Quit21Day 24 after quitting vapingThe same stairs
By Yevhenii, who smoked for 26 years · Updated 30 Oct 2026 · 2 min readWhat's happening in your body
One finding from the six-day vaping studies is easy to overlook. Heart rate fell during abstinence. It is the longer-term mirror of the twenty-minute text. Each session nudged the pulse up, and sessions ran all day, so a regular vaper's heart spent much of its waking life a little above its own pace. For more than three weeks yours has not been nudged.
What to expect
A difference that is easy to miss, because nobody remembers exactly how their body felt a month ago. That is what your notes are for. Do not expect a dramatic change. For vaping nobody has charted what happens to effort and breathing week by week after stopping. If effort brings unusual breathlessness, chest pain, or a cough that is getting worse, see a doctor, because those are not part of recovery.
Try this
Repeat the route from day twelve, the same stairs or the same hill at the same pace, and compare how you feel at the top with what you wrote then.
What else you could do
Take your resting pulse too and set it beside the numbers from the first day and day fourteen. At eleven at night, three measurements in your own handwriting will persuade you better than any text. If you did not write anything then, do it now and repeat in two weeks.
Sources. Measured in vapers. Hughes et al., 2020. Acute effects: Skotsimara et al., 2019. Recovery of exercise capacity after quitting vaping: not measured.