Quitting at work is harder than quitting at home, and the reason is usually misidentified. People assume the problem is being around cigarettes. The bigger problem is that the smoke break was doing four jobs at once, and quitting cancels all four on the same morning.
It was a sanctioned pause — the one break in the day nobody questions, which is more than can be said for sitting at your desk doing nothing for eight minutes. It was a reason to physically leave, which matters more than it sounds. It was a social circle, often the one that cuts across departments and seniority in a way nothing else at work does. And it was an information channel: a genuinely large amount of what is going on at any workplace gets discussed outside the side door before it gets discussed anywhere official.
A quit plan that only replaces the nicotine leaves three of those four holes wide open, and they will be felt every single day at roughly the same times.
There is also one specific trap here, and it is the most common way workplace quits fail. Going out with them just for the company. It sounds harmless, even sociable, and it puts you in the exact physical setting, the exact social configuration, the exact time of day, and the exact smell that your brain has spent years pairing with a cigarette. It is among the highest-risk situations available to a new quitter, and it is the one people most easily talk themselves into precisely because it does not feel like it is about smoking. For the first few weeks, do not do it. Not because you are weak, but because there is no upside that is worth that particular set of cues.
What works better is replacing the break rather than deleting it. Keep the timing. Keep the leaving-your-desk part. Change the destination. A short walk round the block, a coffee somewhere else in the building, the stairs, five minutes outside a different door. The point is that the pause was legitimate and you should not surrender it just because you gave up the cigarette that used to justify it.
Recruit someone. One non-smoking colleague who will take a standing ten-minute walk with you at eleven and three solves the social hole and the pause at the same time, and it is a small enough ask that most people say yes. If your workplace has anyone else who quit recently, they are the obvious candidate.
Tell the smokers plainly rather than simply vanishing. Something as brief as "I've quit, so I'm staying in for a few weeks — nothing personal" prevents the slow awkwardness of people assuming you are avoiding them, and it usually buys you goodwill rather than teasing. Most smokers have tried to quit themselves and respond better than expected. If someone does push, that says something about them, not about your decision.
Accept that you will be slightly out of the loop for a while and compensate deliberately by asking people directly rather than waiting to overhear things. This is a real cost and pretending otherwise does not help; it is also a temporary one.
The last question is when you can rejoin the group, and there is no fixed date. The honest test is what happens when you stand there: if it feels neutral and mildly boring, you are fine. If you find yourself watching the cigarette rather than listening to the conversation, you are not ready yet, and there is no prize for going early. Plenty of ex-smokers eventually go back out purely for the company and never think about it. That is a reasonable destination. It is just not the first week.