Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [34]
Then you read in a newspaper that this isn’t just happening to you; many other people have been suffering from the same problem. In fact, researchers have discovered that the ointment doesn’t actually cure the sore. All it does is to temporarily push the sore beneath the surface of the skin. Far from curing the cold sore, it is the ointment that has caused it to grow. All you have to do to get rid of the sore is to stop using the ointment. The sore will disappear in due course.
Would you continue to use the ointment?
Would it take you willpower not to use the ointment? If you didn’t believe the article you had read in the newspaper, there might be a few days of apprehension, but once you realized that the sore was getting better, the need or desire to use the ointment would go.
Would you be miserable? Of course you wouldn’t. You had an awful problem, which you thought was insoluble. Now you’ve found the solution. Even if it took a while for that sore to disappear completely, each day, as it improved, you’d think, ‘Isn’t is marvelous? I’m not going to die this terrible death.’
This was the magic that happened to me when I put out my final cigarette. Let me make one point quite clear in the analogy of the sore and the ointment. The sore isn’t lung cancer, arteriosclerosis, emphysema, bronchitis, angina, asthma, or coronary heart disease. These are also caused by the ointment, but in addition to the sore. It isn’t the hundreds of thousands of dollars that we burn, or the lifetime of bad breath and stained teeth, the lethargy, the wheezing and coughing. It isn’t the lifetime of being despised by a society that seemed happy for you to get hooked in the first place, or the lifetime of despising yourself. These are all in addition to the sore. The sore is the fear that makes us shut our mind to these things, created by that barely noticeable slightly empty, insecure feeling that says, ‘I want a cigarette.’ Non-smokers don’t suffer from this fear and one of the sweetest things about breaking free from the slavery of smoking is to no longer have your life dominated by fear.
It was as if a great mist had suddenly lifted from my mind. I could see so clearly that the panic feeling of wanting a cigarette wasn’t some sort of weakness in me, or some magical quality in the cigarette. Withdrawing from the first cigarette caused that slightly panicky feeling; and each subsequent one, far from relieving the feeling, was keeping it alive. At the same time I could see that all these other ‘happy’ smokers were going through the same nightmare that I was.
For the first time in my smoking life, my fear of quitting was replaced by a feeling of excitement about how wonderful it would be to break free!
CHAPTER 15
SELF–IMPOSED SLAVERY
Usually when smokers try to stop, they quote health, money and the social stigma as their prime motivations. The sheer, unremitting slavery of being a smoker doesn’t even occur to us.
We quite rightly view slavery as a great evil, yet every smoker lives the life of a slave, every day they remain a smoker. We seem oblivious to this slavery for the most part, and feel that it is somehow normal. It is far from normal. We were lucky enough to have been born free. Of all the basic human values, surely freedom is the most basic and most important? Who could conceive of anything as stupid as giving away this priceless gift in order to be enslaved to a drug that doesn’t even get you high?
Increasingly, smokers are being pushed outside into the cold by society. Anti-smoking by-laws increasingly restrict where and when we can smoke. This bothers smokers, but it doesn’t stop them. Ironically, these types of restrictions can make it harder, not easier, to quit. The reason for this is that these days it is impossible to light up whenever you want. As a consequence, smokers go through periods of enforced abstinence throughout the day. As I mentioned, many ‘special