Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [30]
There is no question in my mind that cigarettes seriously impair our ability to concentrate. Apart from the constant distraction of going through nicotine withdrawal, the progressive blocking of arteries and veins with the poisons contained in tobacco starves the brain of oxygen.
It was the concentration aspect of smoking that prevented me from succeeding when using the Willpower method. I could put up with the irritability and bad temper, but when I really needed to concentrate on something difficult, I had to have that cigarette. I can well remember the panic I felt when I discovered that I was not allowed to smoke during my accountancy exams. I was already a chain-smoker and convinced that I would not be able to concentrate for three hours without a cigarette. But I passed the exams, and I can’t even remember thinking about smoking at the time, so when it came to the crunch, it obviously didn’t bother me.
If we look at the world around us, it’s blatantly obvious that cigarettes don’t enhance concentration or get our creative juices flowing. If they did then every Nobel Prize winner on the planet would be a smoker, and universities, research institutions and corporations would encourage their staff to smoke. Plato, Homer, Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo and Galileo all seemed to operate at a decent intellectual level without the aid of tobacco.
The loss of concentration that smokers suffer when they try to stop smoking is not, in fact, due to the physical withdrawal from nicotine. When you are a smoker and you have a mental block, what do you do? That’s right, if you are not already smoking one, you light a cigarette. That doesn’t cure the block, so then what do you do? You do what non-smokers do: you knuckle down and get on with it. Only this time you do so without the distraction of going through nicotine withdrawal. You work through the block—as the non-smoker does—but give the credit to the cigarette. Instead you should be blaming the cigarette for providing the distraction that caused the loss of concentration in the first place. This is a very common theme with respect to smoking. The cigarette gets the credit for everything and the blame for nothing. The moment you stop smoking, everything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on the fact that you’ve stopped smoking.
Because the willpower quitter has not re-examined this belief, as we have done, he still believes that smoking aids concentration. When he has a mental block, he thinks, ‘If only I could light up now, it would solve my problem.’ He then starts to question his decision to quit smoking and this doubt eats away at his resolve—the first step on the road to relapse.
As a footnote to this issue, smokers who claim that the cigarette helps them to concentrate are often the ones who claim that it also relieves boredom. This is interesting because when we’re bored we look for distractions and when we want to concentrate we look to remove distractions. So which one is it? Does the cigarette provide a distraction or remove distractions? It obviously can’t do both because they are exact opposites, yet because as smokers we unquestioningly accept the brainwashing, we tell ourselves that it can.
When I extinguished my final cigarette, overnight I went from smoking a hundred a day to none without any loss of concentration.
CHAPTER 12
RELAXATION
Most smokers think that a cigarette helps to relax them. The truth is that nicotine is a chemical stimulant (a poor and inefficient one, but a stimulant nevertheless). Don’t take my word for it: take your pulse rate then light a cigarette, take three or four drags in quick succession and check your pulse rate again. You will see a marked increase. How can something that elevates our heart rate and blood pressure be described as ‘relaxing’?
One of the favorite cigarettes for many smokers is the one after a meal. This is because a meal is a part of the day when we stop working; we sit down and relax and relieve our hunger and thirst. At such times the