Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [39]
Those poor smokers all say the same thing: ‘If only I could turn the clock back…’ Sadly, this is the one thing they can’t do.
You have a golden opportunity to save your life by breaking free from this awful addiction and the limitless pain and suffering it brings to so many millions of lives. You have a choice. Make no mistake; if you choose to continue to smoke after reading this book, you’ll be a smoker for the rest of your life. Is this really the future you are choosing for yourself and your family?
At the beginning of the book I promised you no scare tactics. If you have already decided to become a non-smoker, this does not fall into that category. If you are still in doubt, skip the remainder of this chapter and come back to it when you have read the rest of the book.
Volumes of statistics have already been published about the damage that cigarettes can cause to the smoker’s health. The trouble is that until the smoker decides it is time to stop, he goes to great lengths to avoid being exposed to such information. He doesn’t want to know. Even the on-pack health warning is a waste of time because the smoker doesn’t even register it. And if he does see the warning, it is likely to cause anxiety and stress, which will make him want a cigarette.
Smokers tend to think of the health hazard as a hit-or-miss affair, a bit like Russian roulette. Get it into your head: the deterioration to your health is already happening. Every time you take a drag you are breathing cancer-triggering fumes deep into your lungs, and lung cancer—horrific as it is—is by no means the worst of the killer diseases that cigarettes cause or contribute to.
While I was still smoking, I’d never heard of arteriosclerosis or emphysema. I knew the permanent wheezing and coughing and the increasingly frequent attacks of bronchitis and asthma were a direct result of my smoking. But although they caused me real discomfort there was no real pain.
I confess that the thought of contracting lung cancer terrified me, which is probably why I just blocked it from my mind. It’s amazing how the fear of the horrendous health risks associated with smoking is overshadowed by the fear of stopping. It’s not so much that the fear of quitting is greater, just that it’s a more immediate one. The fear of contracting lung cancer is a fear of something that might happen at some point in the future, so we can distance ourselves from the risk and the fear it creates. We think, ‘Who knows? I might not get it. Surely I will have quit by then?’
We tend to think of smoking as a tug-of-war. On the one side we have the fear that it’s killing us, costing a fortune and making us a slave and an addict. On the other side, it’s our pleasure or crutch. It never occurs to us that these perceived ‘benefits’ of smoking are really just more thinly disguised fears: the fear that I won’t be able to have fun, relax or handle stress without the cigarette. Of course both sets of fear are caused by the cigarette. And I hardly need to point out that non-smokers have none of these fears.
As I have said before, it’s not so much that we genuinely enjoy smoking, but that we get miserable when we can’t. This is not genuine pleasure, it is an attempt to avoid discomfort—a discomfort that non-smokers don’t get.
Think of a heroin addict deprived of his drug and going through withdrawal. He is miserable, stressed, panicky and experiencing severe physical symptoms. Now picture that same addict’s utter relief when he shoots up and is able to remove those awful symptoms. Non-heroin addicts don’t suffer that panic feeling. The heroin causes it. The subsequent dose partially relieves the symptoms, but also ensures that addict will go through withdrawal again. So the addict shoots up again to remove the symptoms and the cycle of addiction continues. Why is all this so obvious with other people’s addictions, but not our own?
Non-smokers don’t get anxious, panicky or stressed when they can’t smoke. The cigarette causes those symptoms and the next cigarette partially relieves