Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [27]
What tempts us to smoke in the first place is the influence of people already smoking, whether they are the older kids at school, movie stars or our own family. We assume that smokers are getting some tremendous pleasure from smoking and fear that we are missing out on it. We work so hard to become hooked, yet no smoker ever finds out what it is they were missing. Every time we see another smoker we are reassured that there must be something to smoking, otherwise other people wouldn’t be doing it.
Because he’s brainwashed into believing he has made a genuine sacrifice when he quits, the cigarette continues to dominate the ex-smoker who quits using willpower. This is why people quitting using willpower are often so miserable.
As a child in the 1940s I remember listening to the Paul Temple detective series, which was a very popular program on BBC radio. One episode dealt with marijuana. Some evildoers were selling cigarettes that contained pot. There were no harmful effects. People merely became addicted and had to go on buying the cigarettes. I was about seven years old when this episode aired. It was the first I had heard of drug addiction and the concept filled me with horror. Even to this day I would not dare take one puff of a joint. How ironic that I should end up addicted to the world’s most addictive drug—nicotine. If only Paul Temple had warned me about the tobacco in that cigarette instead of the marijuana! How ironic too that at this time (the immediate post-WWII period) tobacco companies were already aware of the addictiveness of nicotine and were experimenting with ways to increase nicotine yields.
It is incredible to me that we continue to allow tobacco companies to spend billions of dollars persuading healthy teenagers to smoke and that the government itself profits from smokers to the tune of billions of dollars every year.
We are about to remove the brainwashing. It is not the non-smoker who is being deprived but the smoker who is surrendering a lifetime of:
HEALTH
ENERGY
WEALTH
PEACE OF MIND
CONFIDENCE
COURAGE
SELF-RESPECT
HAPPINESS
FREEDOM
And what does he gain from making these enormous sacrifices?
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! The only thing the cigarette does is remove the aggravation caused by the previous cigarette, so that the smoker, for a moment, feels like a non-smoker. By lighting up, he temporarily relieves the very slight feeling of emptiness and enjoys the state of relaxation and peace that non-smokers enjoy all their lives. But immediately after putting the cigarette out, the nicotine begins to leave the bloodstream and the slightly empty feeling returns. So the smoker has to light up again, and again and again.
CHAPTER 8
RELIEVING WITHDRAWAL PANGS
As I explained earlier, some smokers claim they smoke for enjoyment, relaxation or some sort of boost. In fact, this is an illusion. The real reason that any smoker lights up is to relieve the withdrawal pangs. Relieving these pangs returns us, for a short while, to a feeling of normality and this is the illusion of pleasure or a boost. The withdrawal pangs themselves are so mild that most smokers are completely unaware that they even exist.
In the very early days we use the cigarette as a social prop. We feel we can take it or leave it. But as the days and weeks go by, the subconscious mind begins to realize that the cigarette appears to relieve the very slight pangs caused by withdrawing from the nicotine contained in the previous cigarette.
Because stress or mild anxiety can feel like the empty, insecure feeling caused by nicotine withdrawal, our subconscious gets tricked into believing that the cigarette will relieve real stress too. Of course we do feel better when we have a cigarette but all we have done is to relieve the stress and discomfort caused by withdrawing from the