From a Pack a Day to Running a 5K: How Gum Helped Me Quit

My first cigarette was in a computer lab at UC San Diego, sophomore year, 2014. It sounds like a cliche, but engineering school had a very specific culture around stress and cigarettes. You’d see people clustered outside Jacobs Hall between classes, and the implicit message was that this was how you managed the pressure. A smoke break wasn’t slacking off. It was a reset. Even the language around it felt functional.

I started bumming cigarettes from my classmates. Then buying my own packs. By junior year I was smoking a pack a day, Camel Blues, which I told myself were somehow less bad than regular cigarettes. They were not less bad.

Nine years. I smoked from 22 to 31, through the rest of college, through two jobs, through moving from San Diego to San Jose for a position at a mid-size tech company where I work as a backend engineer. I smoked in parking garages and outside office buildings and on the balcony of my apartment with headphones in.

The thing about smoking as a software engineer is that the habit gets woven into your work rhythm in a very specific way. Debugging a gnarly problem? Go outside, smoke, think. Blocked on a PR review? Smoke break. Deployed something and it immediately broke prod? Smoke, breathe, figure it out. The cigarette became load-bearing infrastructure for how I dealt with the cognitive load of the job. At least that’s what I told myself.

Why I Finally Decided to Stop

There wasn’t one dramatic moment. No health scare, no ultimatum. It was more like a slow accumulation of small things that finally tipped the scale.

I’d signed up for a 5K with some coworkers in spring 2024. It was for a charity, low-stakes, just a fun Saturday thing. I run occasionally, nothing serious, but I figured three miles wasn’t going to kill me. Except when I started actually training for it, I realized how bad my lungs had gotten. I’d be jogging along a flat trail in Almaden Quicksilver park and by the half-mile mark I’d feel this tightness, like something squeezing my chest from the inside. Not pain, exactly. Just resistance. Like my lungs were smaller than they needed to be.

I was 30 years old. I shouldn’t have been feeling that.

Around the same time, a friend of mine from college, also a smoker, had just quit using nicotine gum. She’d been at it for two months and kept texting me about how she could smell things again. Specifically she texted me about smelling rain on pavement and being shocked by how good it was. She’d forgotten what that smelled like. It stuck with me.

I also did the math on money, which I had been avoiding. A pack a day in San Jose runs about $12 to $14. Call it $13 average. That’s $4,745 a year. Over nine years of smoking, I had spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000 on cigarettes. I sat with that number for a while.

I picked a quit date: May 1, 2024. The 5K was May 18.

Learning to Use the Gum Correctly

I bought Nicorette 4mg gum, the Fruit Chill flavor, from the CVS near my apartment. I had tried nicotine gum once before, years earlier, and it had made me nauseous and given me hiccups. This time I looked up the proper technique before starting, because of course I did, I’m a software engineer, I read the documentation.

The technique matters a lot and nobody tells you this. You don’t chew nicotine gum like regular gum. You chew it slowly, a few times, until you feel a tingle or a slight peppery taste, then park it between your cheek and gum and leave it there. The nicotine absorbs through the tissue in your mouth. Then you chew a few more times, park it again, repeat. It’s called chew-park-chew. Takes about 30 minutes per piece.

If you chew it continuously like regular gum, the nicotine gets swallowed too fast and you get the nausea. That was my mistake the first time.

Once I got the technique right, it worked. The sharp edge of a craving, that demanding, urgent pull, would ease off within a few minutes of starting a piece. It didn’t make the craving disappear entirely, but it made it manageable. The difference between a craving I could ride out and one that felt like static taking over my brain.

I used the gum heavily the first two weeks, probably eight to ten pieces a day. Then I tapered. By week six I was down to three or four pieces. By month three, one or two on hard days.

The Late-Night Coding Problem

If you have never been a programmer who smokes, let me describe what quitting felt like during late-night debugging sessions, because this was the hard part.

There is a specific mental state you get into when you’re deep in a problem, four layers down in a stack trace, three browser tabs open with documentation, a hypothesis forming. For nine years, cigarettes were part of that state. Not just a break from it, but woven into it. I’d smoke while thinking, holding the cigarette in one hand and scrolling through code with the other. The nicotine sharpened something, or at least I believed it did.

Removing it felt like losing a tool. The first couple of weeks of quitting, when I hit a late-night coding wall, I’d feel this compound frustration: stuck on the problem plus the absence of my usual chemical support. It was loud. My brain kept saying: this would be easier with a cigarette. You know it would.

What I did instead, and this sounds stupidly simple, was chew gum and take a five-minute walk. Away from the screen, outside if I could, or just to the kitchen and back. Something about the movement helped. I also started keeping a small whiteboard next to my desk and when I got stuck I’d walk over and draw out the problem by hand. It forced a different kind of thinking. It gave my hands something to do that wasn’t reaching for a cigarette.

It took about six weeks before the late-night sessions stopped feeling like deprivation. The association between coding stress and smoking had been so deep for so long that unwiring it took time. But it did unwire.

The 5K

I ran the race on May 18, 2024, seventeen days after I quit smoking.

I was still technically in withdrawal. I had finished the first mile before I consciously registered that I wasn’t struggling. My lungs were working. Not perfectly, not the way a lifelong non-smoker’s would, but they were doing their job without that clenching resistance I’d felt during training runs just six weeks earlier. I finished in 34 minutes, which is not fast, but I finished without stopping, which was more than I’d managed in my training runs.

My coworker Priya was waiting at the finish line with a water bottle and a bag of oranges, and we stood there in the morning sun eating oranges and I thought: I can taste this. I can smell the grass and the sunscreen and the orange peel, and my lungs are moving air without complaining, and I am 30 years old and I have not smoked in seventeen days.

It felt like a before and after.

Now

That was almost two years ago. I ran a half marathon in October 2024, the Rock ‘n’ Roll San Jose, 13.1 miles. I finished in 2:22. I did not feel my lungs once.

The smell thing is real. My friend was right. I can smell things I had been blocking out for years. The eucalyptus trees on my usual running route. Coffee brewing on the other side of the office. The difference between neighborhoods in San Jose, the particular mix of jasmine and car exhaust and warm pavement that tells me I’m close to home.

I don’t miss smoking. I want to be clear about that because I know how it sounds when people say it before you’re ready to hear it. When I was still smoking, people who had quit would say I don’t miss it, and I would roll my eyes because I couldn’t imagine that being true. But it is true. The ritual that felt so necessary turned out to be mostly the addiction narrating itself.

I do still use the gum occasionally, maybe once every couple of weeks when stress peaks. I’m honest with myself about that. But the habit is broken. The neural pathway that said code is hard, therefore cigarette has been overwritten with code is hard, therefore walk, or code is hard, therefore whiteboard, or code is hard, full stop, you’ve been here before, you’ll figure it out.

To You, Still Smoking

Maybe you’re a smoker who works in tech and you’ve built the same scaffolding I did, where cigarettes are how you handle the job. I understand that logic completely. It made sense to me for nine years.

But here is what I know now: the cognitive load didn’t actually decrease. The cigarettes were creating a withdrawal loop that felt like stress relief. Every time I smoked to take the edge off, I was medicating a withdrawal that the smoking itself had caused. I was not solving the problem. I was maintaining the problem while telling myself it was the solution.

Quitting was hard for about six weeks. Genuinely hard. After that it got easier. After three months it was mostly fine. After a year, I forgot to think about it.

If you’re thinking about quitting and you’ve failed before, please know that the gum works if you use it correctly. Read the instructions. Seriously, just read them. And if running sounds like something you’d never do, try just walking. Even a ten-minute walk can interrupt a craving long enough to let it pass.

You built a habit over months and years. Unbuilding it takes time too. Be patient with yourself. Get the gum. Pick a date.

The oranges after a race taste incredible. I want that for you.