Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [63]
Ask yourself these following questions.
When you smoked that very first cigarette, did you really decide then that you would continue to smoke for the rest of your life?
OF COURSE YOU DIDN’T!
Do you want to be a smoker for the rest of your life?
OF COURSE NOT!
So when will you stop? Tomorrow? Isn’t that what you said yesterday? Next year? Isn’t that what you said last year?
Isn’t this what you’ve been asking yourself since you first realized you were hooked? Are you hoping that one morning you will wake up and just not want to smoke any longer? Stop kidding yourself. I waited thirty-three years for it to happen to me and never did that day come. With drug addiction you get progressively more hooked, not less. You think it will be easier tomorrow? If you can’t do it today, what makes you think you’ll be able to tomorrow? Or will you wait until you get one of the killer diseases? Do you honestly think that the additional stress caused by the thought of impending death will make it easier to quit? Think about this; what would you advise your dearest friend to do in this situation? You would urge him to save his life and act immediately.
We believe that we live stressful lives. In fact, we don’t. We’ve taken most of the genuine stress out of our lives. We have a comfortable roof over our heads. When we leave our home we aren’t likely to be attacked by man-eating predators. Most of us don’t have to worry about where our next meal is coming from. We have heat, light and clean water. Compare this to the life of a wild animal. Every time a rabbit comes out of its burrow it is confronted with life-threatening situations. One lapse in concentration and that rabbit could be someone or something’s lunch. But the rabbit is equipped to handle this stress. It has adrenaline and other hormones—and so have we.
The truth is that the most stressful periods in our lives tend to be childhood and early adolescence. The reason for this is that everything is new and everything is changing. But during this most stressful period of our lives, we didn’t need to smoke. We were perfectly able to cope because 3.8 billion years of evolution has equipped us to do so.
I was five years old when World War II started. We were bombed out of our home in London and I was separated from my parents for two years. I was billeted with people who treated me unkindly. It was an unpleasant period in my life, but I was able to cope with it. I don’t believe it has left me with any permanent scars; on the contrary I think it has made me a stronger person. When I look back on my life there has only been one thing I couldn’t handle and that was my slavery to that damned weed.
Twenty-five years ago, I thought I had all the worries in the world. I was suicidal—not in the sense that I wanted to jump off the top of a building but in the sense that I knew my smoking would soon kill me. I argued that if this was life with my crutch, life just wouldn’t be worth living without it. What I didn’t realize was that when you are physically and mentally depressed, everything gets you down. Today, I feel like a young boy again. Only one thing has made that change in my life: I’m now out of the smoking pit.
I know it’s a cliché to say that ‘If you haven’t got your health you haven’t got anything’ but it’s true. I used to think that physical fitness fanatics were a pain. I used to claim that there was more to life than feeling fit: like booze and smokes.
That’s nonsense. When you are physically fit you can enjoy the highs more and cope with the lows better. We confuse responsibility with stress. Responsibility becomes stressful only if you are not strong enough to handle it. Characters like Humphrey Bogart, Peter Jennings and George Harrison were strong, dynamic, powerful people. What destroys them is not the stresses of life, or the pressure of being in the public eye, but the socalled crutches they turn to in order to try to handle that stress. Unfortunately these crutches can kill and sadly for those