Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [74]
Remember these points:
1. Smoking is a disease. You do not need a substitute disease when you quit.
2. You do not need nicotine. It is poison. You don’t need a substitute for poison.
3. Remember: cigarettes create the void; they do not fill it. Non-smokers don’t have a ‘void’. The quicker you truly accept that you do not need to smoke, or do anything else in its place, the sooner you will be truly free.
In particular avoid any product that contains nicotine, whether it is gum, patches, nasal sprays, inhalators or the latest and most bizarre gimmick, e-cigarettes. It is true that a small proportion of smokers who attempt to quit using nicotine substitutes do succeed and attribute their success to such use. However I believe that they quit in spite of their use and not because of it. It is unfortunate that many doctors still recommend nicotine replacement therapy (NRT).
The medical community’s love affair with Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) is not entirely surprising though. We tend to think that there is a pill for everything these days. Actually, the theory behind NRT sounds reasonable and logical. It is based on the belief that when you quit smoking, you have two powerful enemies to defeat:
1. The psychological or psycho-social triggers which make up the ‘habitual’ side of smoking
2. The terrible physical withdrawal from nicotine
If you have to take on two enemies, common sense would tell you that it is probably better to do it one at a time. So the theory behind NRT is to continue to take nicotine while you fight the psychological side of the addiction. Once this objective is achieved, we can then wean ourselves off the physical side of the addiction. In this way, you are tackling each problem separately.
The problem with this is that it is based on a flawed premise. Smoking isn’t a habit: it’s drug addiction and the actual physical withdrawal from nicotine is so slight as to be virtually imperceptible.
Furthermore, NRT implies that smokers only go through withdrawal whenever they try to quit. In fact, smokers go through withdrawal throughout their smoking lives, and it is the desire to relieve these feelings of withdrawal that creates the perceived ‘need’ to smoke. As soon as the smoker extinguishes a cigarette, the nicotine begins to leave the body. Even in smokers who metabolize nicotine relatively slowly, within a couple of hours their nicotine levels have dropped to less than half. During those first few hours the smoker is experiencing withdrawal at its worst, which is interesting because every smoker on the planet can (and does) regularly go for hours without smoking and it doesn’t bother them in the slightest.
After eight hours just under 3% of the nicotine from that cigarette remains (along with minor residual amounts from previous cigarettes). Even chain smokers can sleep eight hours at night without waking to smoke. By the morning, in purely physical terms, we are virtually nicotine-free. After just three days, we are nicotine free. This begs the question of why we need to use NRT for such extended periods (the patch, for example, is a ten-week program). All this does is prolong the life of the ‘little monster’ and, because your brain associates getting nicotine with cigarettes, it keeps the big monster alive and wanting to smoke.
Think about it this way. Would you tell an alcoholic who was trying to quit to drink beer instead of wine? To stop being a nicotine addict you must stop taking nicotine. All the people we see in our seminars who are addicted to nicotine gum remind me of this simple, unarguable truth. Don’t be fooled by the fact that the gum tastes awful—so did the first cigarette, remember?
NRT also has two other important negative impacts on the psychology of the quitter.
1. It convinces the smoker