Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [45]
In the last years of my smoking, I was a nervous wreck. I refused to have a medical checkup, because I was terrified of what it would reveal. If I wanted to buy life insurance or private health coverage I insisted on a ‘no medical’ product and paid far higher premiums as a result. I hated visiting hospitals, doctors and dentists. I also had a terrible fear of the future and of aging—as a smoker, I didn’t feel I was entitled to a future.
I didn’t relate any of this to my smoking, but when I stopped I suddenly acquired the confidence and courage to face these issues head on. Nowadays I look forward to every day. Of course, bad things happen in my life—this is the human condition—and I am subject to the normal stress and strains, but it is wonderful to have the confidence and courage to deal with them. And the improved health, energy and freedom make the good times more enjoyable too.
CHAPTER 20
THOSE SINISTER BLACK SHADOWS
Another of the great joys of breaking free from the slavery of smoking is to be free from those sinister black shadows that lurk at the back of every smoker’s mind. All smokers sense they have been trapped, and to make a bad situation tolerable, we have to close our minds to the ill-effects of smoking. For most of our lives smoking is virtually automatic, but those black shadows are always lurking in our sub-conscious minds, never very far beneath the surface.
There are many substantial advantages to becoming a happy non-smoker. Some of them are pretty obvious—vastly improved health, a much-improved financial status and ending to the slavery of smoking—but such was my fear of life without cigarettes that I was prepared to ignore these obvious advantages and search desperately for any flimsy excuse to keep smoking.
We can get very creative when looking for an excuse to smoke and I was at my most creative when I was actually supposed to be trying to quit. This creativity was triggered by the desperation that came from the fear and misery I felt by having to use willpower.
Smokers can’t block their minds to the health and financial aspects of smoking—they are just too big and too obvious to ignore—but I still struggle to understand how I could have blocked my mind to the sheer slavery of smoking. Spending half of my life not smoking, wishing I could, and the other half smoking, wishing I didn’t have to.
In the last chapter I mentioned the incredible joy I experienced when I rediscovered my energy and confidence but this pales into insignificance next to the joy I felt when at last those sinister black clouds that for years had been hanging over me, disappeared forever, leaving me for the first time in my adult life a truly free man.
Smokers are not the weak-willed, spineless jellyfish that anti-smokers (and even some smokers themselves) believe.
I knew that I was strong-willed and I was in control of every other aspect of my life. I loathed myself for being dependent on something I despised so much and that I knew was ruining my life and my family’s future.
I cannot even begin to describe to you the utter joy of being free from these sinister black shadows, the dependency and the self-loathing. I can’t tell you how nice it is to be able to look at smokers not with a feeling of envy, but with a feeling of pity for them and a sense of elation that you have broken free and are no longer trapped.
The last two chapters have dealt with the considerable advantages of being a non-smoker. In the interests of fair play and with a desire to give a balanced account, the next chapter lists the advantages of being a smoker.
CHAPTER 21
THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A SMOKER
CHAPTER 22
THE WILLPOWER METHOD OF STOPPING
It is an accepted ‘fact’ in our society that it is very difficult to stop smoking. Even books advising you how to quit usually start