Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [47]
As a consequence, because he hasn’t changed his thinking about the cigarette and retains the desire to smoke, the Willpower quitter is not really a non-smoker but a smoker who is not currently allowing himself to smoke. This is why relapse is so common among people who quit using Willpower—they never remove the desire to smoke. They believe that the cigarette gave them something and that they are now depriving themselves of that something. It is this sense of deprivation and sacrifice that keeps the desire to smoke alive. Think about it, who is more likely to relapse: someone that doesn’t want to smoke or someone that does?
Quite simply, the key to being a happy non-smoker is to remove the desire to smoke. With no desire to smoke, it takes no Willpower not to do so. In the same way that it doesn’t take you willpower not to do other things you have no desire to do. So long as Willpower quitters don’t understand this, they will continue to have a desire to smoke and will need to use Willpower to combat that desire.
After a while of trying and failing to quit, most smokers begin to pin their hopes on the possibility—some would say fantasy—that they will suddenly wake up one morning with no desire to smoke. We hear stories and urban myths about Brett or Jane or John or Betsy to whom this happened (e.g. ‘I had a bout of the flu and afterwards found I didn’t want to smoke any more’).
Don’t kid yourself. I have investigated these rumors whenever I’ve heard about them and they are rarely as simple as they appear. Usually the smoker has been mentally preparing himself to quit for months beforehand and uses the abstinence imposed upon him from being unwell as the trigger to launch an attempt.
More often in the case of people who stop ‘just like that’ they have suffered some kind of shock that has jolted them into action. Perhaps a close friend or relative has just died from a smoking-related condition or they have had a scare themselves. They tell people, “I just decided to quit and that was it” because it shows them to be decisive, action oriented, no-nonsense go-getters. Far better than admitting that you quit because you were terrified of remaining a smoker.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not criticizing such people. Frankly, I’ll support anything that helps people quit. However the problem I have with such scare tactics is that they tend not to last. As the weeks and months go by, the ex-smoker forgets how frightened they were. Because they have not removed the brainwashing or really dealt with their desire to smoke, after a period of time the cigarette begins to look attractive. Weeks or even months into their quit, they find themselves wanting to smoke and having to use Willpower not to do so. Sadly, this usually ends with relapse. The ex-smoker tells themselves that they’ll ‘just have one’ to prove that they’ve kicked it or ‘to see what it’s like’. Of course, they get hooked even faster this time around and are left kicking themselves in anger and frustration at having fallen into the same trap again.
Let’s consider in greater detail the flaws in the Willpower method and why quitting using Willpower (and I consider all other methods as Willpower) is so difficult and unpleasant.
For most of our lives we bury our head in the sand about smoking, but every so often something happens which triggers an attempt to quit. As an initial step we weigh up the pros and cons of smoking. This confirms what we have known all along: by any rational assessment there is only one conclusion, STOP SMOKING!
If you were to sit down and give points out of ten to all of the advantages of stopping and do a similar exercise with