To stay with the drug theme: I’ve had moderate success using nicotine lozenges to “jumpstart” an exercise habit. For the uninitiated, nicotine is habit-building more than it is directly addictive and slow-release forms like lozenges or patches are relatively safe. I had no trouble stopping the lozenges after a few weeks and the habit stuck.
Do be careful with this if you have any cardiovascular ailments (particularly hypertension), as nicotine is a vasoconstrictor.
nicotine is habit-building more than it is directly addictive
This seems doubtful. Various other sources have described nicotine as highly addictive, comparable to various “hard” drugs. Evidence is that coffee drinking also seems “habit building”, but it is empirically much, much easier to quit caffeine than to quit nicotine.
This comes up a lot—Gwern has a decent research overview on arguments why nicotine by itself isn’t particularly addictive (spoiler: MAOIs in tobacco) and there also decades of trying and mostly failing to get animals hooked on nicotine alone. As far as I can tell, society has just conflated nicotine and smoking and blamed the former for addiction to the latter.
n=1, but I personally do not feel any pull towards using patches not lozenges and ironically often forget about them.
IME there is a real effect where nicotine acts as a gateway drug to tobacco or vaping
in general this whole post seems to make this mistake of saying ‘a common second order effect of this thing is doing it in a way that will get you addicted—so don’t do that’ which is just such an obvious failure mode that to call it a chesterton fence is generous
To stay with the drug theme: I’ve had moderate success using nicotine lozenges to “jumpstart” an exercise habit. For the uninitiated, nicotine is habit-building more than it is directly addictive and slow-release forms like lozenges or patches are relatively safe. I had no trouble stopping the lozenges after a few weeks and the habit stuck.
Do be careful with this if you have any cardiovascular ailments (particularly hypertension), as nicotine is a vasoconstrictor.
This seems doubtful. Various other sources have described nicotine as highly addictive, comparable to various “hard” drugs. Evidence is that coffee drinking also seems “habit building”, but it is empirically much, much easier to quit caffeine than to quit nicotine.
This comes up a lot—Gwern has a decent research overview on arguments why nicotine by itself isn’t particularly addictive (spoiler: MAOIs in tobacco) and there also decades of trying and mostly failing to get animals hooked on nicotine alone. As far as I can tell, society has just conflated nicotine and smoking and blamed the former for addiction to the latter.
n=1, but I personally do not feel any pull towards using patches not lozenges and ironically often forget about them.
IME there is a real effect where nicotine acts as a gateway drug to tobacco or vaping
in general this whole post seems to make this mistake of saying ‘a common second order effect of this thing is doing it in a way that will get you addicted—so don’t do that’ which is just such an obvious failure mode that to call it a chesterton fence is generous