Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [36]
Usually, his eyes light up. If I had attacked him on health grounds or on the social stigma, he would feel at a disadvantage, but on money—“Oh, I can afford it. It is only $x a week and I think it’s worth it. It is my only vice or pleasure,” etc.
If he is a pack-a-day smoker I say to him, “I still cannot believe you are not worried about the money. You will need to earn over $150,000 in your lifetime to finance your addiction. What are you doing with that money? You are not even setting light to it or throwing it away. You are actually using that money to ruin your physical health, to destroy your courage and confidence, and to suffer a lifetime of slavery, bad breath and stained teeth. These are all priceless and irreplaceable. It’s like paying an assassin to kill you. Surely that must worry you?”
It becomes apparent at this point, particularly with younger smokers, that it is the first time they have ever considered smoking as a lifetime expense. For most smokers the price of a pack is bad enough. Occasionally we work out what we spend in a week, and that is alarming. Very occasionally (and only when we’re thinking about stopping) we estimate what we spend in a year and that is frightening, but over a lifetime—it’s unthinkable.
The confirmed smoker with whom I am having the discussion almost always counters with the encyclopedia salesman trick. “I can afford it. It is only so much a week.” I know this trick well, having used it myself for years. I then say, “I will make you an offer you cannot refuse. You pay me the cost of one year of smoking right now and I will provide you with free cigarettes for the rest of your life.”
If I were offering to take over his $150,000 mortgage for $2,000, the smoker would have my signature on a contract faster than you could say ‘Philip Morris’, and yet not one confirmed smoker (and please bear in mind I am not talking to someone like yourself who plans to stop, I am talking to someone who claims to have no intention of stopping) has taken me up on that offer. Why not? Is it because, deep down, like every other smoker on the planet, even ‘confirmed’ smokers would really rather be non-smokers?
Often at this point in my consultations, a smoker will say, “Look, I am not really worried about the money aspect.” If you are thinking along these lines, ask yourself why you are not worried. In other areas of our lives we go to great trouble to save a couple of dollars. We clip coupons. We wait until our favorite stores have a sale. We make sure we claim every last cent on our taxes. Yet here we are spending tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of poisoning ourselves to death.
The answer to the question is this. Every other decision that you make in your life will be the result of an analytical process of weighing the pros and cons of various courses of action and arriving at a rational, fact-based decision. From time to time we may get it wrong, but at least the process will be a rational one. Whenever any smoker weighs up the pros and cons of smoking, the answer is the same: ‘STOP SMOKING! YOU FOOL!’ We can do this exercise a thousand times and a thousand times the answer would be the same. We have two options at this stage: to sacrifice the cigarette, or sacrifice rationality. So we sacrifice rationality. We sense that we are not smoking because we want to or because we like it, but because we think we can’t stop. We have to keep our head in the sand and believe the brainwashing, because otherwise we feel stupid being a smoker.
Try to take your head out of the sand for a moment. Smoking is a chain reaction. Withdrawing from your first cigarette made you smoke the second. Withdrawing from the second made you smoke the third and so on. Actually, the first cigarette you ever smoked cost you everything you have ever spent on cigarettes. That was one very expensive cigarette! Equally, your next cigarette