You see it advertised all the time. All of your happy cigarette-free friends want you to buy them, and you see them next to the cigarettes almost anywhere you can buy them. They’re a giant rip-off, though, and don’t actually work to quit smoking.
Why? They treat smoking as a disease, just like the common cold. Everybody wants some kind of “magic pill” that will cure their addiction to smoking, because all of the other ways just seem unbearable. Let’s take a look at the main one for a second here:
Cold Turkey? Most people connect quitting cold turkey with months of misery as your body detoxes itself of nicotine. You’ve heard the horror stories of people quitting smoking cold turkey and being awful company for weeks.
Back to the nicotine patch. It seems like the perfect cure: You slap one on in the morning, and don’t feel any cravings for cigarettes. Repeat for a few weeks, and you’re cured.
The problem comes in when you, like every smoker does, happen upon one of your smoking friends. You’ll rip the nicotine patch off, stuff it in your pocket, and light up a cigarette. Why? Because the nicotine patch doesn’t make you not want to smoke, it just makes you not want nicotine.
Your mental ties with smoking (seeing your friends, getting off of work, etc.) are still there. The tiny little success rate from nicotine patches comes from people who manage to (very much like cold turkey quitters) push through all of those triggers for long enough. That doesn’t sound much better than quitting without the patch, does it?
