Nicotine Gum Got Me Through My SF Commute Without Cigarettes

I’m Ted Nakamura. I’m 43, and I live in the Sunset District of San Francisco. I’ve been a software developer for about eighteen years, currently working at a mid-size fintech company near the Embarcadero. I commuted on BART for the last seven years, and for most of those years, cigarettes were as much a part of my commute as my transit card. Waiting on the platform. Walking from the station to the office. Standing outside during lunch. The whole commute was structured around cigarettes. When I quit using nicotine gum, the commute was the part I was most afraid of losing. Turns out, it was the part the gum replaced best.

I started smoking at 25, which is later than a lot of people. I was living in the East Bay, working my first real developer job at a startup in Oakland. The startup culture in the Bay Area in the 2000s was intense. Long hours, crunch periods, everyone running on caffeine and stress. A few people on my team smoked. We’d go out to the parking lot during builds, when the code was compiling and there was nothing to do for ten minutes, and smoke. It started as something to do during downtime and became something I needed.

I smoked Camel Blues. About three-quarters of a pack a day, give or take. Not the heaviest smoker, but consistent. Daily. For eighteen years. I’d smoke first thing in the morning on my back steps, looking at the fog that always sits over the Sunset in the morning. I’d smoke on the walk to the N Judah, which I’d take to the BART station. I’d smoke on the BART platform if I was outside, or sneak one in the little gap between the station entrance and the escalator if I was at one of the underground stations. I’d smoke on the walk from Embarcadero station to my office, about a twelve-minute walk along Market Street and then down toward the waterfront. I’d smoke at lunch. I’d smoke on the walk back to BART. I’d smoke waiting for the train home. I’d smoke on the walk from the station to my house. Each of those was a specific cigarette in a specific place at a specific time.

That routine is what made quitting so terrifying. It wasn’t just about the nicotine. It was about every single transition point in my day being marked by a cigarette. Walking somewhere? Smoke. Waiting for something? Smoke. Finished something? Smoke. The cigarettes were the punctuation of my day. They separated one activity from the next. Without them, the day felt like one long run-on sentence.

My wife Yuki had been asking me to quit for years. She’d never been a smoker. She’s from Yokohama originally and grew up in a non-smoking family. When we started dating, she accepted that I smoked but always made it clear she wished I wouldn’t. After our son Kai was born in 2021, the requests got more urgent. She didn’t want smoke on my clothes when I held him. She didn’t want me smelling like cigarettes at his school events. She’d read all the studies about thirdhand smoke, the residue that gets on your clothes and skin, and she was worried about it transferring to him.

I tried to quit once before, in 2022. Cold turkey. I told myself I was just going to stop and that would be it. I made it through the first morning okay. Got on the N Judah without smoking, which felt wrong but manageable. Got to the BART platform and the craving hit hard. There were other people smoking on the outdoor platform at Balboa Park. The smell was everywhere. I was gripping the strap of my laptop bag so tight my knuckles were white. I made it to the office. By lunch, I was pacing. By mid-afternoon, I couldn’t concentrate on my code. I was staring at my monitor, reading the same function over and over, unable to hold a thought. I left work early, walked to the gas station near the Embarcadero, and bought a pack. I smoked two on the walk back to BART and felt an immediate wave of guilt and relief simultaneously. That was my only serious quit attempt until last year.

In January 2025, I went for my annual physical. My doctor, Dr. Chen at UCSF, told me my lung function test showed some early decline. Nothing alarming yet, but the trend line was clear. “You’re 42,” she said. “If you quit now, your lungs can still recover significantly. If you wait another ten years, the damage becomes more permanent.” She asked if I’d considered nicotine replacement therapy and I said I hadn’t really looked into it. She recommended nicotine gum specifically because of what I told her about my commute. She said the gum is good for people who have a lot of micro-triggers throughout the day, the little moments where you’d normally light up. She said the gum can fill those gaps one at a time.

I bought a box of Nicorette 4mg, the spearmint flavor, at the Walgreens on Irving. Set my quit date for February 1st, 2025. A Saturday, so I could have the weekend to adjust before dealing with the commute on Monday.

That weekend was rough but survivable. I stayed close to home. Chewed gum when the cravings hit. Yuki kept Kai busy so I could have space to be miserable. The gum tasted aggressively minty and the nicotine tingle took some getting used to. But I could feel it working. The cravings came in waves, like everyone says they do, and the gum smoothed the peaks. Not eliminated them. Smoothed them.

Monday morning. The real test. I woke up, and for the first time in eighteen years, I did not go out to the back steps to smoke. I stood in the kitchen, chewed a piece of Nicorette, and made coffee. The gum with coffee tasted terrible, by the way. Minty gum and black coffee is not a combination anyone would choose voluntarily. But it was nicotine, and my brain accepted it grudgingly.

The walk to the N Judah was the first commute cigarette I had to replace. I usually lit up as soon as I walked out the front door and smoked the entire walk to the train stop, about seven minutes. Instead, I popped a fresh piece of gum right before leaving the house. The chewing gave me something to do. My hands were empty and that felt wrong, so I put them in my jacket pockets. The walk took the same amount of time but felt longer. Without the cigarette to focus on, I noticed things I’d been walking past for years without seeing. A house with a really elaborate garden. A cat that sits in a window on 30th Avenue. The particular gray of the Sunset fog in the morning. Weird what you miss when you’re staring at the tip of a cigarette.

The BART platform was the biggest trigger. The Balboa Park station, where I catch BART, has an outdoor platform. People smoke there even though you’re not supposed to. The smell of cigarette smoke is always in the air. That first Monday, I stood on the platform with gum in my cheek and the smell hit me and I wanted a cigarette more than I’ve wanted almost anything. My body literally leaned toward the guy smoking twenty feet away. I chewed the gum harder, felt the nicotine tingle intensify, and stared at my phone until the train came. That became my platform strategy: gum and phone. Don’t look at smokers. Don’t breathe through your nose.

On the train itself, I was fine. You can’t smoke on BART, obviously, so the train had never been a smoking trigger. It was actually a fifteen-minute reprieve from craving. I’d park the gum and zone out. But then the doors would open at Embarcadero and I’d step off the train and the twelve-minute walk to the office would begin. This had been a one-cigarette walk. Always. For seven years. I’d light up right outside the station and time it so I finished just before reaching the office doors.

The replacement was simple: new piece of gum for the walk. I’d unwrap it on the escalator going up from the platform and have it working by the time I hit the street. Market Street in the morning is full of people walking to work, coffee cups in hand, headphones in. Nobody noticed that I was chewing gum instead of smoking. Nobody cared. But in my head, it was enormous. Each block I walked without a cigarette felt like a small victory. The gum was delivering nicotine, and the chewing was keeping my mouth busy, and the act of unwrapping a fresh piece at the station had become its own ritual, replacing the lighter and the first drag.

The walk to the office is where I started to appreciate what Dr. Chen had meant about micro-triggers. It wasn’t just “the commute” that was a trigger. It was every part of the commute separately. The walk to the train. The platform. The walk from the station. Each one was its own cigarette, its own moment, its own craving. The gum let me tackle them individually. A piece for the walk to the station. It carried me through the platform too, sometimes. A new piece for the walk to the office. It was modular in a way that the patch never would have been. The patch would have just dumped nicotine on me all day. The gum let me respond to each specific trigger.

Lunch was another transition point. My office is near the water, and I used to walk out to the Embarcadero promenade and smoke while looking at the Bay Bridge. It was genuinely one of the most pleasant parts of my day. The view is incredible. Alcatraz in the distance, the bridge, the water. Smoking there felt like a moment of peace in the middle of a stressful day. Replacing it was hard. The gum couldn’t replicate the visual beauty of standing by the water with a cigarette. But I still went out there. Same spot. Same view. Piece of gum instead of a cigarette. The view was still there. The peace was still there, mostly. What was missing was that satisfied exhale, the physical act of breathing something out. I started doing deep breathing exercises instead. Inhale through the nose for four counts, hold for four, exhale through the mouth for four. It sounds like wellness nonsense, but it actually helped fill the gap.

The afternoon commute home was a mirror image of the morning. Walk to BART station: gum. Platform: gum plus phone distraction. Walk home from the station: gum. Each piece lasted about 30 minutes, which was usually enough to cover each leg of the commute with a little overlap. I was going through about 12 pieces a day in the first month, which is within the recommended range for a 4mg user.

My hands were the unexpected problem. I didn’t realize how much of my smoking habit was about my hands having something to do. During the commute, my hands were holding a cigarette, lighting a lighter, flicking ash. Without that, they were just hanging at my sides or shoved in my pockets, restless and twitchy. The gum occupied my mouth but not my hands. I started carrying a small stress ball in my jacket pocket for the first few weeks. Squeezed it during the walks. It looked a little odd, but less odd than going back to smoking.

By month two, the commute was transformed. I’d established a new routine. Gum before leaving the house. Fresh piece at the station. Fresh piece for the walk to work. The panic of those first few days was replaced by something closer to normalcy. The cravings still came at the trigger points, but they were softer. More like memories of cravings than the real thing.

My developer work actually improved during this period, which I didn’t expect. My concentration got better once the initial withdrawal phase passed. I could hold longer focus sessions without the interruption of needing a smoke break. My code reviews were more thorough. I wasn’t itching to finish a task so I could go outside and light up. The gum was at my desk and I could have nicotine whenever I wanted without leaving my chair. My productivity went up enough that my team lead mentioned it at a standup.

The tapering happened naturally. By month three, I was at about 8 pieces a day. By month five, 4 or 5. I noticed that some commute legs no longer required their own piece. I could do the walk to the station and the platform wait on a single piece. Then the whole BART ride home from station to station became gum-free. The pieces clustered around morning and lunchtime, which were always my strongest cravings.

By month eight, I was at 1 or 2 pieces a day. A morning piece and sometimes a lunch piece. By month ten, I stopped completely. I’ve been nicotine-free for about two months now.

The commute is different. I walk to the N Judah and I notice the fog and the garden and the cat in the window. I stand on the BART platform and scroll my phone and don’t think about smoking. I walk to the office and look at the Bay and drink my coffee, which tastes better now than it ever did paired with a cigarette, and I think about the day ahead. The transitions that used to be marked by cigarettes are now just transitions. They don’t need to be marked by anything. They just are.

Yuki tells me I smell better. Kai, who’s four now, has never seen me smoke. He doesn’t know I ever did. When he’s old enough, I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him that his dad made a mistake for a long time and then fixed it, and that the fixing was hard but worth it. I’ll tell him about the gum, about the BART platform, about the stress ball in my pocket. I’ll tell him that changing a habit that’s woven into every part of your daily routine is one of the hardest things a person can do. And that it’s possible. Even if you’ve been doing it for eighteen years.

I’m Ted Nakamura. The fog still rolls over the Sunset every morning. I still ride BART to work. The view of the bay from the Embarcadero is still beautiful. The only thing that’s different is that I’m not smoking while I look at it. And that makes all the difference.