Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [51]
CHAPTER 23
BEWARE OF CUTTING DOWN
Many smokers resort to cutting down either as a stepping stone towards quitting or as an attempt to control the ‘little monster’. Only people who have never smoked a cigarette in their life endorse this strategy.
As a stepping stone to stopping, cutting down is fatal. It is our attempts to cut down that can keep us trapped for life.
Usually, cutting down follows a failed attempt to stop. After a few hours or days of abstinence using Willpower, the smoker says something like, ‘There’s no way I can quit so I’ll cut down and just smoke the special ones.’
Terrible things happen.
You keep the ‘little monster’ alive wanting to be fed as before, but now you are only feeding him on a restricted basis. This forces you to experience the ‘big monster’—the psychological ‘craving’ to smoke—more often and with more intensity.
You spend your whole life looking at your watch, wishing your life away waiting for the next cigarette.
You have the worst of all worlds. You have to use willpower as if you were quitting, but for all your effort and trouble, you don’t even get to be a non-smoker!
When you smoke as much as you want you rarely feel that you enjoy any of them. You’re smoking because it’s just what you do. However, when you cut down, self-imposed abstinence creates the feeling that every cigarette is precious.
Again, all this is obvious when you think about it. When we cut down, we are abstaining from smoking whenever we want. We still have the desire to smoke say, every 45 minutes, but we are limiting ourselves to one every couple of hours. During that time, our desire to smoke builds, and the longer we wait to scratch the ‘itch’, the more ‘enjoyable’ it seems when we can at last scratch it.
Of course, this is also an illusion because what we are ‘enjoying’ when we smoke after a period of abstinence is not the cigarette, but ending the state of wanting or needing it. This is evident throughout our smoking lives. So many ‘special’ cigarettes come after a period of abstinence—the first of the day, the one after a meal, the one after a long flight, and so on. The longer the perceived period of ‘suffering’ between cigarettes the greater the illusion of relief or ‘pleasure’ when we can finally light up.
The main difficulty of stopping smoking is not the chemical aspect of the addiction. That’s easy. Smokers go through nicotine withdrawal every night when they go to sleep and it doesn’t bother them in the slightest. The ‘cravings’ that terrify us so profoundly are, in fact, so mild they don’t even wake you up. In the morning, most smokers will actually leave the bedroom before lighting up. Many will eat breakfast. Because so few people smoke in their homes these days, many will wait until they’re on their way to work before lighting up.
Most smokers go between eight and ten hours every night without a cigarette and it doesn’t bother them. Interestingly, many of them couldn’t do this during the day. They’d be tearing their hair out. Yet the withdrawal we experience is identical, regardless of whether we’re awake or asleep.
No, our obsession with the chemical side of the addiction is misplaced. The real problem is psychological. Ironically, all smokers and nearly all doctors know this, yet still we are told that the solution is a pill or a patch. I have yet to come across another field of medicine where the success rates for pharmacological treatments are so poor yet they remain the supposed ‘gold standard’ of treatment.
The real challenge that smokers face is to counter the brainwashing to which we all have been exposed. A major part of the brainwashing is the idea of the cigarette as a reward or special treat or crutch. Cutting down reinforces this illusion. It leaves you feeling miserable and deprived for extended periods (i.e. when you are abstaining) and this convinces you that the most precious thing on earth is the next cigarette. Even though we might smoke less for