Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [50]
Fearing that he’ll get hooked again (too late, he already is) he doesn’t light up immediately, but waits for a few hours, days or even weeks, until he thinks it’s ‘safe’. He’s on the slipperiest of slippery slopes. Most admit defeat and are soon smoking full-time again: only now they feel angry, frustrated, guilty and stupid in addition to feeling miserable.
Even smokers who succeed with the Willpower method tend to find the process difficult and unpleasant and have to be constantly vigilant, often for years after they’ve quit. The reason for this is that they never truly get to grips with the brainwashing. Long after the physical aspect of the addiction has disappeared, the desire to smoke remains. It prolongs—sometimes indefinitely—the ‘cravings’ and so the feeling of misery and deprivation lingers. Eventually, if he can survive for long enough without cigarettes, the willpower quitter begins to accept that life goes on and that life without cigarettes might even become tolerable. This is one of the great tragedies of the willpower quitter—they never get to celebrate their achievement and to enjoy their freedom from the slavery of smoking.
It’s true that many people stop smoking using Willpower, but I feel that this does not, on its own, define success. True success in the smoking cessation context is when you are happy to be a non-smoker, and when you are able to enjoy the health, happiness and freedom to which this most wonderful of achievements entitles you.
The truth is that with Willpower, there are far more failures than successes. According to the journal Tobacco Control, 12-month success rates using pure Willpower with no education, motivation or support range from 2–5%. Success rates for other popular quit methods are difficult to gauge, but studies show real-life quit rates of around 7% for Nicotine Replacement Therapy (patches, nicotine gum etc.) and 12–15% for Zyban (Wellbutrin) and 15% for the latest ‘wonder drug’ Champix. Links to these studies can be found on our US website: www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com
Looking at it another way, the most ‘successful’ variant of the Willpower approach has an 85% failure rate at twelve months and the least successful a 95% failure rate. Our seminar centers would close in a month if they delivered these kinds of results.
The reason for this lack of success with the Willpower approach is obvious to me. It doesn’t help smokers understand why they smoke, or deal with the psychological desire to light up. So long as the desire to smoke remains, the smoker will struggle to break free. The desire can and does remain with many willpower quitters for the rest of their lives, and this explains why they remain so vulnerable even years after they’ve quit.
They continue to believe that they enjoy smoking, but that they have deprived themselves by quitting. As I have often said, enjoyment doesn’t come into it. It never did! If enjoyment were the reason that people smoked, no one would smoke more than one. We assume that we enjoy them because we have to. We’d feel stupid if we continued to smoke and did not ‘enjoy’ it. That’s why many of the cigarettes we smoke, we’re barely even aware we’re smoking. If every time we lit up we had to be acutely aware of the smell, the taste, the consequences and that this might be the one that triggers the lung cancer, then even the illusion of enjoyment would disappear.
Watch smokers when you get a chance. It’s clear that they don’t particularly enjoy it. You’ll see that they are only happy when they are not aware they’re smoking. Once they become aware they get uncomfortable, self-conscious and apologetic.
Keep it simple. We smoke to feed that ‘little nicotine monster’. Once you have purged