How many workdays it cost

Do this with your own numbers, nobody else's. Take what you used to spend in a week and hold it next to what one hour of your work actually pays you after tax. Divide one by the other. That's how many hours a week you were on the clock for nicotine, not as a figure of speech, actually. Now stretch it across a year. The answer stops being pocket change somewhere in the middle and starts being days. Whole workdays. Mornings you got up in the dark for and drove in.

Here's what makes it worse and also what makes the way out obvious. You were charged in time twice. Once to earn the money, sitting through hours you wouldn't otherwise have needed to sit through. Then again to spend it, in the minutes the habit took directly, the trips to the shop, the stepping away, the waiting before you could go back in. Money was only ever the middleman. The real currency leaving your account was the one you can never earn more of, at any wage.

That's the honest bill, and if it stings, notice the sting has nowhere useful to go. You can't invoice the past and you shouldn't try. What you can do is see clearly what has stopped. Both charges already ended. As of now those hours of work are yours to keep, and the minutes are back in the day where they always belonged. Nobody is deducting from you anymore. This isn't a future benefit you're waiting on. It happened the week you stopped, quietly, with no statement arriving to announce it.

So treat it as what it is: a raise. Not a metaphor, a real change in what your hours buy. Decide what it's for before it dissolves into nothing in particular, because unnamed money always does. A course. A weekend away. The debt that's been sitting there glaring at you. Tell one person this week what you're putting it toward, out loud, so it becomes a plan instead of a feeling. You already worked for that money once and never got to keep it. Keep it this time, and spend it on something you'll remember.