Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [69]
5. Separate the disease (i.e. the chemical addiction) from the frame of mind of being a smoker or a non-smoker. All smokers, if given the opportunity to go back to the time before they became hooked, would jump at that opportunity and choose a non-smoking life. You have that opportunity today! Embrace it! Don’t even think about it as ‘giving up’ smoking. As soon as you make the decision to smoke your final cigarette you become a non-smoker. You should celebrate right from the outset, and you should continue to celebrate for the rest of your life.
By this stage, if you have opened your mind as I requested at the beginning, you will have already decided you are going to stop. If you have the right frame of mind, your success is guaranteed. Many readers are now feeling excitement at the prospect of their new lives and are straining at the leash to get on with it, barely able to wait to get the poison out of their system.
If you have a feeling of doom and gloom, it will be for one of the following reasons.
1. Something has not quite ‘clicked’ in your mind. Re-read the above five points and ask yourself if you genuinely believe them to be true. If you doubt any point, re-read the appropriate chapter or chapters.
2. You fear failure itself. Do not worry. Just read on. You will succeed. The whole business of smoking is like a confidence trick on a grand scale. Intelligent people do fall for confidence tricks, but only once. Having seen through the smoking illusions, you will not fall for the same con trick again so you should have no fear of failure.
3. You agree with everything, but you are still miserable. Don’t be! Open your eyes. Something wonderful is happening. You are about to escape from the prison. Anyway, it is the cigarette that is causing the misery—non-smokers aren’t miserable when they can’t smoke!
It is essential to start with the correct frame of mind: “Isn’t it great that I am a non-smoker!”
All we have to do now is to keep you in that positive frame of mind during the withdrawal period (three days), and the next few chapters deal with specific points that will enable you to do just that. By the end of the withdrawal period you will be thinking this way automatically and naturally as you begin to experience the delights of being a non-smoker. At that stage, the only mystery in your life will be ‘It is so obvious, why couldn’t I see it before?’ However, two important warnings:
1. Delay your plan to smoke your last cigarette until you have finished the book.
2. I have mentioned several times a withdrawal period of three days (after which you are 100% nicotine-free). This can cause misunderstanding. First, you may subconsciously feel that you have to suffer for three days. Provided you have the right mindset, which means seeing quitting not as losing a friend, but as killing an enemy, you don’t. Secondly, avoid the trap of thinking, ‘Somehow I have just got to abstain for three days and then I will be free.’ Nothing will actually happen after three days. You won’t suddenly feel like a non-smoker. Non-smokers do not feel any different from smokers. If you are moping about stopping during the three days, in all probability you will still be moping about it after three weeks, three months or even three years. What I am saying is, if you can start right now by saying, ‘I am never going to smoke again. Isn’t it wonderful?’ all temptation will go. Whereas if you say, ‘If only I can survive three days without a cigarette,’ you will be dying for a cigarette after the three days are up.
CHAPTER 33
THE WITHDRAWAL PERIOD
Although you are 100% nicotine-free after three days of abstinence it can take up to three weeks before our mind and body become fully accustomed to the absence of nicotine and many of the other thousands of chemicals present in tobacco smoke.