Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [64]
Look at it this way. You’ve already decided that you are not going to stay in the trap for the rest of your life. Therefore at some time in your life, whether you find it easy or difficult, you will have to go through the process of getting free. Smoking is not a habit or a pleasure. It is drug addiction and a disease. We’ve already established that, far from being easier to stop tomorrow, it will get progressively harder. With a disease that’s getting progressively worse, the time to get rid of it is NOW—or as near to now as you can practically manage. You are about to trade in a beaten up old pick-up truck for a brand new Ferrari. Why wait another day?
Just think how wonderful it will be not to have your life dominated by a four-inch tube of paper with poison in it. Just think how wonderful it will be to replace a life of fear, anxiety, stress and slavery with one of health, happiness and freedom! Why wouldn’t it be easy—and fun?
Just follow all my instructions. You won’t only find it easy after extinguishing the final cigarette: YOU’LL ENJOY IT!
CHAPTER 29
WILL I MISS THE CIGARETTE?
No! Once that little nicotine ‘monster’ is dead and the chemical addiction is broken, any remaining brainwashing will vanish and you will find that you will be both physically and mentally better equipped not only to cope with the stresses and strains of life but to enjoy the good times to the fullest.
There is only one danger and that is the influence of people who are still smoking. There is a saying that, ‘The grass is always greener on the other side’. Nowhere is this attitude more prevalent than in the area of smoking. Why is it in the case of smoking, where the disadvantages are so enormous and the illusory ‘advantages’ so slight, that ex-smokers tend to envy smokers?
With all of the brainwashing we are exposed to during our childhood and adolescence it is no surprise that we experiment with cigarettes and become hooked. But why is it that as soon as we manage to break free, we immediately once again want to become a smoker? It is the influence of smokers.
It usually happens at a social occasion, maybe on vacation with friends. After a meal, a smoker lights up and the ex-smoker remembers that this is an occasion when previously he would have smoked. He forgets about the many awful disadvantages of smoking and sees the cigarette as something that would help him to really relax after a meal. This momentary sense of deprivation causes a pang. This is a very curious scenario because what the ex-smoker should be remembering is how miserable smoking made him and how the smoker is envying him for being a non-smoker. This is much closer to the truth because, let’s face it, every smoker on the planet, even with the warped, addicted, brainwashed mind suffering the delusion that he enjoys smoking, would rather be a non-smoker. So why do some ex-smokers envy smokers on such occasions? There are two reasons.
‘Just one cigarette’. Remember: ‘just one cigarette’ doesn’t exist. Stop seeing the cigarette as a single object and see it how it really is: just one more link in the endless chain of smoking. Don’t envy smokers; pity them. It helps to observe smokers closely. Notice how agitated and irritable they get when they can’t smoke. Notice how quickly they smoke that cigarette, and how quickly they light the next. Notice how they are only happy when they are not aware that they’re smoking and how self-conscious and apologetic they are when they are aware of it. Remember: they aren’t enjoying any of them; they are merely feeding their addiction. But by feeding the addiction they are ensuring that they’ll need to go on feeding it. So long as they feed it, it will never go away.
In particular, remember that after that meal, that social occasion or that vacation, those poor smokers have to smoke all day, every day for the rest of their lives, never being allowed to stop, even for a day. The next morning, when they wake up with a mouth like a cesspit and a throat like sandpaper,