Startup Founder, 10-Year Smoker: How Chantix Helped Me Quit at 33

I’m David Chen. I’m thirty-three, I live in San Jose, California, and I run a software startup that builds analytics tools for e-commerce companies. I also smoked a pack of Camel Crushes almost every day for ten years. I quit eleven months ago with the help of Chantix, and I’m going to tell you exactly how it went, including the parts that weren’t pretty.

In the Bay Area tech scene, nobody talks about smoking. It’s weird. You’ve got people who are obsessed with optimizing every aspect of their lives. They track their sleep with Oura rings, they do ice baths, they drink celery juice, they have standing desks and walking pads. But there’s this subset of founders and engineers who smoke, and everybody just pretends it doesn’t exist. I was one of them.

I started at twenty-three, right after I dropped out of my CS master’s program at San Jose State to join a startup. The company was four people in a garage in Sunnyvale, which sounds like a cliche because it is one. The founder, a guy named Kevin, smoked. He’d take breaks in the driveway, and I’d go with him because those were the moments when he’d think out loud about the product, share strategy, make decisions. The cigarette break was where the real meetings happened. I started smoking to be in the room. Or in the driveway, I guess.

Camel Crushes were my thing. You squeeze the filter and it releases a menthol capsule. I liked the ritual of it, the little pop of the bead, the sudden cool in the back of my throat. It felt like a feature, like some product designer at R.J. Reynolds had understood exactly what would hook a twenty-three-year-old engineer. They probably had.

That first startup failed. I moved to another one, then another, then started my own company at twenty-nine. Through all of it, the smoking stayed constant. I’d smoke at my desk at midnight during crunch periods. I’d smoke in the parking garage of our co-working space in downtown San Jose. I’d smoke on calls with investors, muting myself for the inhale. One time I was on a Zoom pitch with a VC firm and forgot to turn my camera off when I lit up. The partner on the call said, “Is that a cigarette?” I said it was a pen. I don’t think she believed me.

The thing about smoking in tech is that it clashes with the image you’re supposed to project. Healthy, disciplined, high-performance. I ran a company. I was responsible for eleven employees and their salaries. I was in meetings with people who evaluated every aspect of me as a proxy for the company’s potential. And I smelled like smoke. I kept a spare shirt at the office. I’d change after smoking so I wouldn’t stink during afternoon meetings. I kept hand sanitizer and breath mints in my desk drawer. I was managing a secret in plain sight.

My wife, Lisa, never smoked. She’s a product manager at a big tech company, she runs half-marathons, she eats clean. She tolerated my smoking the way you tolerate a partner’s worst habit: with visible frustration and diminishing patience. She didn’t nag. She’d just look at me when I came back inside smelling like smoke, and her face would say everything.

I tried to quit three times before Chantix. First time, I was twenty-seven. Cold turkey. I lasted four days, then we lost a major client and I bought a pack at the 7-Eleven on Santa Clara Street before the client’s email had even finished loading. Second time, twenty-nine, I tried nicotine pouches. Zyn, the little white pouches you put under your lip. They helped with cravings but I never actually stopped wanting cigarettes. I used Zyn for about a month and then started smoking on top of it, which meant I was taking in even more nicotine than before. Brilliant.

Third time, thirty-one. I tried quitting with an app and willpower during a vacation in Maui. Figured if I couldn’t quit in paradise, I couldn’t quit anywhere. I made it the whole seven-day trip, then smoked a cigarette at SFO baggage claim the minute we landed. Lisa didn’t talk to me the entire drive home.

After that third failure, I saw my doctor. Regular checkup. She asked about smoking, I told her the truth. She suggested Chantix, also called varenicline. She explained how it works: it partially stimulates the nicotine receptors in your brain so you get some relief from cravings, but it also blocks nicotine from fully activating those receptors, so if you do smoke, it feels less satisfying. She said it’s not magic, that I’d still have to work at it, but that the medication significantly improves quit rates. She wrote the prescription that afternoon.

I filled it at the CVS on Stevens Creek. A month’s supply of Chantix cost me about forty-five dollars after insurance. I started the medication on a Monday, the way the starter pack is designed. Half a milligram once a day for three days, then half a milligram twice a day for four days, then the full dose of one milligram twice a day. You keep smoking during the first week while the medication builds up in your system. My quit date was the following Monday.

That first week on Chantix while still smoking was strange. By about day four, cigarettes started tasting different. Not bad exactly, but flat. Like the flavor had been turned down. The satisfaction I usually got from the first drag of the morning was diminished. I’d smoke a whole cigarette and feel like I’d only gotten half the payoff. That’s the medication working, blocking the receptors, making the nicotine hit less rewarding. It was disorienting. My brain was used to a specific response and wasn’t getting it.

Quit day, the second Monday, I woke up and didn’t smoke. I put on the prescribed dose of Chantix, ate breakfast (important, because this stuff on an empty stomach will make you nauseous), and went to work. The cravings were there, but they were muffled. Like hearing someone yelling through a thick wall. I could tell the craving existed, but it didn’t have the sharp, urgent quality I remembered from cold turkey. I didn’t feel calm. I felt restless, fidgety, unable to focus for long stretches. But I didn’t feel desperate. The desperation was the thing that had broken me every other time, and Chantix took it down to a level I could manage.

The side effects were real. Nausea was the main one. For the first two weeks on the full dose, I felt queasy every morning. Taking it with a full meal helped, but didn’t eliminate it. I had vivid dreams, which is a well-known Chantix side effect. I dreamed about code. I dreamed I was debugging a production issue and the error log was in a language I couldn’t read. I dreamed about a board meeting where all the investors were dogs. Literal golden retrievers in suits. I’d wake up confused and disoriented. The dreams weren’t nightmares, just intensely strange.

I also had some flatness in my mood for the first few weeks. Not depression. More like the color saturation of my emotions got turned down. Lisa noticed before I did. She said I seemed “muted.” I tracked it carefully because I’d read about the mood-related side effects. I stayed in close contact with my doctor. By week four, the mood flatness lifted and I felt more like myself.

The hardest moment came in week three. We had a board meeting. Our Series A investors were in the room. The meeting didn’t go well. Our growth numbers were below projections and there were hard questions. After the meeting, my COO and I stood in the parking garage debriefing, and he pulled out a cigarette. He didn’t know I’d quit. He offered me one. The smell of the fresh-lit tobacco mixed with the garage’s concrete and oil smell, and my body reacted before my brain could intervene. My hand reached for it. I actually touched the cigarette. My fingers were on it.

Then I pulled back. I said, “I quit three weeks ago.” He said, “Seriously?” I said, “Yeah.” He put the pack away and we talked about the board meeting instead. When I got in my car afterward, I sat there for ten minutes with my hands on the steering wheel, processing how close I’d come. A quarter inch. My fingers had been a quarter inch from taking that cigarette. Chantix or no Chantix, that moment came down to a decision made in a fraction of a second.

The turning point was about five weeks in. I was on a run. I’d started running because Lisa had been asking me to for years, and I figured if I was quitting smoking, I might as well go all in on the health overhaul. I was doing a slow jog on the Los Gatos Creek Trail, maybe a twelve-minute pace, nothing impressive. But at the one-mile mark, I realized I wasn’t winded. My lungs felt open. The air went in deep and came back out clean. For ten years, running had felt like breathing through a straw. Now it felt like breathing. That was the first time I thought: this is actually going to work.

I completed the twelve-week Chantix course and then tapered off as my doctor recommended. Coming off the medication was smoother than I expected. The cravings bumped up slightly for a few days, but nothing like the raw, screaming withdrawal of cold turkey. My body had spent twelve weeks learning to function without nicotine, and it held.

Eleven months out. Here’s my scorecard.

I run three times a week. My pace has dropped from a twelve-minute mile to a nine-minute mile. I ran a 10K last month at Golden Gate Park. Finished in under an hour. Lisa ran it with me. She cried at the finish line. I pretended I wasn’t crying too.

My sense of taste is different. Not just better. Different. I can detect subtle flavors I never could before. Lisa and I went to a wine tasting in Napa last summer and I could actually tell the difference between the wines. Before, wine was just wine. Red or white. Sweet or not. Now there are layers. It’s like someone upgraded my operating system.

My skin looks better. I didn’t expect this one. My complexion was always a little gray, a little dull, and I chalked it up to staring at screens. Turns out it was the smoking. The grayness is gone. My dentist noticed at my last cleaning. She said my gums looked healthier too.

The money saved is real but not life-changing at my income level. About three thousand dollars over eleven months. California cigarette prices are around ten dollars a pack for Camels. I put the money into a vacation fund. Lisa and I are going to Japan this fall.

What I didn’t expect was the mental clarity. I’m a better founder now. Not because I’m smarter, but because I’m not spending twenty percent of my mental bandwidth managing my smoking habit. Thinking about when I can smoke next, how to hide it, where to do it, whether I smell, whether I have mints. All that background noise is gone. My brain has capacity it didn’t have before. I notice it in meetings, in product decisions, in the way I process complex problems. The fog lifted.

If you’re in tech, or any high-performance field, and you’re smoking in secret, I get it. The shame of it compounds the addiction. You feel like a fraud, optimizing everything except the one thing that’s actually killing you. Here’s what I’ll tell you: Chantix gave me an edge I didn’t have on my own. It didn’t do the work for me, but it made the work possible. Talk to your doctor. Get the prescription. Set a quit date. Tell someone.

And if you’re reading this and you don’t work in tech, ignore everything I just said about Silicon Valley. The important part is this: I smoked for ten years, tried three times to quit, failed every time, and then a medication and a decision and a run on a creek trail added up to something that stuck.

You are not alone. There’s someone right now, in a parking garage or a co-working space or a driveway, smoking a cigarette and wishing they weren’t. That used to be me. It doesn’t have to keep being you.