Coffee and chocolate (plus potentially tobacco) are technically stimulants, 100% legal, and people seem to handle them just fine. Just take them strategically as opposed to recreationally (i.e. only as support for building up healthy habits; go cold-turkey otherwise!) and you should do just fine. The effect is way stronger than most people might think, provided that habituation hasn't built up and the existing tolerance has been dissipated.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend nicotine. It works and alleviates ADHD symptoms at first which is great but that also makes it really addictive. I can't comprehend the level of discipline I would need to use nicotine without becoming addicted and I'm not prone to addiction generally.
The interesting thing wrt. this is that nicotine replacement products are widely available without a prescription. Would people really get seriously addicted to e.g. wearing a transdermal patch?
For N=1 (me), yes. I’ve been a smoker since I was about 12 years old and have tried to quit multiple times (short-term successfully a few times). I’ve had a few experiences with transdermal nicotine.
When I was in the hospital and couldn’t get out of bed, the nurses provided me with some. They seemed to be partially working, but I was still having pretty intense cravings all the time. After doing a bit of napkin math I realized that the patches were only providing about 1/3 of the daily nicotine I’d been consuming before my appendectomy.
When I tried to quit on my own, I started out with the recommended dosage from the package and had the same experience. They modulated the cravings a bit but were nowhere near effective enough to actually allow me to go through the day without chronic acute cravings. I bumped up my daily dose from the patches and did successfully stop smoking, but trying to reduce the dose too much led to the same brutal cravings. I ended up abandoning patches as a way to quit because of the daily hassle of trying to slowly wean myself off of the patches; a full patch decrement was too much at once, so I was cutting them into halves and quarters to try to make progress without ruining my concentration and focus.
I suspect that this just isn't in the cards given that kind of situation. You're ultimately just better off suffering through that withdrawal (especially since you've said you were in a frickin' hospital to begin with. It's not like you're losing that much effectiveness and productivity) and trying to find a new normal after the worst symptoms are over. It might take some time but our best guess is that kind of habituation is not permanent, so you should see quite a bit of improvement over time if you just stick to it.
I used to vape and I had the worst time quitting nicotine. I tapered down to around 25% of my usual daily intake over the period of about 3 months before I decided to quit for good. Even then, for about 3 weeks I felt incredibly tired all the time, yet I couldn't sleep, and I felt borderline mentally retarded... it was really bad. It took me about 3 months to feel more or less normal again, and cravings completely went away when I was properly diagnosed with ADHD and started medication about a year later.
I'm surprised they gave you nicotine patches - was this an American hospital? I always thought they want you to suffer withdrawal as a punishment for the moral failure of being a smoker. Also, there are probably some risks with throwing nicotine into the mix of whatever drugs they might be giving you.
I used the patch to quit, and I used to enjoy slapping those patches on in the morning almost as much as I enjoyed a morning cigarette.
Canadian hospital. It was an appendectomy, the only other medication I was on was morphine. The nurse actually offered the patches to me on her own after noticing a pack of smokes in the pocket of the sweater I was wearing when I went to the ER.
Humans can get addicted to anything that triggers a reward. Even things that seem gross or weird, like picking your scabs. The line between addiction and compulsion is kind of blurry.
I don't think it is a question of discipline when it comes to addiction - if you are taking it on a regular basis at a high enough dose to become addicted, you will become addicted, and you will have withdrawal symptoms when you stop taking it.
It might be possible to manage the addiction and maybe keep it from escalating with discipline, but the addiction will always be there.
Humans are excellent at denying addiction and rationalizing addictive behavior. And you don't even realize you are doing it - I've seen it in myself with cigarettes, which I fortunately quit years ago.
Lol I will provide a small anecdote as a warning from my own life. I was at a point (pre-diagnosis) where I felt my caffeine intake had reached an addiction-like level and had decided to wean myself down to a more sustainable level. I’d read about adenosine receptors and the different substances that can act as stimulants/inhibit adenosine. I was starting to get a bit of a caffeine headache + drowsiness and the good idea fairy told me “hey why don’t you have some chocolate instead? Theobromine is an adenosine-receptor antagonist so it might help without consuming any caffeine”
This led to what was probably the worst headache of my life. I don’t know enough pharmacology to understand how exactly that worked, but it was terrible. Having a cup of coffee reversed the effect pretty quickly, luckily.
