Easy Way to Stop Smoking (19 page)

So when will you stop? Tomorrow? Isn't that what you said yesterday? Next year? Isn't that what you said last year?

Isn't this what you've been asking yourself since you first realized you were hooked? Are you hoping that one morning you will wake up and just not want to smoke any longer? Stop kidding yourself. I waited thirty-three years for it to happen to me and never did that day come. With drug addiction you get progressively more hooked, not less. You think it will be easier tomorrow? If you can't do it today, what makes you think you'll be able to tomorrow? Or will you wait until you get one of the killer diseases? Do you honestly think that the additional stress caused by the thought of impending death will make it easier to quit? Think about this; what would you advise your dearest friend to do in this situation? You would urge him to save his life and act immediately.

We believe that we live stressful lives. In fact, we don't. We've taken most of the
genuine
stress out of our lives. We have a comfortable roof over our heads. When we leave our home we aren't likely to be attacked by man-eating predators. Most of us don't have to worry about where our next meal is coming from.
We have heat, light and clean water. Compare this to the life of a wild animal. Every time a rabbit comes out of its burrow it is confronted with life-threatening situations. One lapse in concentration and that rabbit could be someone or something's lunch. But the rabbit is equipped to handle this stress. It has adrenaline and other hormones—and so have we.

The truth is that the most stressful periods in our lives tend to be childhood and early adolescence. The reason for this is that everything is new and everything is changing. But during this most stressful period of our lives, we didn't need to smoke. We were perfectly able to cope because 3.8 billion years of evolution has equipped us to do so.

I was five years old when World War II started. We were bombed out of our home in London and I was separated from my parents for two years. I was billeted with people who treated me unkindly. It was an unpleasant period in my life, but I was able to cope with it. I don't believe it has left me with any permanent scars; on the contrary I think it has made me a stronger person. When I look back on my life there has only been one thing I couldn't handle and that was my slavery to that damned weed.

Twenty-five years ago, I thought I had all the worries in the world. I was suicidal—not in the sense that I wanted to jump off the top of a building but in the sense that I knew my smoking would soon kill me. I argued that if this was life with my crutch, life just wouldn't be worth living without it. What I didn't realize was that when you are physically and mentally depressed, everything gets you down. Today, I feel like a young boy again. Only one thing has made that change in my life: I'm now out of the smoking pit.

I know it's a cliché to say that ‘If you haven't got your health you haven't got anything' but it's true. I used to think that physical fitness fanatics were a pain. I used to claim that there was more to life than feeling fit: like booze and smokes.

That's nonsense. When you are physically fit you can enjoy the highs more and cope with the lows better. We confuse responsibility with stress. Responsibility becomes stressful only if you are not strong enough to handle it. Characters like Humphrey Bogart, Peter Jennings and George Harrison were strong, dynamic, powerful people. What destroys them is not the stresses of life, or the pressure of being in the public eye, but the socalled crutches they turn to in order to try to handle that stress. Unfortunately these crutches can kill and sadly for those fine men and millions like them, cigarettes did just that.

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!

N
o! 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, what will be the first thing they do? That's right, light a cigarette and start the cycle all over again. That's what smoking is: a life sentence where life means a life of filth, disease, fear, misery and slavery.

The next time those smokers inadvertently see the health warnings, the next time they have a heart flutter or pains in their chest, the next time they're the only smoker in a group of non-smokers, the next time they are going out and feel anxious because they don't know if they'll be able to smoke, those poor smokers will have to continue to pay a fortune for the privilege of poisoning and suffocating themselves to death. And for what? Why do they live this life of slavery and pain? To remove that little empty feeling caused by withdrawing from the previous cigarette, so they can temporarily feel like a non-smoker. This is all smokers are trying to achieve; the state of peace they enjoyed before they ever lit that first cigarette. And what is the only thing preventing them from enjoying that feeling permanently? The cigarette!

The second reason why some ex-smokers (almost always people who have quit using willpower) have pangs on these occasions is because the smoker is doing something (i.e. smoking) and the ex-smoker is not. This can lead to a feeling of deprivation. Get it clear into your mind before you start: it is not non-smokers who are being deprived; it is smokers.

Smokers are deprived of their:

HEALTH

ENERGY

MONEY

SELF-CONFIDENCE

PEACE OF MIND

COURAGE

SELF-ESTEEM

SELF-RESPECT

TRANQUILLITY

FREEDOM

Get out of the habit of envying smokers and start seeing them for the sad, enslaved creatures they really are. I know: I was the world's worst. That is why you are reading this book, and the ones who cannot face up to this reality, who have to go on kidding themselves, are the most pathetic of all.

You wouldn't envy a heroin addict. Opiate use kills around 3,000 Americans a year. Nicotine kills over 450,000 Americans and an estimated 5 million worldwide. It has already killed far more people on this planet than all the wars in history combined. Like all drug addiction, yours won't get better. Each year it will get worse, just as it has already since the first time you smoked. If you don't enjoy being a smoker today, you'll enjoy it even less tomorrow. Don't envy smokers; pity them. Believe me, THEY NEED YOUR PITY.

T
his is another myth about smoking, spread mainly by people trying to quit using willpower and who substitute food for cigarettes. The withdrawal pangs from nicotine are very similar to hunger pangs, so the two are easily confused and some people might eat when they aren't really hungry. However, whereas eating can relieve a hunger pang, the withdrawal pangs from nicotine can never be satisfied so long as you remain a smoker.

As with any drug, after a while the body builds immunity and the drug ceases to relieve the symptoms that the previous dose created. As soon as we extinguish a cigarette, the nicotine begins to leave the body, so the withdrawal symptoms with their hunger-like pangs return.

The smoker is therefore left with a permanent ‘hunger' that he can never satisfy. This is why many smokers turn to overeating, heavy drinking and even harder drugs in order to satisfy
this perceived ‘void'. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, the vast majority of alcoholics are smokers. I wonder if this is really a smoking problem disguised as a drink problem.

For the smoker the natural tendency is to start by substituting nicotine for food. During my own nightmare years I got to the stage where I cut out breakfast and lunch entirely. I would chain-smoke during the day. In the later years I would actually look forward to the evenings because I could stop smoking and give my poor lungs some respite from the punishment. However, I would be picking at food all evening. I thought it was hunger, but it was really withdrawal pangs from nicotine. In other words, during the day I would substitute nicotine for food and during the evenings, food for nicotine.

In those days I was thirty pounds heavier than I am today and there wasn't a thing I could do about it.

When that ‘little monster' leaves your body the feeling of insecurity leaves with it. Your confidence returns, together with a marvelous feeling of achievement and self-respect. You feel in control of your life, and you can use that control to determine not only your eating habits, but in a wide variety of wonderful ways. This is one of the many great advantages of being free from this awful weed.

As I have said, the weight myth is perpetuated by willpower quitters who substitute food for cigarettes during the withdrawal period, and then continue to overeat. Let's be clear about this: stopping smoking does not lead to weight gain; overeating does. Food and any other substitutes make it harder to quit smoking, not easier, as I shall explain in
Chapter 37
.

Provided you follow all the instructions, weight gain should not be a problem for you. However, if you already have a weight problem, or you want more information to give you peace of mind, I would recommend that you read
Allen Carr's EASYWEIGH to Lose Weight
which is based on the same principles as this book and makes weight control a pleasure.

M
any smokers, while trying to stop by using Willpower, try to increase their levels of motivation by providing themselves with false incentives.

There are many examples of this. A typical one is ‘My family and I can have a great vacation on the money I will save.' This appears to be a logical and sensible approach, but in fact it is a false incentive because any smoker would rather smoke fifty-two weeks a year and not have a vacation. In a way, this approach can even heighten the sense of deprivation because the smoker now perceives that he has to abstain for fifty weeks to go on a vacation that he feels that he'll never be able to enjoy without a cigarette anyway. This makes the cigarette even more precious in the smoker's mind. Instead, you should focus on the other side of the equation: What am I getting out of the cigarette? Why do I need to smoke?