How Nicotine Gum and Hypnosis Helped Me Quit Smoking at 31

My name is Jason Kim. I’m thirty-one, I’m a graphic designer in Los Angeles, and I quit smoking fourteen months ago using the weirdest combination of methods you’ve probably heard of: nicotine gum and hypnosis. I know how that sounds. Stick with me.

I started smoking at twenty-three, right after I graduated from ArtCenter in Pasadena. I’d been a non-smoker through college, mostly because I was broke and couldn’t afford the habit on top of tuition and supplies. But when I landed my first real job at a branding agency in Silver Lake, I started going on smoke breaks with the creative director. His name was Marcus, and he was the kind of guy who had brilliant ideas while smoking. He’d light up a Spirit Yellow and start talking about color theory and typography, and I wanted to be in that circle. I wanted to be part of those conversations. So I started bumming American Spirits off him.

Within a month I was buying my own packs. Spirit Yellows at first, because that’s what Marcus smoked. Then I switched to Spirit Blacks because I liked the perique tobacco blend. By the time I was twenty-five, I was smoking about twelve to fifteen cigarettes a day. Not a full pack, but close enough that I was spending seventy, eighty bucks a week in LA where a pack of Spirits costs over twelve dollars.

Smoking fit into my work life perfectly. The agency had a back patio with string lights and succulents, very LA, and half the creative team smoked out there. Every brainstorming session had an unofficial smoke break baked into it. The best ideas came up on that patio. Or at least that’s what we told ourselves. Looking back, we were just addicts rationalizing our addiction by calling it creative fuel.

I tried to quit twice before it stuck.

First attempt was at twenty-seven. A girl I was dating told me she didn’t want to date a smoker. I tried cold turkey for her. Lasted four days. The irritability was bad, but what got me was the concentration issue. I couldn’t focus on design work. I’d stare at my screen for forty-five minutes without making a single useful decision. Everything I produced looked flat and wrong. On day four, I walked to the gas station on Sunset and bought a pack, and within ten minutes of that first drag, I could think clearly again. Or at least that’s what my brain convinced me. The girl and I broke up a month later for unrelated reasons, but I blamed the smoking argument.

Second attempt was at twenty-nine. I tried nicotine patches, the Walgreens generic brand. The patches helped with cravings, but they gave me vivid, unsettling dreams. I’m talking full-color nightmares about things that made no sense. Being chased through empty parking structures by people with no faces. Drowning in warm milk. Stuff that would wake me up at 2 AM sweating. After ten days, I pulled the patch off and went back to smoking because at least Spirits didn’t give me nightmares.

After that second attempt, I settled into being a smoker. I wasn’t happy about it. I noticed I was winded going up the stairs to my apartment. I noticed I’d lost some of my sense of smell, which is a weird thing to notice until you realize you can’t smell the ocean anymore when you drive out to Malibu. I noticed my teeth were yellowing despite whitening strips. But I’d rationalized all of it. I’m only smoking twelve a day. I’m still young. I exercise. I eat well. I’ll quit when I’m thirty.

Thirty came and went. No quit.

The turning point happened in November 2024. I was at a restaurant in Koreatown with my parents. My mom was sitting across from me and she wrinkled her nose and said, in Korean, “You smell like an ashtray.” She said it casually, the way she’d tell me my hair was too long. My dad just looked down at his rice. He didn’t say anything, which was worse. My parents are Korean immigrants who worked twelve-hour days running a dry cleaning business in Glendale so I could go to a fancy art school. They never asked much of me. My mom asking me to not smell like an ashtray was, in her quiet way, telling me she was scared.

I didn’t quit that night. But I started researching. I went deep. I read studies, forums, Reddit threads, quit smoking blogs, everything. I knew cold turkey and patches hadn’t worked for me. I knew I needed something to handle the physical withdrawal and something to handle the psychological attachment. Two different problems. That’s when I started reading about combination approaches.

The nicotine gum part was straightforward. I went with Nicorette, 4mg, the cinnamon surge flavor. My doctor approved it. The plan was simple: whenever I got a craving, chew a piece using the proper technique. Chew, park, chew, park. Let the nicotine absorb through the lining of my mouth. Don’t chew it like regular gum. I’d made that mistake before.

The hypnosis part requires more explanation, because I know it sounds like I’m about to tell you about crystals and chakras. I’m not.

A coworker at my agency had quit smoking using a clinical hypnotherapist in Burbank. She swore by it. I was skeptical, to put it mildly. I’m a designer. I believe in grids, data, and whitespace. Hypnosis sounded like something from a Vegas stage show. But she gave me the guy’s name, Dr. Raymond Torres, and I looked him up. He was a licensed psychologist who used hypnotherapy as one of his tools. He had real credentials, not a strip mall neon sign.

I went in for a consultation. Dr. Torres explained that hypnosis for smoking isn’t about someone swinging a pocket watch and telling you you’re sleepy. It’s closer to guided meditation combined with cognitive reframing. You’re fully conscious. You’re aware of everything happening. What he does is get you into a deeply relaxed state and then work on the unconscious associations your brain has built between smoking and things like stress relief, creativity, social bonding, and reward.

We did four sessions over two weeks, starting one week before my quit date of January 6, 2025. In the first session, he had me close my eyes, relax progressively from my toes up, and then walked me through a visualization where I observed myself smoking from a distance. Not doing it. Watching myself do it. He asked me to notice how I looked, how I smelled, what the cigarette was doing to my body. It was weird, honestly. But something about seeing myself from the outside was powerful. I looked small. I looked dependent.

In later sessions, he worked on rewiring my trigger responses. Every time I’d feel a craving, instead of thinking “I need a cigarette,” I’d been trained to reframe it as “my body is healing and that’s what this sensation means.” I’m not saying it was magic. But it gave me a script to follow when my brain started its old tricks.

My quit date came. January 6, 2025. I woke up, slapped on no patch (they gave me nightmares, remember), and went to work with a pack of Nicorette in my pocket. The first craving hit at 8:45 AM, right when I would’ve normally had my first cigarette with my coffee. I popped a piece of gum. The nicotine hit was slower than a cigarette but it took the physical edge off within a few minutes. Then I used the mental reframing from the hypnosis sessions: this craving is withdrawal, withdrawal is my body healing, healing is good.

It sounds corny written out like that. But in the moment, standing on that patio in Silver Lake where I’d smoked a thousand cigarettes, it gave me something to hold onto besides a cigarette.

The first week was hard. No getting around that. Even with the gum managing the nicotine withdrawal, I was dealing with intense psychological cravings. The hardest moment was on day three. I was under deadline on a packaging design project. The client had sent revisions at 4 PM that needed to be done by 9 AM. I was stressed, exhausted, and my brain was screaming that I needed a cigarette to focus. I chewed three pieces of gum in an hour. I went to the bathroom and did one of the breathing exercises Dr. Torres had taught me: four seconds in, hold for four, out for six. I repeated that ten times. Then I went back to my desk and finished the project. It wasn’t my best work. But it was done and I hadn’t smoked.

By week two, I noticed the gum was handling the cravings well enough that I wasn’t white-knuckling it every hour. I was using six or seven pieces a day, which is within the recommended range. The hypnosis sessions had given me tools for the mental game, and I started to actually believe the reframing. Cravings did start to feel less like an emergency and more like a passing weather system. Unpleasant but temporary.

I went back to Dr. Torres for two more booster sessions during weeks three and four. These focused on long-term maintenance and visualizing myself as a non-smoker. Not as a person who was “trying to quit” or “in the process of quitting,” but as a non-smoker. Full stop. That shift in identity was bigger than I expected. When someone at a bar offered me a cigarette, I didn’t say “I’m trying to quit.” I said “I don’t smoke.” Those are very different sentences.

I tapered off the gum over about two months. From six or seven pieces a day down to four, then two, then one in the morning, then none. I dropped the 4mg down to 2mg pieces for the last three weeks. By mid-March, I was off the gum completely.

Fourteen months later, I’m still a non-smoker. Here’s what’s changed.

I can smell the ocean from Pacific Coast Highway again. That sounds dramatic but it’s literally true. I drove out to Malibu last summer and I rolled the windows down and I could smell salt and kelp and I nearly pulled over because I’d forgotten what that was like.

My work is better. I thought smoking helped me think. It didn’t. It just gave me a ritual around thinking. Now I take walks around the block when I need to brainstorm. Fresh air and movement work better than tar and nicotine. My last two projects won design awards. Not because I quit smoking, but I wasn’t winning those while I was smoking either.

I’ve saved close to $5,000. Spirits in LA are about $12.50 a pack. The gum cost me around $150 total. The hypnosis sessions were $200 each, so $1,200 for six sessions. Even with those costs, I’m way ahead.

My mom hugged me the last time I visited and held on a few seconds longer than usual. She didn’t say anything about how I smelled. She didn’t have to.

If you’re still smoking, especially if you’re young and think you have time, let me tell you something. Eight years felt like nothing while I was in it. I started at twenty-three and suddenly I was thirty and I was hooked and I couldn’t focus without nicotine and my teeth were yellow and I couldn’t smell the ocean. Eight years goes fast when you’re lighting up every hour.

Don’t be afraid to combine methods. Don’t be afraid to try something that sounds weird. If someone had told me at twenty-eight that I’d quit smoking with gum and hypnosis, I would’ve laughed. But here I am, fourteen months free, and I don’t miss it. I really don’t.

You are not alone. Every creative who smokes because it “helps them think,” every person who started by bumming cigarettes to fit in, every son or daughter who can see the worry in their parents’ eyes. You are not alone. And you can stop.