Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [37]
You will shortly be making the decision to smoke your final cigarette (not yet, please—remember the initial instructions). All you have to do to remain a happy non-smoker is not to fall for the trap again. That is, do not smoke that first cigarette. If you do, that one cigarette will cost you $50,000.
If you think that this is a trick way of looking at it, don’t kid yourself. Just work out how much money you would have saved if you hadn’t smoked your first cigarette.
Actually, this is the only sensible and accurate way to look at the true financial cost of smoking. Just think how you would feel if a check for $50,000 from a competition you’d won were to arrive in the mail. You’d be dancing with delight! So start dancing, because with the decision you have made to escape from the smoking trap, you have just saved yourself $50,000.
This is a great deal of money, and you should quite rightly celebrate this windfall, but the truth is that a substantially improved financial status is the smallest and least important of the gains you earn when you break free from smoking. You are also giving yourself the gifts of life and freedom. These are truly priceless, and they just aren’t available to smokers.
During the withdrawal period you may be tempted to have ‘just one more’ final cigarette. Of course that ‘one more’ will lead to another and another and soon enough, you’ll be back smoking as you are now. It will help if you remind yourself it will cost you $50,000 (or whatever your estimate is). Would you spend $50,000 to get re-addicted to a drug that doesn’t even get you high?
If you are ever in the company of ‘happy’ smokers who tell you how much they enjoy it, just tell them that you know an idiot called Allen Carr who, if you pay him a year’s smoking money in advance, will provide free cigarettes for the rest of your life. Perhaps you can find me someone who will take up the offer?
CHAPTER 17
HEALTH
This is the area where the brainwashing is at its peak. Smokers think they are aware of the health risks. They are not. Even in my case, when I was expecting my head to explode at any moment and honestly believed I was prepared to accept the consequences, I was still kidding myself.
If in those days I had taken a cigarette out of the pack and an alarm started to sound, followed by a voice saying, ‘OK Allen, this is the one! Fortunately you get a warning and this is it. If you smoke another cigarette your head will explode,’ do you think I would have lit that cigarette?
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I would not have lit that cigarette. In addition, I would have been immensely relieved to have received the warning and happy that my head was not going to explode.
I did what every smoker on the planet does throughout their smoking lives: I closed my mind, prayed it wouldn’t be me, kept my head firmly in the sand and hoped that I would wake up one morning with no desire to smoke. Smokers can’t allow themselves to think about the health risks because if they do, even the illusion of enjoyment disappears.
This explains why the shock tactics used by the media on the Great American Smokeout are so ineffective. It is only non-smokers who can bring themselves to watch these horrific ads. It also explains why smokers, recalling Uncle Fred who smoked forty a day until he was eighty, will ignore the millions of smokers who are cut down in their prime because of this poisonous weed.
I frequently have the following conversation with smokers (usually the younger ones):
ME: Why do you want to stop?
SMOKER: I can’t afford it.
ME: Aren’t you worried about the health risks?
SMOKER: No. I could step under a bus tomorrow.
ME: Would you deliberately step under a bus?