsive consumer with a few things (most notably food and candy, but also internet forum discussions), and I fear I might develop dependency. Have any of you guys tried it? Did it make you feel noticably different? Was it easy to quit? Any suggestions regarding dosage?
I've been using nicotine pouches for about 3 years.
When you have a low tolerance you get a head rush and supposedly it helps you focus. I don't know if it really helps with the kind of deep focus you'd want for studying but it certainly keeps you awake and at my kitchen job it does get you into the headspace to manage the 20 things you're paying attention to at once. Practically I should only be using it for these reasons but it feels nice so I've ended up taking it constantly.
Long term downsides: a pouch feels relaxing but they are heightening your baseline level of anxiety in the meantime, a pouch will give you energy but lower your baseline level of motivation.
Yes, and then no. For the first year I could go off it for a month without noticing anything, once I started tapering off to 4mg pouches from the 11s I had eventually ramped up to I got a taste of the classic nicotine withdrawal symptoms. One of the things a friend reported to me was that you feel amazing while quitting, I also experienced this while tapering off but it was back and forth between that and the bad symptoms.
I do plan to quit because I'd rather take the 20 or so euro a week and go to a nice restaurant instead, once these 4mg cans run out I'll try and find something weaker and failing that just stop altogether.
Don't go past 6mg and avoid the temptation to increase the strength as your tolerance goes up. Right now it's getting hard to find even 6s in my local shops, one place told me the weakest they had was 17mg.
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Smoking sucks. The first drag is like ten seconds of enjoyment followed by what feels like several minutes of work and wishing it would be over already. I can't imagine getting addicted to it, but also I can't imagine anything more upsetting to be casually addicted to.
Vaping is a little nicer and I would definitely never buy my own nicotine vape pen because I could imagine using it whenever I feel even slightly tired and pulling on it all day long.
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Quitting smoking is easy. I've done it fifty times
Smoking on and off for ten years to counter adhd issues and to have an excuse to step outside, sometimes months long gaps between smokes, sometimes chain smoking during particularly important tasks. Never felt anything more than a cranky feeling that lasted a day and constipation when deprived of tobacco for longer than 48 hours.
It still feels worth doing for me but cigarettes are really bad indoors.
I'm sure you've all heard it before but anyone who smokes should switch to vaping, it has like 1/100th of the health consequences for the same benefit.
(Also a bit selfish, I also despise cigarette smoke)
100%. Vaping isn't something I'd recommend people start, but when switching from a cigarette habit, you're doing yourself an enormous favor.
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Please don’t. I had to stuff an entire can of Zyn packs into my mouth just to answer your question.
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I don't think it's worth it if you already consider yourself to have an "addictive personality", so to speak. It definitely feels good, but once you start getting cravings that pretty much cancels it out, in my opinion. My now-fiancée and I both got into vaping for a couple years or so during college and, honestly, only decided to quit when our state banned all the non-tobacco flavors of vape cartridges and it became too much of a pain to support the habit. I found it surprisingly easy to quit given the reputation (it was kind of unpleasant for a week or so but then I felt back to normal) but she had an absolute bitch of a time, with physical withdrawal symptoms that went on for months. I'll still take a hit off a friend's vape or share a cigarette at a party once in a blue moon -- again it really is a nice feeling, especially in a party environment where you're talking to people and already a little tipsy -- but she's convinced (probably rightly) that if she tried it again at all it would kickstart the addiction all over again. So if you already think you're susceptible to that kind of thing, I think it's pretty much a guarantee that you'll end up with a proper addiction/dependency -- which in my view makes the juice very much not worth the squeeze.
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I started vaping, on a rainy night when I was stuck outside my Airbnb in London. My ex had cancer, so we spent the wait reading through the literature and finally convinced ourselves that the harms were minimal, compared to cigarettes at the very least. Putting anything but virgin air in your lungs has some downsides.
That being said, I mildly regret developing a nicotine dependence. When I was forced to stop cold-turkey, it was best described as a male version of PMSing or roid-rage.
The upsides? It gives you something to do when hanging out with smokers. It gives me a small boost when I run away to the toilets for a quick puff at work. Nicotine buzzes are fun.
On the balance, I think it's better not to start. I think I read too much Gwern.
What about weight loss? Just about the only hot 30 year old women I know all smoke. Rhea Seehorn smokes in Better Call Saul and look at her.
The fact that you are (justifiably) a fan of Better Rim Kim doesn’t justify your filthy addiction.
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I don't think even heavy use of my vape appreciably diminished my appetite. I certainly didn't lose any weight because of it. Thinking about the people I know who smoke or vape, they're more likely to be obese than not.
If you're that keen on losing weight, then you can source Chinese semaglutide as dried peptides for the same expense and save yourself the addiction.
Wow. I'm not keen on losing weight - I want to lose like 10 pounds but that's about it - but is illegal Chinese semaglutide any cheaper than the real stuff? I know some people that take it, and one paid for it at the start of the year and had to pay the whole deductible until it got covered, and it was painful. A prescription has to be $2k, at least...
Scott has a recent post up about it.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ozempocalypse-is-nigh
It doesn't take much effort or knowledge to reconstitute it with bacteriostatic water or inject it. I presume you could take it orally too, but I'm not 100% sure about that.
It seems to be way cheaper, and probably safe unless you look at extremely shady sources. I'd do it, if I felt like I needed ozempic, but I also have the option of visiting India and getting it at about $100 for a month's supply.
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There's no good part. Not really. Once you're used to it, all you're doing is alleviating your want for it, and removing the negative effects from not having it. There's no real positive effect at that point. Just an unhealthy, expensive habit.
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I've long been an occasional cigar or drunk-cigarette smoker, like a couple times a year. I never felt any compulsion to smoke regularly. Last year I tried Zyns. I quite like them. They deliver a pleasant buzz and burst of energy when doing something, give a little hint of taste to stimulate me without calories or the gallon of diet coke or green tea I'd drink on a long drive, they're totally unobtrusive when walking around, and there's not really any gross residue. I use them a couple times a week, and rarely more than one a day. I've never gotten a craving or a headache on a day I don't use them.
But I perceive that I have a non-addictive personality when it comes to substances (less so when it comes to other things). I just don't ever really feel the urge to use weed or alcohol or nicotine. So Your Mileage May Very Very Much Vary.
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I smoke cigars, generally about once a week when the weather is nice during the summer. The nicotine is a pleasant part of the experience and that usage pattern does not cause any apparent compulsion to consume more. I probably wouldn't bother with a product that was just nicotine without the tobacco, but I'm also just not much of a drug guy in general.
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