Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [53]
In any case, as I’ve already said, cutting down doesn’t work anyway. It takes enormous amounts of willpower to cut down. If you haven’t had the willpower to quit, why do you think you’ll have the much larger amount of willpower needed to cut down?
Through all the smokers and ex-smokers I have met, I have heard of literally tens of thousands of attempts to quit by cutting down. I have only heard of a handful of successes. Of all the quit smoking techniques this has to be the least successful and the most unpleasant. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.
However, the experience of cutting down does help us to explode one of the myths about smoking because it clearly illustrates that smoking is only ‘pleasurable’ after a period of abstinence. Once you see that, it becomes very obvious that we are not enjoying the cigarette itself, but the ending of the state of misery of needing it.
So your choices are simple:
Cut down for life. This is self-imposed torture and you will fail miserably (as have millions of smokers before you) because smoking isn’t a habit that you can break and re-make in another form, but drug addiction. “Cutting down” doesn’t work with drug addiction!
Continue to smoke as you do now, being dominated by fear, misery and slavery. What is the point?
Break free, take your life back and give yourself the gifts of health, happiness and freedom.
The other important point that cutting down demonstrates is that there is no such thing as ‘just one’ cigarette. Smoking is a chain reaction. Every cigarette creates the ‘need’ to smoke the next. You can’t break the chain by cutting down, only by breaking the chain!
REMEMBER: CUTTING DOWN WILL DRAG YOU DOWN.
CHAPTER 24
JUST ONE CIGARETTE
‘Just one cigarette’ is a myth you must get out of your mind. See it for what it really is—fiction.
It is ‘just one cigarette’ that gets us hooked in the first place. That ‘one’ cigarette led to the tens of thousands of others you have smoked.
It is ‘just one cigarette’ to tide us over a difficult patch or on a special occasion that is the cause of failure of most of our attempts to stop.
It is ‘just one cigarette’ that, when smokers think they are free, sends them back into the trap. Sometimes we smoke it just to confirm that we have indeed broken free. It tastes horrible and you question how you could have become hooked in the first place. You are convinced you could never get hooked again, but you already are. Before you know it, you’re back buying cigarettes and wondering what on earth happened.
It is the thought of that one ‘special’ cigarette that often prevents smokers from even trying to stop: the first in the morning or the one after a meal.
Get it firmly into your mind that there is no such thing as ‘just one cigarette’. It is a chain reaction that will dominate you for the rest of your life unless you choose to break it.
It is the myth of the occasional or ‘special’ cigarette that keeps willpower quitters mourning the loss of their ‘little friend’ instead of celebrating the death of an enemy. You must teach yourself to see smoking for what it really is. That ‘just one cigarette’ led to the years and years of slavery and torture you have had to endure as a smoker.
Whenever you think about smoking you must see it as a lifetime’s chain of filth, disease, fear, misery and slavery. These are the facts of smoking. A lifetime of paying an exorbitant amount of money for the privilege of feeding yourself poison. A lifetime of shame, anger, guilt, bad breath, and mental and physical torture. And for what do we put ourselves through this awful experience? So we can remove the slightly empty feeling of withdrawal caused by the previous cigarette, and feel like a non-smoker.
There are two things in particular that really grind us down about smoking.