A recent study published by the British Medical Journal suggests that people who switch from cigarettes to vaporizers are more likely to kick their tobacco habit than people who quit cold turkey. Over the course of 15 years, researchers involved in the study gained information from more than 160,000 American participants. They set out to discover which group of people — vaporizer or “e-cigarette” users vs. non-users — could abstain from smoking cigarettes for at least three months.
What they found was promising. Researchers discovered 65% of vaporizer users managed to quit cigarettes compared to just 40% of non-vaporizer users. The timeline of the study also happened to coincide with a dramatic spike in vaporizer use across the U.S. After first registering as a trend in 2010, and continuing to accelerate with a noticeable spike in 2014, this upward boom in vaping also coincided with an overall drop in cigarette use.
This isn’t the first time a group has studied the relationship between vaporizers and cigarettes. As Martin Dockrell, Public Health England’s tobacco control lead, told Wired:
“This US study strongly reflects what we have seen in the UK. E-cigarettes have become the nation’s favorite quitting tool and 1.5 million [vaporizer users] have stopped smoking completely. And while we’re seeing smoking rates fall rapidly across all ages, the steepest decline has been amongst younger adults. We encourage anyone who’s struggling to quit to try e-cigarettes… In the UK, regular [vaporizer users] consist almost entirely of smokers and ex-smokers. Evidence shows only 0.3 per cent of adult [vaporizer users] have never smoked.”
According to Wired, 2.9 million adults currently use vaporizers in the U.K. alone. This is good news considering cigarette smoking directly causes almost 6 million deaths around the globe every year. According to the CDC, 16 million Americans currently live with a smoking-related disease. The dangers of cigarettes are common knowledge, and while vaporizers are a relatively healthier alternative, there are still some risks associated with consuming nicotine. In the long fight to end cigarette use, vaporizers are an important tool, but unfortunately not an end-goal in themselves.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.