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Keeping a vaping craving journal: what to record and how to read it

Why recording cravings changes what you can do about them, the five fields worth keeping, when to write them down, and how to turn a week of notes into a plan.

By Roméo Gambino · Updated September 5, 2026

Why a journal is not busywork

Recording something you are trying to change is one of the better-supported behaviour-change techniques, and it is not merely a way of feeling organised. A 2016 meta-analysis by Harkin and colleagues examined whether monitoring progress towards a goal actually helps people reach it, across a large body of studies, and found that it does. The mechanism is unremarkable and useful: what you measure becomes visible, and what is visible can be planned around.

What a journal is actually for

It is not a record of your discipline and it is not evidence in a case against yourself. Its job is to reveal a pattern you cannot see from the inside. Most people discover something specific within a week: that most urges arrive in the same two hours, that one place produces a third of them, that the difficult days follow bad nights. None of that is available to intuition, and all of it changes what a plan should contain.

Why memory will not do this for you

Reconstructing your cravings at the end of the week produces a smoothed, tidy version that is wrong in the ways that matter. Memory over-represents the dramatic episodes and loses the ordinary ones, and it attaches reasons after the fact. Research on momentary assessment methods, reviewed by Shiffman in 2009 for substance-use studies, exists precisely because recording in the moment and recording afterwards give different answers.

The five fields worth keeping

Time, place, activity, feeling and what you did. That is enough, and it is deliberately short so that you will keep it. Anything more elaborate tends to be abandoned in the first week, and an abandoned system produces no data at all, which is strictly worse than a crude one you maintain.

Time and place

These two do most of the work. Cravings cluster in time far more than people expect, and they attach strongly to physical locations. A week of timestamps usually shows two or three windows in the day that account for most of the total, and a handful of places that keep reappearing. Both are directly actionable: you can change what happens at four in the afternoon, and you can leave a room.

What you were doing

Record the activity, not the judgement. Waiting for a meeting, finishing a meal, driving home, scrolling, standing outside with colleagues. The activity is what you will plan against, and it is often more revealing than the emotion, because a lot of vaping attaches to transitions between things rather than to feelings about them.

What you were feeling

One word is plenty: stressed, bored, tired, fine, celebrating. Resist the urge to write a paragraph. The point is not to understand yourself deeply in the moment, it is to have a label you can count later. Note also that fine appears far more often than people predict, which is itself worth knowing, because it means not every craving is an emotional event.

Intensity, and why a simple scale is enough

A one-to-five scale is sufficient. Finer scales feel more scientific and are less reliable, because you will not distinguish a six from a seven consistently. What you want from intensity is not precision but the ability to see whether the strong ones cluster somewhere different from the weak ones, which they often do.

What you did, and what happened

This is the field most journals miss and the one that makes the record useful. Write down what you actually did and how it went. Waited it out, went outside, had a glass of water, vaped. Over a week this tells you which responses work for you specifically, which is more useful than any general list of coping strategies, including the one in the companion guide on getting through a craving.

Record the ones you got through

Most people only write down the slips, which produces a journal that reads like a list of failures and gets abandoned. The episodes you survived are the more informative ones, because they contain the responses that worked. A week in which you recorded eleven cravings and vaped once is a week with ten pieces of useful information, not one piece of bad news.

When to write it down

In the moment if you can, at the end of the day if you cannot. In the moment is more accurate for the same reason momentary methods exist in research. End of day is far better than nothing, and a habit you keep beats a method you abandon. If you are writing at the end of the day, do it at a fixed time attached to something that already happens.

Keep it small enough to survive

Fifteen seconds per entry is the target. If your journal takes two minutes, you will stop within a week, usually on the day you most needed it. Five short fields, no prose, no self-assessment. The value comes from having a full week rather than from having beautiful notes for three days.

Reading it back

After seven days, look for four things. Which hours repeat. Which places repeat. Which activity comes up most. And which responses worked when you tried them. You are not looking for insight into your character. You are looking for two or three specific situations that account for most of the risk, because those are what a plan can address.

Turning a pattern into a plan

Take your top two or three situations and write an if-then plan for each: if this specific thing happens, then I will do this specific thing. That is the bridge between the journal and any change, and without it the journal stays a diary. The guide on building a quit plan sets this out in full.

What not to do with it

Do not use it to grade yourself. A journal that produces verdicts stops being kept, and a journal that is not kept tells you nothing. Do not add fields because the week was interesting. And do not read a single bad day as a trend: seven days is the minimum unit of meaning here, and a month is better.

Where PuffOff fits

PuffOff records cravings, mood and the situations that trigger them as part of your daily check-in, so the fields above are already there and an entry takes seconds. It shows the record back to you rather than scoring it. It is a habit-support tool, not a health professional: it does not diagnose or treat, and persistent difficulty is a reason to speak to a pharmacist, a doctor or a national quit service.

Questions

Does keeping a craving journal actually help?

Monitoring progress towards a goal is one of the better-supported behaviour-change techniques. A 2016 meta-analysis by Harkin and colleagues examined it across a large body of studies and found that it does help. The mechanism is simple: what you record becomes visible, and what is visible can be planned around.

What should I write down when a craving hits?

Five short fields are enough: the time, the place, what you were doing, one word for how you felt, and what you did about it. Fifteen seconds per entry. Anything longer tends to be abandoned within a week.

Should I record cravings in the moment or at the end of the day?

In the moment is more accurate, which is why momentary assessment methods exist in research on substance use. End of day is much better than nothing, so pick whichever you will actually keep and attach it to a fixed point in your routine.

Should I only record the times I gave in?

No, and that habit is why most journals get abandoned. The cravings you got through carry the useful information, because they contain the responses that worked for you specifically.

How do I use the journal to change anything?

After a week, find the two or three situations that account for most of your cravings, then write an if-then plan for each: if this specific thing happens, then I will do this specific thing. Without that step the journal stays a diary.