Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [22]
When we smoked our first cigarette, for most of us inhaling resulted in a coughing fit. If we managed to smoke the whole thing, we most likely experienced dizziness or nausea. These symptoms were our body’s way of telling us: ‘YOU ARE FEEDING ME POISON. STOP IT.’ This is the key moment that often decides our future: whether we become smokers or not. It is a fallacy that weak and weak-willed people become smokers. Smokers need to be strong and strong-willed to endure the process of learning to smoke. The lucky ones are those who find that first cigarette so repulsive that they cannot go through this process of learning to tolerate tobacco smoke; physically their lungs cannot cope with it, and they avoid the trap.
To me this is the most tragic part of the whole business. How hard we have to work to become hooked in the first place! Ironically, this is why it is difficult to get teenagers to quit. Because they still find cigarettes and smoking distasteful, they refuse to believe that they can get hooked. They believe they can stop whenever they want to. Sadly, by this stage, they are already addicted. Why do they not learn from us? Then again, why did we not learn from our parents?
Some smokers believe they enjoy the taste and smell of the tobacco. This, like so much else with respect to smoking, is an illusion. What we are actually doing when we learn to smoke is teaching our bodies to become desensitized to the disgusting smell and taste in order to get our fix.
Ask a smoker who believes he smokes because he enjoys the smell and taste of tobacco, ‘If you cannot get your normal brand of cigarette, do you abstain?’ No way. A smoker will smoke anything rather than abstain. Smokers prefer their own brands because they have taught themselves to tolerate the smell and taste, but if their brand isn’t available a smoker will smoke any brand in order to get his fix. This is why smokers who at first find roll-ups, cigars, menthols or pipes absolutely disgusting, over time can learn to ‘like’ or, more accurately, tolerate them.
Smokers will even keep smoking through colds, ‘flu, sore throats, bronchitis and emphysema. Taste, smell and ‘enjoyment’ have nothing to do with it. If it did, no-one would smoke more than one cigarette. There are even thousands of people hooked on nicotine chewing gum which tastes disgusting, and many of them are also still smoking.
During our seminars some smokers find it alarming to realize that they are drug addicts and think that this will make it even more difficult to stop. In fact, it is very good news for two important reasons:
1. Most of us carry on smoking because, although we know that the disadvantages of smoking outweigh the advantages, we believe that there is something intrinsically enjoyable or special that the cigarette gives us. We feel that after we stop smoking there will be a ‘void’, that our life will never be quite the same. This is an illusion, as I will demonstrate. The fact is that the cigarette gives you nothing.
2. Although it is a highly addictive drug because of the speed with which it hooks you, ironically, you are never badly hooked on the drug itself. Because it is so fast-acting it also leaves the body very quickly. Eight hours after putting out a cigarette, you are 97% nicotine-free. After just three days of not smoking, you are 100% nicotine-free.
You will ask, quite rightly, why if this is the case, so many smokers find it so difficult to stop, and suffer through months of torture? Why do so many spend the rest of their lives craving cigarettes at odd times, even years after they have become 100% nicotine-free?
The answer is the second component to the smoking puzzle—the brainwashing. Breaking the physical addiction and getting through the chemical withdrawal is fast and easy to cope with. In fact, smokers cope with withdrawal their whole smoking lives and they cope with it so easily that they aren’t even aware it exists.
Most smokers go all night without a cigarette. The withdrawal