"It's the last thing before I sleep"

The bedside table deserves a chapter, because a lot of readers will have the vape there, and will say it settles them for the night.

Nicotine is a stimulant. That's not in dispute and I don't think you'd dispute it. So a draw before the lamp goes off is a stimulant before sleep, and what you experience as settling is, once again, the fall being reversed, this time at the end of a day when the line has been high since seven in the morning. You feel calmer after the draw than before it. Before it was the beginning of the fall. The draw doesn't help you sleep. It removes a restlessness that not having drawn for twenty minutes produced, and then sits in your blood as a stimulant while you try to drop off.

The three in the morning draw is worth looking at, if you have one. Nicotine's half-life is about two hours, so by three the line has been falling for four or five, and the thing that wakes you, or that you reach for when something else wakes you, is the fall, full size for the first time all day. That's the loop showing itself at night, when the pocket can't run it tight enough to hide. A lot of people who say they never feel withdrawal feel it at three and call it a bad night's sleep.

When you stop, or bring the line down, the NHS lists difficulty sleeping among the things to expect, and Hughes's review puts insomnia among the reliable withdrawal symptoms, peaking in the first week and gone within two to four. So there's an honest cost here. Some nights in the first fortnight will be worse. What I'd put against that is that the nights you have now, with a stimulant at eleven and a fall at three, aren't good nights either. You've just stopped noticing, because you've never had a night without them to compare.

The practical rule is simple and it's the first place I'd start if the bedside is where your vape lives. The vape doesn't go upstairs. It stays in the drawer downstairs from an hour before bed. The first few nights the reach will find an empty bedside table and you'll do the breath from chapter 8 instead. By the end of a week most people find the three o'clock draw has gone, because there was nothing there to have, and the waking went with it.