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Comment by usednet | Hacker News Reader

As a freshman in college, strategic use of alcohol was probably the best social decision I ever made. Safe, moderate drinking before socializing got rid of my anxiety and made me tons of diverse friends that I still keep to this day.

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You are being downvoted because of the obvious health implications of alcohol consumption and its potential addiction.

On a similar vein, I've been smoking for 10 years and trying (ineffectively) to quit for the last 4. But I can't count the amount of nice moments I made by borrowing (or having borrowed) a lighter.

Anyway, don't smoke.

A very effective substitute for us in India is "Lets go have tea". "Chai points", as we call them, are ubiquitous with friendships flourishing. Sure there are people smoking along with tea, but you can make do with just the tea all the same. To give an example, the chai point near our work place 'hosts' our CEO with his group. And the janitor and his gang. Sometimes at the same time.

Ex smoker here: this is a very under-appreciated challenge to smoking/nicotine quits. There are genuinely positive aspects of smoking that are going to be missed when you quit. The key is to reconcile this, and try and build in the opportunity for those little moments of peace and sanity (and often friendship and camaraderie) in a life without nicotine. There are pros and cons to both sides of nicotine addiction, the healthiest mindset, in my opinion, is to weigh of the sum totals of each and see that a life without nicotine is worth giving up some of the good moments too.

I made all my friends at work on my smoke breaks with them. Come to think of it, once I stopped smoking I stopped having friends at work…

Man, can I relate to that! Not wanting to smoke was hard but being out of the loop because I wasn't in the smoker's area during breaks was harder. It made me re-think about quitting more than once, sometimes I buckled and said 'just one more box'.

Maybe that's a reason why people have trouble quitting, can you imagine that?

In America, freshman can't drink (legally). It might be better for them to talk to psychiatrist and get some social anxiety medication like Propranolol.

Drink illegally like every other freshmen and stay off of the pills.

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