Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [46]
If your aim is to run a four-minute mile, that’s difficult. You will have to undergo years of extremely hard training, and even then you may be physically incapable of doing it. In fact, until Roger Bannister broke the four-minute barrier, it was considered impossible.
As a smoker about to attempt to quit, you might feel that you’re about to attempt the impossible, but really all you need do is not light your next cigarette. After all, no one forces you to smoke. Unlike food or drink, cigarettes are not necessary for survival. So if you want to stop, why would it be difficult? In fact, it isn’t. It is smokers who make it difficult by relying on the Willpower method. I define the Willpower Method as any method that makes the smoker feel that he or she is making a sacrifice. Let’s look at this in more detail.
You never decided that you would become a smoker for life. You experimented with a few cigarettes and because they tasted so awful, you believed that you could never get hooked and were convinced that you could stop whenever you wished.
Before we realize it, we’re buying them and we begin to feel uneasy if we don’t have cigarettes close at hand or if we are going into a situation where we won’t be able to smoke. Smoking, very quietly but very definitely, has become part of our lives. We always have our cigarettes close at hand and we begin to believe that they help us relax, concentrate, handle stress, etc. We come to rely on the cigarette to give us a ‘boost’ in a wide variety of situations. We conveniently ignore the many contradictions that surround smoking. Like the fact that we use a cigarette as a stimulant in the morning to help us get going, and as a relaxant in the evening to help us ‘take the edge off’. It also doesn’t occur to us that non-smokers seem to get on perfectly well without them. Whether we openly admit it or not, soon we are smoking because we don’t think we can stop.
Research has shown that nicotine addiction takes place very quickly, but because it is so subtle (unlike, say, heroin addiction where the effects of the drug are plain to see) it can take smokers years to realize that they are hooked. This is because we are brainwashed into believing that we smoke because we enjoy it. This is distorted thinking: because we get miserable when we can’t smoke, we assume it gives us great pleasure when we do.
Usually it is only when we try to stop for the first time that we realize we have a problem. The first attempts to stop are more often than not in the early days and are triggered by a shortage of cash as a student or by a realization that we are short of breath playing sports.
These ‘trigger’ events are stressful in themselves, and ironically, it is during times of stress when our need to smoke is its greatest. We are therefore attempting what we perceive to be an extremely stressful undertaking (quitting smoking) at a time when we are already stressed and ‘need’ to smoke most. We quickly conclude that doing without our ‘crutch’ at a time of such stress is not an option (it never occurs to us that the cigarette is causing some of the stress), so we begin to look for an excuse to smoke. We tell ourselves that it ‘wasn’t the right time’ to quit. So we decide to wait until there is less stress or no stress in our lives before trying again. Of course, this gives us the perfect excuse to keep smoking indefinitely because so long as you are smoking, you will have stress. If we ever do have a period when we aren’t stressed we don’t quit because we need the stress to provide the motivation to do so.
This becomes a common pattern among what we call ‘serial quitters’. On the one hand we sense that being a smoker is stressful, but during our whole lives we have been brainwashed into believing that cigarettes relieve