Bringing the line down

Once the ending is back and the number is known, you can bring the line down. This is the gradual route, and it suits people who want the vape to fade rather than stop, and ex-smokers who want the insurance to stay in the drawer to the end. The NHS describes it under three headings, and I'll follow them with what chapter 6 adds.

Strength and number together. The NHS says to check the milligrams per millilitre on your liquid and lower it gradually, paying attention to how you feel. Chapter 6 says why that on its own won't do it. Dawkins's vapers on the weak liquid doubled their consumption and ended the hour just as comfortable. If you drop from twelve to six and let the hand do what it likes, the hand will make up the difference and the line won't move. So drop the strength and hold the number. The tally from the week before is your ceiling. If yesterday was forty draws at twelve, today is forty or fewer at six, and the drawer and the one-draw rule are what hold it there.

If you're vaping more, you've cut too fast. That's the NHS's own line, and it's a good one. The number going up after a strength change means the fall is bigger than you can hold, and the answer is to go back a step, not to fight it. Only cut down when you're ready, the page says. Ready means the number's steady at the current strength.

Longer gaps. The NHS example is that if you vape every twenty minutes, try forty. I'd put it in terms of the day. Once the strength is down a step and the number is steady, stretch the three vape-free places to four, then five. Add the hour after meals. Add the walk. Each place you take back is a gap, and each gap is one the loop can no longer run through.

What the fall feels like now. As the line comes down, the falls get slightly bigger, because there's less on the line to hide them. You'll feel more of what chapter 5 described. Restlessness, an edge, the thought that keeps returning. Hughes's finding for tobacco is that the reliable withdrawal symptoms peak in the first week of stopping and last two to four weeks. Bringing the line down spreads that thinner. Each step down is a small first week. You won't get the full size of it, because you're not stopping, but you'll get a version, and it's the same version each time, and it passes each time, which is worth noticing.

The walk and the breath. When a fall arrives and you've decided not to go to the drawer, the two things that reliably help are the breath, twice, and moving. The NHS lists going for a walk among ways to manage cravings, and it works because a craving is a few minutes long and a walk is longer than that. You don't have to outlast the fall by will. You have to be somewhere else when it peaks.

A date. Bringing the line down has one weakness, which is that without a date it becomes a place to live. Six milligrams, twenty draws a day, for three years. So set a date, before you start, for the day the line reaches zero. Two months from now is reasonable for most people. A date turns the fade into a plan.

Zero, and after. At the bottom of the fade there's a choice. Some people go to a zero-nicotine liquid for the hand and the mouth, and then let the device die. Some go straight to nothing. Some, especially ex-smokers, keep the drawer stocked for a while as insurance and never open it. Any of those is fine. What's not fine is a zero that never arrives, and the date is what stops that.