Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [62]
Many people have said to me, ‘You say, “Continue to smoke until you have finished the book.” This makes people read the book slowly or just not finish it at all. Therefore you should change that instruction.’ This sounds logical, but I know that if the instruction were ‘Stop Immediately’, some smokers wouldn’t even start reading the book.
I had a smoker consult me in the early days. He said, ‘I really resent having to seek your help. I know I’m a strong-willed person. In every other area of my life I’m in control. Why is it that all these other smokers are stopping by using their own willpower, yet I have to come to you?’ He continued, ‘I think I could do it on my own, if I could smoke while I was doing it.’
This may sound like a contradiction, but I know what the man meant. We think of stopping smoking as something that is very difficult and unpleasant. What do we need when we have something difficult to do? We need our ‘little friend’. So stopping smoking seems to the smoker to be a double blow. Not only do we have something we perceive to be difficult and unpleasant to do, but we also have to do without our crutch while we’re doing it.
It didn’t occur to me until long after that man had left that my instruction to keep smoking is the real beauty of the Easyway method. You can continue to smoke while you go through the process of stopping. You can get rid of all your doubts and fear first, so when it comes time to extinguish that final cigarette you are already a non-smoker and enjoying being one.
The only chapter that has caused me to question my original advice seriously is this chapter on the matter of the right timing. Above I advise that if your special cigarette occasions are stress situations at the office, then pick a holiday to make an attempt, and vice versa. In fact, that isn’t the easiest way to do it. The easiest way is pick what you feel to be the most difficult time to do it. In this way you can prove to yourself right out of the blocks that you can handle even the toughest situations as a non-smoker and the rest becomes even easier. But if I gave you that as a definite instruction, would you even make the attempt to stop?
Let me use an analogy. My wife and I plan to go swimming together. While we arrive at the pool at the same time, we are rarely in the water together. The reason for this is that my wife enters the water extremely slowly, dipping one toe in, then another, and so on. For me, even watching this is excruciating. I know that no matter how cold the water is, eventually I’m going to have to brave it. So I’ve learned to do it the easy way: I dive straight in. If I were in a position to insist that my wife either did as I did (i.e. dive straight in) or not swim at all, I know that she’d choose not to swim at all. You see the problem.
Feedback from readers tells me that many smokers have used the original advice I gave on timing to delay what they perceive to be the ‘evil day’.
My next thought was to use a technique like the one I used for Chapter 21, The Advantages of Being a Smoker. It would be something like, ‘Timing is very important, and in the next chapter I will advise you about the best time for you to make the attempt.’ You would turn the page over and there would be a huge ‘NOW!’ That is in fact the best advice, but would you take it?
In a sense, this is the most subtle aspect of the smoking trap. It’s designed to hold you for life. When we have genuine stress in our lives, it’s not time to stop,