Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [70]
1. The physical withdrawal pangs of nicotine—that slightly empty, insecure feeling, like hunger, which smokers identify as a ‘need’ to smoke.
2. The psychological trigger of certain events such as a telephone conversation or a coffee break.
It is the failure of Willpower quitters to understand and differentiate between these two factors that make their attempts to quit so miserable and unsuccessful. Although ‘pangs’ are not painful as such, it is important not to underestimate their potential influence if we approach this task with the wrong mental attitude.
If smokers using willpower to quit can manage to abstain for a few days, the physical component of the ‘pang’ disappears. It is the psychological triggers that cause the difficulty. That smoker has grown accustomed to relieving his need to smoke at certain times of the day and when doing certain things. Over time, these associations can become quite strong. Thus the smoker forms the view that he can’t have a coffee, or drink a beer, or take a break, or enjoy a meal without a cigarette. It is important to deal with this point and best to do so by using an example.
Let’s say that you buy a brand new car, and true to Murphy’s Law, instead of the signal lever being on the left, as with your old car, it is on the right. You know it’s on the right, but for a couple of weeks, until you become accustomed to it, you occasionally put the windshield wipers on whenever you want to signal.
Stopping smoking is similar. During the early days of being quit, certain events may trigger the thought, ‘I want a cigarette.’ This is because for all of the years you were a smoker, you associated this specific event with smoking. In such situations, ‘I want a cigarette’ becomes a conditioned reflex. It is essential to counter-condition your response in these situations otherwise you will interpret your conditioned ‘I want a cigarette’ response as fact and then feel deprived because you can’t have one. This is the beginning of the slippery slope of having to use willpower.
A common such trigger is a meal, particularly one at a restaurant with friends. The ex-smoker having to use willpower already feels depressed and deprived. When his friends light up after the meal this feeling is doubled. Because the brainwashing still exists in his mind, he believes that his friends are enjoying the cigarette rather than merely removing the dissatisfied state of needing to smoke. This compounds the feeling of deprivation further and the ex-smoker needs to use substantial amounts of willpower to get through the occasion. The saddest thing here is that even though he is not smoking, the cigarette is still dominating the ex-smoker’s life.
Even with my method, responding correctly to these ‘triggers’ is the most challenging part and it can make the difference between finding stopping an ‘OK’ experience and a wonderful, life-changing one.
It is essential to counter this conditioning from the start and to do so successfully you must replace the fear and confusion caused by the brainwashing with hard facts. Get it clear in your mind: you don’t need to smoke and you don’t need to torture yourself by regarding the cigarette as some sort of crutch or friend when you know for a fact that it is neither. There is no need to be miserable. Cigarettes don’t make meals or social occasions; they ruin them. Smokers aren’t smoking after a meal because they enjoy it, but because they are drug addicts who need their ‘fix’ after a period of abstinence.
Abandon the ridiculous concept of smoking as being pleasurable for its own sake. If we smoked just for the sake of smoking, we could smoke herbal cigarettes (no, not that kind of herb!). The reason that herbal cigarettes haven’t taken off here or anywhere else is that there is no point in smoking them because they haven’t got any nicotine. We can clarify this point by comparing it with heroin. Do you think a heroin addict shoots up because he enjoys using a