Hello, and welcome to episode 12. Of the quit vaping podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Cipriano. And if you haven't listened to episode two yet and you want to understand who I am and what I do as a life coach, I'd recommend you listen to episode two, because it's kind of goes over my framework for how I help people quit vaping permanently and easily.

But this is one of the episodes where you don't really need to listen to the framework to understand the episode. I'm going to be talking about the lowest point I hit in vaping. And I don't really do this to like make myself look bad or tell you that you've hit lows like this or scare you into thinking that you're a horrible person if you are doing things like this or whatever.

I just tell you because my whole entire point of getting people to quit vaping as a life coach isn't because I'm anti vape, it's because I'm I believe that when you have an addiction, it's hard to become the person that you want to become the most and this story I'm going to use as a method of showing you how nicotine addiction influenced me to do something I really wouldn't have done without the addiction and it made me feel very small.

So today we're going to talk about my lowest point in vaping, and again, this is just a lesson to you to show you how maybe vaping isn't serving you or letting you become the person you really want to become because it's an addiction. And when we're addicted to things, we act in ways that we most likely wouldn't act without the addiction.

So here's my story. I vaped for seven years before that I smoked cigarettes for two. I used nicotine for about nine years. I tried everything under the sun that had nicotine in it, except for pouches and gum. Oh, no, I did the got my stuff for pouches and patches, uh, to quit. So I've done a ton of stuff with nicotine.

I have a ton of stories about how, you know, I was like annoying with friends and like just all the addiction drama. I don't even want to get into it. But the one that really sticks with me is I was working at a psychiatric hospital during COVID. So I started in 2021. I worked with the entire year through 2021.

And I actually just quit last year. In May. So as of right now, it's March of 2023. So I worked there for 2021 and part of 2022, pretty much like a year and a half. And at the time I was using vaping for when I started the job and I quit in September of 2021. But so from January to September, I was vaping.

And the hospital is a strange place to work when you have a nicotine addiction, because especially during COVID, they're very low on staff. So what would happen is we would work six, I'm sorry, we would work. Eight hour shifts. And what would happen if there wasn't enough staff is they would do something called mandating.

So you would be working your eight hour shift and then a manager would approach you like an hour or two before your shift, something like that. And everybody knew what was happening. You'd like try to hide from the manager, but they'd pretty much come up to you and say, you have two options. You can either stay for the second shift, 16 hours altogether, or you get written up because this is a mandation.

We do not have staff to supply the hospital with the necessary amount of staff, and we're going to be under our legal. Limit. So we have to mandate people and that's something that you go into the job knowing it's an option, but I will say that in that hospital, they said it might happen every once in a while, but it was happening weekly and sometimes more than one times a week for staff.

So you would literally be at the hospital for 16 hours straight. And it was common for us also not to get breaks throughout that time. It wasn't supposed to happen, but it just did. And we would move units, right? So once you transfer from one unit in a hospital to another unit on a shift, like I'm there for eight hours on one unit, I transfer the other unit.

They don't really care if you've had a break or not. They're in a brand new, they're seeing you for the first time. So pretty much the first eight hours that you worked don't matter to the people that are on the new unit. They just don't care. So if you didn't get a break the first date. It was common. It would also happen for the last date.

So when you have a nicotine addiction, this is a really big problem. You're 16 hours without nicotine working your butt off and you need to hit a vape. So I used to hide it. And a lot of, apparently a lot of staff did this, by the way, with nicotine addictions, because this was, um, I heard of other stories of people getting fired and suffering and caught, but I would go in the laundry room in the hospital.

I would vape and like pray that no one would walk in like on the staff. Uh, I would go in the bathroom. It's like anywhere where there wasn't a camera and keep in mind, this is a psychiatric hospital, right? So there's cameras. Everywhere for liability. So, um, the bathrooms and the laundry room are pretty much the only places without cameras or Ooh, number three, the patient rooms, not allowed to have patient cameras in a patient room.

And the bathrooms didn't have doors on them in a psych hospital. The bathrooms have curtains, like the patients aren't allowed to go and lock themselves behind a door or anything. So there's pretty much no privacy. So no cameras in the patient bedrooms. And here's what happened. One night I was working a mandation shift, so I worked a eight hour shift on a really busy unit.

It was the woman's unit, the adult, and there was like 40 adult women in this unit. And it's just a lot of energy all in one small space. Um, 40 people who are experiencing psychiatric conditions of what, you know, anything. Ranging from bipolar to schizophrenia to, uh, depression to like just psychotic breaks and like just random, you know, whatever people are going through with their mental health, no big deal, but it's a lot to have 40 people on one unit with all sorts of eclectic mix of mental health, um, issues going on at one time.

So it's just a lot of energy. So it's, it's a stressful job. So I got mandated. So I worked that first hour shift and it went okay. And then I had to literally stay. So here's how the schedule looked. I worked from 3 11 PM. So 3 PM to 11 PM was my first shift and I got mandated. So I got mandated to work from 11 PM to 7 AM.

So I was supposed to be at the hospital working the entire time without one break from 3 PM to 7 AM. It's a long day, 16 hours straight. So needless to say, I was a little bit itching to hit my vape and about two o'clock in the morning, I got moved to, so my, my second shift, I got moved to Uh, the really slow unit.

I'm like not good with slow, especially when I'm on my 16 hour shift in the middle of the night. So I'm working the graveyard shift on the slow unit. There's literally two staff and less than two patients on the unit. Um, so what happened was I'm supposed to do rounds every 15 minutes and I couldn't get away because there's only two staff on the unit.

So like I literally can't even go to the bathroom without putting this other staff in danger. So there was literally nowhere for me to go for this last eight hours. So like me being stupid, being an addict, I decided to go into a patient room. Like, just kind of like walk in because I was doing rounds. So I was already walking the patient rooms and just kind of like hold my clipboard up and rip on my vape.

Cause that seemed like a good idea. So I do that. Right. I do it at once in the patient room. I felt weird doing it. I didn't like it, but I'm like, you know, I'm an addict. I need to use. So who cares? Huh? Pretty much. And then I went back to the nation, the nurse's station up front and I sat down in like out of nowhere.

This is the scariest thing that's ever happened to me. Like five minutes later, this patient comes. Stomping onto this room, mind you, it's like 2 a. m. on the graveyard shift. Nobody around except for me and this nurse and this patient running after the front desk stomps up to the front desk and screams, did you get what you wanted?

And of course I knew what he was talking about, right? Like he definitely saw me at my vape. I thought he was sleeping, but he wasn't and my face like literally went so pale. All the blood drained out of my face. I've never felt this before. I literally, I think I almost paint passed out. My face was so hot.

Um, and all I could muster at the time was like a horribly pathetic and whimpery. Yes. And he said, good, shut, shook his head up and down. It's like good, angrily, aggressively, and then stomped back into his room. And then I looked to my left in the nurse. It was like two feet next to me on the nurse's station.

It's like, what was that all about? And me being a pathetic. addict decided to just lie to the nurse that he was experiencing psychosis. So for anyone who doesn't know what psychosis is, and when you have a disconnect from reality, it can look like, um, other people's voices in your head. You seeing things that aren't there, hearing things that are not there.

Um, you could even have like delusions, any kind of a disconnect from reality. It's called psychosis. And that's a blanket term for. Yeah. And he disconnect from reality in the mental health world. So that's actually ironically kind of a common thing to experience in the psych hospital, especially in the middle of the night.

People who experienced psychosis kind of experience it heavier at nighttime. I don't know what that's about. If it's like a sleep thing or a moon thing, who knows? Um, that's what I said. I lied to her that he was experiencing psychosis and thankfully it worked that I mean, thankfully in a weird, twisted kind of way.

And she didn't question me about it and he didn't come up again and he could have said something and I could have lost my job and honestly, looking back on it, I should have. And I just carried that with me. And that's one of the most truly pathetic things I've ever done in my whole life is lie about the person I'm supposed to be there to help for my own addiction.

So that I wouldn't get in trouble for being addicted to something and doing something I shouldn't have based off of addiction. So I say that to you because in the last episode, if you've listened to it, Awesome. If you haven't, I'll explain what it's about. Um, it was my deciding factor for why I decided to quit vaping for good.

Remember, your belief systems are what cause your actions. So if you no longer believe that vaping is serving you, you'll no longer vape. Very simple. Uh, you know, simple to understand, but actually to apply that, it's kind of challenging. So, long story short. Vaping, I decided was not fitting into the person I wanted to become.

And I think that we all know this and we all see ourselves do things with vaping that isn't cool that we don't like about ourselves. And we're doing it obviously because we're addicted and it's, it's an addiction, but it also halts us from becoming the people that we want to become. And I always say like, when you think about yourself 10 years down the line in the life that you want, maybe the kids you want, the family you want, the lifestyle you want, the business you want to create.

Do you see yourself vaping? Everyone always says, not really. Like, no, of course I don't. Like, in ten years when I'm quote unquote successful, of course I won't be vaping. Well, it's like, at what point then do you go from now, where you're currently addicted to nicotine, to that person who isn't? Don't you think it'd be a really good first step to quit vaping right now to get addiction out of your life?

If your life isn't together, I promise you, and I mean this so heartily, and I would fight to the death on this belief system that you cutting an addiction out of your life is going to serve you. It is never going to hurt you to get rid of an addiction. It can't. Because by its very definition, addiction makes you weak.

It makes you depend on something else. And when you're trying to get your life together in any capacity, you, depending on one less thing externally for you to be okay, It's going to benefit you when I was vaping, I did a lot of things that made me feel very weak. And at no point in my life did I ever picture myself successful and also simultaneously vaping.

So I decided that something that I used in order to do things that were pathetic and weak and stupid, I would have to drop if I wanted to become the life coach and the leader and the entrepreneur and the business owner that I saw myself as internally. Where is your lowest point with vaping? I'm just curious.

I'm not doing this to shame you. I don't even tell the story to shame myself. I feel no shame about it anymore. I actually use it as a lesson for something I'm so happy to have gotten through. And I don't even have the desire to use vaping anymore. I'm actually happy that thing, that story happened because it fortifies my belief that that just wasn't a part of my life that I wanted to hold on to.

It fortifies my belief that if I want to help people genuinely and honestly, I have to be with integrity with myself. I cannot go into a psych hospital trying to help people with their addictions and also be struggling with my own and feeling weak and pathetic about it. So where in your life is vaping not allowing you to become the person that you know you're capable of becoming?

That's exactly why I help people get off of nicotine. I'm not anti nicotine. I'm anti not living your best self. I'm a life coach. My whole entire point of life in my business is to help you become the best version of yourself, and I promise you. The best version of yourself is not addicted to anything.

And I don't know if it's possible to ever not be addicted to anything. Like we are human beings. We love dopamine hits. Like that's how our brain works, right? If you know anything about your brain, it's a very simple reward system. You use something, you get dopamine, you use it again. It encourages you, right?

It's just a very simple reward system. So. We have every single human being has a proclivity to get addicted to things because that's how your brain's functioned and in the past it served us. But now that we're surrounded by things like nicotine, sugary foods, alcohol, porn, social media, it isn't serving us anymore.

It's actually stopping us from creating the lives we want. So when you picture yourself 10 years from now in the life that you want, are you vaping? And there's no right or wrong answer. But I would say most people would say no. So at what point do you make the decision that you're going to drop that, that addiction?

And I won't, I refuse to call it a habit because it isn't a habit. When I first set out to get my life in order, I didn't really know what I wanted with certainty, but I knew for a fact that vaping and quitting would be a really good place to start. So now that I'm a life coach, I intend on helping other people come to that realization too that if you're using something you're dependent on a substance and your life isn't going the way that you want it to, cutting out that substance is a really good place to start because not only does it make you not dependent, it also gives you self confidence, self worth, and it gets you one step closer in your mind, the most important part in your mind to becoming the person you want to become.

So I know this episode was kind of heavy. I appreciate you for listening to it. And the other ones are more so teaching. So I'd recommend you listen to the other ones, understand what it is. You know, tools and insight knowledge. I actually teach from life coaching perspective, but I think it's important to understand and hear other people's stories about how they've struggled with addiction and You know, just how their life has changed for the better now that they're not struggling with addiction.

So thank you so much. Have a fantastic day. I will talk to you next week.