Stop Smoking, Start Vaping this Stoptober!

The days are getting shorter, the nights are drawing in, Stoptober is upon us, the cigs go in the bin…

During October each year the NHS and Public Health England run the Stoptober campaign to help the estimated 9.7 Million smokers in the UK give up for good.

Everyone knows by now just how incredibly bad for you smoking is. According to the nhs over 480,000 of all hospital admissions in the UK are due to smoking. That's a single, preventable habit that causes 4% of ALL hospitalizations in the country, not to mention 16% of all deaths at over 75,000 people.

Cigarettes cause this horrific damage through their smoke. When you light a cigarette, harmful, cancer causing chemicals in the tobacco leaf are released and taken into your body. Along with the thousands of poisons that cigs contain, they also clog up your lungs with sticky tar produced by burning tobacco.

And it’s not just you that they harm. Second hand smoke can enter and damage the lungs of friends, family, and children. What’s more, a recent study showed that our pets are at even more risk from second hand smoke than the humans around us!

Tobacco isn’t just bad for your health, it’s also bad for your wallet. Recent tax hikes designed to encourage smokers to stop have put up the price even further. Smokers in the UK spend on average around £250 a month on cigarettes. That’s almost £3000 a year totally wasted. What’s more, it’s been shown that smoking has the worst effect on those who don’t have much money to begin with, with over 30% of the most deprived individuals being addicted to tobacco smoke in 2012.

Even knowing all this, it’s still incredibly hard to quit smoking. In 2013 Cancer research UK reported that almost half of people who try to stop eventually fail and go back to smoking. If you’re in Scotland, this figure is even worse, with only 38% of people reporting successful quitting in this study.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Smoking has been on a steady decline for years, and a part of the recent decline in smokers has been the introduction of Electronic Cigarettes to the market.

According to The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), 40% of people who try to stop smoking do so with the aid of an e-cig. In fact, e-cigs have become one of the most popular quitting aids in the UK; according to the NHS an estimated 2.9 million adults in the UK use e-cigs and, of these, 1.5 million have stopped smoking cigarettes all together.

NHS says that in 2017-18, two thirds of smokers who switched to e-cigs managed to stop for good! It seems clear to us that, when combined with a little extra support, vaping can be a particularly effective method of quitting smoking.

Stoptober is all about providing people with that little bit of extra support that they need! On the NHS stoptober website you can find loads of valuable hints, tips, and resources to help you quit smoking for good and lead a healthier life. They offer personalised quitting plans, as well as a stoptober app, which helps you track your progress and see how much money you are saving as you quit.

We’re here to help too! While you can’t get an e-cig from your GP, Flawless Vape Shop is proud to announce we will be offering a series of offers and discounts throughout Stoptober, to make it as easy as possible for you to quit!

Some of the heavier smokers out there may well have tried to switch to vaping before, but found that the usual ‘starter kits’ of sub-ohm pen style kits just don’t satisfy in the same way a cigarette does, especially when paired with traditional E-Liquids that utilise freebase nicotine.

If you haven’t heard about Nic Salts yet, check out our blog post on that topic here. The long and short of it is that Nic Salts E-Liquids provide an instant nicotine hit that is much more satisfying than traditional liquids. For this reason, we’ve paired our Nic Salts liquids with some handy, easy to use vape kits that mimic the draw style of a cigarette! Click the images below for details.

As well as offering you great deals on vapes, we are here to offer you support as you quit. We know that quitting is hard, and vapes can be confusing, so you can come in store to discuss quitting with our friendly expert staff. If you can’t make it to our shops we will be happy to answer all of your questions over Facebook chat. Many of us are former smokers ourselves, and many of those simply say that vaping has saved their lives.

The health improvements upon quitting smoking are almost immediate. In just a couple of weeks, circulation improves which leads to better fitness, lower stress levels, and even better sex. Your sense of smell and taste will return (which might be a surprise if you didn’t notice it was gone!) and you will see improvements in dental health, with healthier gums, whiter teeth, and better breath!

This Stoptober, make the best decision for your health, and stop smoking for good.

And as always, stay Flawless.