Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [49]
Fortunately this is not true—just the reverse. Life as a non-smoker is not only longer but is infinitely more enjoyable. If this weren’t true, I can assure you, I’d still be smoking and so would the 60,000,000 Americans who have already successfully quit.
The misery and the subsequent ‘craving’ experienced by smokers trying to quit using willpower is nothing to do with physical withdrawal from nicotine. True, it is withdrawal that often triggers the misery, but the actual ‘craving’ is a physical feeling resulting from a mental process, and is caused by doubt and uncertainty.
Because the smoker has started off by feeling that he is making a sacrifice, he begins to feel deprived. It can be stressful to be deprived of something we want. Because the smoker associates smoking with stress relief, as soon as he quits, he wants to smoke. However, because he is supposed to be quitting, he can’t smoke, so the feeling of deprivation and misery grows. As a smoker, he would have cheered himself up with a cigarette but of course, this is the one thing he can’t do, and so it goes on until finally the poor smoker puts himself out of his misery by lighting up. This dynamic explains why many willpower attempts last literally minutes.
Another problem with the Willpower approach is that success is defined in negative terms. If it is your objective not to smoke for the rest of your life, then how do you know if you’ve succeeded until you’ve lived the rest of your life? This makes it hard for people using the Willpower method to get closure on the smoking issue and to move on with their lives. Instead the majority of them are plagued by doubts about whether they have succeeded and about how or when they will know that they have truly broken free. This is why so many willpower quitters feel vulnerable at social occasions or during periods of stress, sometimes even years after putting out their final cigarette.
While this is truly miserable for the Willpower quitter, their struggles help us to confirm that the misery or ‘craving’ is nothing to do with nicotine. It is just not possible to continue to ‘crave’ nicotine years after it has left their body.
These smokers are waiting for something to happen and at the same time, hoping that it won’t. Desperate to smoke, but hoping they never will. This is a pretty miserable state of affairs. How much fun can it be going through life hoping nothing will happen?
As I have said, the very real misery that these willpower quitters suffer from is entirely mental and therefore (with the right mindset) entirely avoidable. It is caused by the doubt. There is no pain, but they are still obsessed with smoking. This is heartbreaking because their lives remain dominated by the cigarette, even though they are no longer smoking. If you’ll excuse the crude comparison, they are the equivalent of the AA’s ‘dry drunk’. It’s hardly surprising that these are some of the unhappiest people you are likely to meet, or that we look at them and form a terrible fear of quitting and becoming one of them.
As the doubts fester, the fear begins to set in:
‘How long will the cravings last?’
‘Will I ever be happy again?’
‘Will I ever want to get out of bed in the morning?’
‘Will I ever enjoy a meal again?’
‘How will I cope with stress?’
‘Will I ever enjoy a social occasion again?’
The smoker is waiting for things to improve, but so long as he feels he is being deprived, he will remain miserable. And, of course, all the while the cigarette is looking more and more desirable.
The smoker then tells himself that he’ll ‘just have one