Quit21Day 6 after quitting vapingIf you came here from cigarettes
By Yevhenii, who smoked for 26 years · Updated 30 Oct 2026 · 2 min readWhat's happening in your body
Many people who vape started in order to stop smoking. For them this week holds a specific trap, and it has been measured. When former smokers abstained from their vape in the 2020 study, their craving for tobacco cigarettes went up alongside their craving for the vape. The brain remembers both routes to nicotine and asks for whichever is nearer.
What to expect
The thought that one cigarette would not count, since it is vaping you are quitting. It counts more. The NHS puts it plainly. Stop vaping only if you are confident you can do it without smoking. A cigarette is the worst available outcome of this attempt, worse than vaping again. If that confidence is not there yet, keeping the vape for now or cutting down slowly is a reasonable choice, and not a failure.
Try this
Decide the order of your fallbacks now and write it down. First nicotine replacement from a pharmacy. Then, if it truly comes to it, the vape, logged here as a slip. A cigarette is not on the list.
What else you could do
Keep no cigarettes in the house. If you never smoked, the same nicotine logic applies to you, so do not borrow one from a friend to get through a bad evening. Tell someone who knows your history what you are doing, so that there is one person to call before a shop. And if a cigarette does happen, log it and stop again straight away. One is one.
Sources. Measured in vapers. Hughes et al., 2020. NHS Better Health, How to quit vaping.