Easy Way to Stop Smoking (15 page)

Fortunately this is not true—just the reverse. Life as a non-smoker is not only longer but is infinitely more enjoyable. If this weren't true, I can assure you, I'd still be smoking and so would the 60,000,000 Americans who have already successfully quit.

The misery and the subsequent ‘craving' experienced by smokers trying to quit using willpower is nothing to do with physical withdrawal from nicotine. True, it is withdrawal that often triggers the misery, but the actual ‘craving' is a physical feeling resulting from a
mental
process, and is caused by doubt and uncertainty.

Because the smoker has started off by feeling that he is making a sacrifice, he begins to feel deprived. It can be stressful to be deprived of something we want. Because the smoker associates smoking with stress relief, as soon as he quits, he wants to smoke. However, because he is supposed to be quitting, he can't smoke, so the feeling of deprivation and misery grows. As a smoker, he would have cheered himself up with a cigarette but of course, this is the one thing he can't do, and so it goes on until finally the poor smoker puts himself out of his misery by lighting up. This dynamic explains why many willpower attempts last literally minutes.

Another problem with the Willpower approach is that success is defined in negative terms. If it is your objective not to smoke for the rest of your life, then how do you know if you've succeeded until you've lived the rest of your life? This makes it hard for people using the Willpower method to get closure on the smoking issue and to move on with their lives. Instead the
majority of them are plagued by doubts about whether they have succeeded and about how or when they will know that they have truly broken free. This is why so many willpower quitters feel vulnerable at social occasions or during periods of stress, sometimes even years after putting out their final cigarette.

While this is truly miserable for the Willpower quitter, their struggles help us to confirm that the misery or ‘craving' is nothing to do with nicotine. It is just not possible to continue to ‘crave' nicotine years after it has left their body.

These smokers are waiting for something to happen and at the same time, hoping that it won't. Desperate to smoke, but hoping they never will. This is a pretty miserable state of affairs. How much fun can it be going through life hoping nothing will happen?

As I have said, the very real misery that these willpower quitters suffer from is entirely mental and therefore (with the right mindset) entirely avoidable. It is caused by the doubt. There is no pain, but they are still obsessed with smoking. This is heartbreaking because their lives remain dominated by the cigarette, even though they are no longer smoking. If you'll excuse the crude comparison, they are the equivalent of the AA's ‘dry drunk'. It's hardly surprising that these are some of the unhappiest people you are likely to meet, or that we look at them and form a terrible fear of quitting and becoming one of them.

As the doubts fester, the fear begins to set in:

‘How long will the cravings last?'

‘Will I ever be happy again?'

‘Will I ever want to get out of bed in the morning?'

‘Will I ever enjoy a meal again?'

‘How will I cope with stress?'

‘Will I ever enjoy a social occasion again?'

The smoker is waiting for things to improve, but so long as he feels he is being deprived, he will remain miserable. And, of course, all the while the cigarette is looking more and more desirable.

The smoker then tells himself that he'll ‘just have one' and that everything will then be all right; but there is no such thing as ‘just one' cigarette. As soon as he puts that cigarette out, the nicotine begins to leave the body and the old empty, insecure feeling (i.e. the physical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal) reappears. Almost immediately, a little voice at the back of his mind says, “Light another.”

Fearing that he'll get hooked again (too late, he already is) he doesn't light up immediately, but waits for a few hours, days or even weeks, until he thinks it's ‘safe'. He's on the slipperiest of slippery slopes. Most admit defeat and are soon smoking full-time again: only now they feel angry, frustrated, guilty and stupid in addition to feeling miserable.

Even smokers who succeed with the Willpower method tend to find the process difficult and unpleasant and have to be constantly vigilant, often for years after they've quit. The reason for this is that they never truly get to grips with the brainwashing. Long after the physical aspect of the addiction has disappeared, the desire to smoke remains. It prolongs—sometimes indefinitely—the ‘cravings' and so the feeling of misery and deprivation lingers. Eventually, if he can survive for long enough without cigarettes, the willpower quitter begins to accept that life goes on and that life without cigarettes might even become tolerable. This is one of the great tragedies of the willpower quitter—they never get to celebrate their achievement and to enjoy their freedom from the slavery of smoking.

It's true that many people stop smoking using Willpower, but I feel that this does not, on its own, define success. True success in the smoking cessation context is when you are
happy
to be a non-smoker, and when you are able to enjoy the health,
happiness and freedom to which this most wonderful of achievements entitles you.

The truth is that with Willpower, there are far more failures than successes. According to the journal
Tobacco Control
, 12-month success rates using pure Willpower with no education, motivation or support range from 2–5%. Success rates for other popular quit methods are difficult to gauge, but studies show real-life quit rates of around 7% for Nicotine Replacement Therapy (patches, nicotine gum etc.) and 12–15% for Zyban (Wellbutrin) and 15% for the latest ‘wonder drug' Champix. Links to these studies can be found on our US website:
www.TheEasywayToStopSmoking.com

Looking at it another way, the most ‘successful' variant of the Willpower approach has an 85% failure rate at twelve months and the least successful a 95% failure rate. Our seminar centers would close in a month if they delivered these kinds of results.

The reason for this lack of success with the Willpower approach is obvious to me. It doesn't help smokers understand why they smoke, or deal with the psychological desire to light up. So long as the desire to smoke remains, the smoker will struggle to break free. The desire can and does remain with many willpower quitters for the rest of their lives, and this explains why they remain so vulnerable even years after they've quit.

They continue to believe that they enjoy smoking, but that they have deprived themselves by quitting. As I have often said, enjoyment doesn't come into it. It never did! If enjoyment were the reason that people smoked, no one would smoke more than one. We assume that we enjoy them because we have to. We'd feel stupid if we continued to smoke and did not ‘enjoy' it. That's why many of the cigarettes we smoke, we're barely even aware we're smoking. If every time we lit up we had to be acutely aware of the smell, the taste, the consequences and that this might be the one that triggers the lung cancer, then even the illusion of enjoyment would disappear.

Watch smokers when you get a chance. It's clear that they don't particularly enjoy it. You'll see that they are only happy when they are not aware they're smoking. Once they become aware they get uncomfortable, self-conscious and apologetic.

Keep it simple. We smoke to feed that ‘little nicotine monster'. Once you have purged him from your body and the brainwashing from your mind, you'll have neither the need nor the desire to smoke.

M
any smokers resort to cutting down either as a stepping stone towards quitting or as an attempt to control the ‘little monster'. Only people who have never smoked a cigarette in their life endorse this strategy.

As a stepping stone to stopping, cutting down is fatal. It is our attempts to cut down that can keep us trapped for life.

Usually, cutting down follows a failed attempt to stop. After a few hours or days of abstinence using Willpower, the smoker says something like, ‘There's no way I can quit so I'll cut down and just smoke the special ones.'

Terrible things happen.

• You keep the ‘little monster' alive wanting to be fed as before, but now you are only feeding him on a restricted basis. This forces you to experience the ‘big monster'—the
  psychological ‘craving' to smoke—more often and with more intensity.
  
• You spend your whole life looking at your watch, wishing your life away waiting for the next cigarette.
  
• You have the worst of all worlds. You have to use willpower as if you were quitting, but for all your effort and trouble, you don't even get to be a non-smoker!
  

When you smoke as much as you want you rarely feel that you enjoy any of them. You're smoking because it's just what you do. However, when you cut down, self-imposed abstinence creates the feeling that every cigarette is precious.

Again, all this is obvious when you think about it. When we cut down, we are abstaining from smoking whenever we want. We still have the desire to smoke say, every 45 minutes, but we are limiting ourselves to one every couple of hours. During that time, our desire to smoke builds, and the longer we wait to scratch the ‘itch', the more ‘enjoyable' it seems when we can at last scratch it.

Of course, this is also an illusion because what we are ‘enjoying' when we smoke after a period of abstinence is not the cigarette, but ending the state of wanting or needing it. This is evident throughout our smoking lives. So many ‘special' cigarettes come after a period of abstinence—the first of the day, the one after a meal, the one after a long flight, and so on. The longer the perceived period of ‘suffering' between cigarettes the greater the illusion of relief or ‘pleasure' when we can finally light up.

The main difficulty of stopping smoking is not the chemical aspect of the addiction. That's easy. Smokers go through nicotine withdrawal every night when they go to sleep and it doesn't bother them in the slightest. The ‘cravings' that terrify us so profoundly are, in fact, so mild they don't even wake you up. In the morning, most smokers will actually leave the bedroom before lighting up. Many will eat breakfast. Because
so few people smoke in their homes these days, many will wait until they're on their way to work before lighting up.

Most smokers go between eight and ten hours every night without a cigarette and it doesn't bother them. Interestingly, many of them couldn't do this during the day. They'd be tearing their hair out. Yet the withdrawal we experience is identical, regardless of whether we're awake or asleep.

No, our obsession with the chemical side of the addiction is misplaced. The real problem is psychological. Ironically, all smokers and nearly all doctors know this, yet still we are told that the solution is a pill or a patch. I have yet to come across another field of medicine where the success rates for pharmacological treatments are so poor yet they remain the supposed ‘gold standard' of treatment.

The real challenge that smokers face is to counter the brainwashing to which we all have been exposed. A major part of the brainwashing is the idea of the cigarette as a reward or special treat or crutch. Cutting down reinforces this illusion. It leaves you feeling miserable and deprived for extended periods (i.e. when you are abstaining) and this convinces you that the most precious thing on earth is the next cigarette. Even though we might smoke less for a time (in my experience, cutting down never lasted more than a day or so), but during that time you are more enslaved than ever. The cigarette dominates your whole life.

There is nothing sadder than the smoker who is trying to cut down. He suffers from the drug addicts' delusion that the less he smokes, the less he will want to smoke. In fact, the reverse is true. The less he smokes, the longer he endures the psychological itch to smoke and the more he treasures finally being able to scratch that itch.

A slightly odd twist to cutting down is that the smoker often becomes more aware of the taste, which he invariably finds distasteful. It doesn't stop him smoking, but he does begin to wonder why he is doing it. Like chemical addiction, taste is
a red herring. We often find that our most precious cigarettes are the ones that taste the most foul. The first of the day is a classic example. For many smokers, the first of the day is the most important of all, yet it's the one that has them coughing and spluttering the most.

It is essential to remove all the illusions about smoking before you smoke a final cigarette. Unless you've removed the illusion that you enjoy the taste of certain cigarettes, there will be no way of proving it after you become a non-smoker without getting hooked again. So, unless you are already smoking, light one up now. Take six big drags, inhaling each drag as deeply into your lungs as you can. Now ask yourself what it is about the taste that you enjoy.

Perhaps, as I did, you believe that only certain cigarettes taste good, like the one after a meal. If this was so, then why smoke the others? Anyway, how can two cigarettes from the same pack taste different?

Don't take my word for it; see for yourself. Smoke a cigarette consciously after a meal to see if it tastes different to the others. The reason that the smoker perceives that the one after a meal or at a social occasion is more enjoyable, is because at such times we are enjoying ourselves anyway, whether we're a smoker or not. The one after a meal is for some people the most precious of all. This is because in addition to being at a time when we're having fun anyway, it also comes after a period of abstinence.

It is such a shame that smokers so value the one after a meal when the truth is that they should be acknowledging that it is their need to smoke that has ruined their ability to enjoy the meal in the first place.