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

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

A journal keeps dated observations rather than grading your discipline. It may help you notice a repeated situation, but a few entries do not establish a cause or trend. Keep days with no obvious pattern too.

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

In a personal note, you can record the time, place, activity, feeling and what you did. Choose information relevant to your question; these five fields are a suggested journal, not the PuffOff check-in form.

Time and place

Dated times and places let you look for repetitions. Do not assume that your urges must cluster in two time slots or one particular place. If a situation recurs in your notes, you can prepare a response for it and observe what happens next.

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

Keep the entry brief enough for your own use. Begin with a note you can complete, then adapt the fields if needed. This guide establishes no fifteen-second entry time or one-week abandonment threshold. A partial entry remains a partial observation, distinct from a day without an urge.

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 turn entries into a personal grade or diagnosis. One difficult day does not demonstrate a trend; neither seven days nor a month is a universal evidence threshold. Review the conditions and missing entries before comparing two periods.

Where PuffOff fits

PuffOff’s daily check-in records the date, mood and urge intensity on a one-to-five scale. Triggers selected in the profile are separate from each check-in: the form does not provide the five journal fields suggested above. Use a separate personal note for an episode’s place, activity and response. PuffOff is a habit-support tool; it does not diagnose or treat. Persistent difficulty can be discussed with a pharmacist, doctor or quit service.

Further reading

• Smokefree: Know your vaping triggers
• Harkin et al. (2016), Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence, Psychological Bulletin
• Shiffman (2009), Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) in studies of substance use, Psychological Assessment
• Michie et al. (2013), The Behavior Change Technique Taxonomy (v1), Annals of Behavioral Medicine