Why Do We Use Nicotine and Tobacco?
To encourage active involvement, get out your quit journal, or hop on the Grinds Facebook Group, and take a few minutes to make a list of reasons why you use nicotine and tobacco.
Don’t have a quit journal yet or aren’t part of our Facebook community? Get a free Quit Kit from Grinds with any purchase here! For now, if you don’t have anything else just grab a piece of scrap paper and make your list. You can transfer it over to your quit journal later.
Focus on Why You Dip, Not Why You Shouldn’t
Today, and for most of this series, we’re going to focus on why you dip, not why you shouldn’t. You know why you shouldn’t; we don’t have to tell you. But one of the most important things to remember as you start this journey is that you change best by feeling good.
We want to emphasize that we will stay away from fear tactics. Managing fear and anxiety might even be on your list of reasons why you dip. If you find yourself feeling guilty, anxious, or some other negative emotion, that should be a red flag to stop doing what’s making you feel that way and try a different approach.
5 Common Reasons for Dipping
Here are some common reasons people give for why they use chewing tobacco. Do any of these show up on your list?
You enjoy the taste and smell.
There are certain triggers your brain gets from smells. This could be hard wired by now. But think about what happens when you can’t get your brand or flavor: you probably pick something different. You may actually chew despite the taste and smell, not because of it, which means you can move on from a specific taste and smell to a new one.
It makes you feel safe and secure, or at the very least happy and satisfied.
Everyone—including people who do not use chewing tobacco—seek to find these feelings. You can still feel safe, happy, secure and satisfied without chewing tobacco in your life.
You have an oral fixation and need something in your mouth at all times.
This is quite natural and common, but you can find a healthy alternative (like Grinds Coffee Pouches) to manage your oral fixation, which may even fade over time.
It’s how you cure your boredom.
Dipping is just a distraction that lets you temporarily forget you’re bored. You can teach yourself to default to a healthy activity when boredom strikes.
It helps you focus or concentrate.
In order to focus or concentrate, you need to remove distractions. But dipping is actually just a distraction. It can’t be both, can it? What actually happens is you experience physical withdrawal symptoms from the last time you chewed and interpret those as distractions preventing you from concentrating. You chew to remove the withdrawal pangs, and then feel ready to focus.
What other reasons do you have for using nicotine tobacco that aren’t on this list? Post to our Facebook group to let us know what we missed!
Reasons or Excuses?
Whether or not we fully come to grips with why we chew tobacco, many create reasons or excuses for why they continue to do so. We know it’s bad for our health, our families, finances… so we’ve developed “rational” explanations to justify it.
The actual reasons we use chewing tobacco are:
- Addiction to nicotine.
- Marketers make nicotine appear harmless, and even fun.
In future blog posts, we’re going to explore nicotine addiction and norms that shouldn’t have been established. But for now, we’ll end with a journal prompt.
Ask yourself the following questions, and answer honestly:
- What does dip really do for me?
- Do I really enjoy it?
- Do I really need tobacco and nicotine?
For people trying to quit nicotine and tobacco, we recommend either picking up a mint flavor you know like Spearmint or Wintergreen. Our studies show that people transitioning to a tobacco and nicotine free lifestyle have more success quitting or reducing their habits by choosing a flavor familiar to them. Many of our customers who quit enjoy Spearmint and Wintergreen because the flavors are most similar to the tobacco they were chewing previously.
If you have already had some of our flavors, which ones would you recommend to someone trying Grinds for the first time?
Use code "QUITDIPNOW" to get 10% off Spearmint and Wintergreen!