Easy Way to Stop Smoking (22 page)

B
ased on the enormous amount of feedback we have received over the past twenty-five years, there are two main reasons for failure with the Easyway method.

The first is the influence of other smokers. At a weak moment or during a social occasion (most likely involving alcohol) somebody will light up. I have already dealt with this topic at length. Use that moment to remind yourself that there is no such thing as just one cigarette and that the smoker has to go on smoking all day, every day, for the rest of his life, never being allowed to stop. Remember that the smoker envies you, and feel sorry for him. Believe me, he needs your pity. I wouldn't wish the life of a smoker on my worst enemy.

The other main reason for failure is having a bad day. You need to get it clear in your mind before you start that everyone has good and bad days, whether they smoke or not.

The problem with the Willpower quitter is that he tends to blame a bad day on the absence of the cigarette. He mopes around feeling deprived and makes a bad day worse. On the other hand the Easyway Method quitter celebrates the fact that, even though today isn't good, he doesn't have the additional stress and misery of being a smoker on top of it.

When you are a smoker you have to block your mind to the many, many downsides of smoking. Smokers never have smoker's coughs, just permanent colds. They never have to freeze outside in the depths of a Midwestern winter; they just ‘go for a bit of fresh air'. As a smoker, if your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, you light a cigarette. But does this really help deal with the problem? In such a situation, a willpower quitter would mope for a cigarette, as if the cigarette would solve the problem, but why? Smoking a cigarette does precisely nothing to fix your car or improve your predicament, so why do we attribute these magical properties to it?

This moping creates an impossible situation. You are miserable because you can't smoke, and you'll be even more miserable if you do. You know that you have made the right decision, and you have made that decision based on irrefutable facts. Every smoker on the planet would rather be a non-smoker and every non-smoker is glad they don't have to smoke. Never punish yourself by doubting this decision. It is one of the best, if not the very best decision that you have ever made.

You can be happy, not because Allen Carr tells you to be, but because there is so much to be happy about. This is a fact. As with every other area in our lives,
a positive mental approach is essential—always
.

S
ubstitutes include gum, candy, pills, patches and chocolate. DO NOT USE ANY OF THEM. They make it harder to quit, not easier because they perpetuate the myth that you have given something up and that you need to replace it with something else. That quitting smoking has left a hole in your life that needs to be filled. Smoking
was
the hole in your life. When you get rid of the cigarette, you fill the hole and are once again complete.

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 that the physical withdrawal from nicotine is so bad that he needs a patch or gum to handle it. This, because of the power of the mind, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A smoker who could previously
go several hours without a cigarette with no bother at all, suddenly experiences terrible ‘physical withdrawal' just a few minutes into his quit. How can this possibly have anything to do with nicotine?

2.
The use of NRT products (indeed any substitute) also perpetuates the notion that the smoker is ‘giving something up'—that nicotine does something more than merely remove the symptoms of withdrawal created by the previous dose. This, as I have said repeatedly, leads to a sense of sacrifice, and it is this that triggers feelings of deprivation, misery and vulnerability. This necessitates the use of enormous amounts of willpower, which in turn leads to failure rates in excess of 90% (real life studies of the patch and gum seem to indicate a 12-month success rate of around 7%).

All substitutes have exactly the same effect. I'm now talking about this business of ‘I can't have a cigarette, so I'll have ordinary chewing gum, or sweets, or peppermints to help fill the void.' Although the empty feeling of wanting a cigarette is indistinguishable from hunger for food, one will not satisfy the other. In fact, if anything is designed to make you want a cigarette, it's stuffing yourself with chewing gum or peppermints.

The launch of Zyban is one of the biggest and most controversial changes to the smoking cessation landscape in recent years. It has been around as an anti-depressant (Wellbutrin) for quite a while, but was repackaged as a cessation aid in the late 1990s.

I quit many years before it was launched, but I have read extensively about Zyban and spoken to hundreds of smokers who have attempted to quit by using it. I have to admit to being fairly bemused by the whole concept of it. In addition to admitting ‘…it is unclear exactly how Zyban works…' which I find a little alarming, the manufacturer's website states that Zyban
‘reduces the urge to smoke'. But what is an ‘urge', and how do you measure it? How can you scientifically measure two different ‘urges' from two different people? An ‘urge' isn't something uniform that you can measure like a sack of potatoes; every single one is different and every person is different. Anyway, why try to ‘reduce the urge to smoke' when it's just as easy to remove it altogether?

Think of two Zyban quitters sitting having coffee together. One says, “Wow! That was a huge craving. This Zyban isn't working.” The other says, “I had one too. But mine was OK, this Zyban is really working!” Might it be possible that these two people had the identical feeling but that due to a million outside factors, they interpreted and processed those feelings differently? Could it be possible that one person has a lower discomfort threshold?

Isn't this all really saying that the desire to smoke is mental, and that we can use the power of the mind to reduce or even eliminate the desire to smoke? This is the EASYWAY—to remove the desire to smoke. Why do we need a drug to help us do this? Why not just use an open mind and facts? Why not permanently remove our desire at a cognitive level, rather than merely temporarily suppressing it? If we are not confronting and dealing with our desire to smoke, but merely using a drug to suppress it, what happens when you stop taking the medication? Does the desire to smoke return?

Interestingly, both Zyban and NRT manufacturers advocate fairly intensive counseling as a critical element of their respective programs (in fact, it is difficult to find published success rates for these products without the counseling element, which makes it difficult to evaluate their true efficacy).

For me, there is something counter-intuitive about treating drug addiction with drugs (particularly the drug you are trying to kick). Zyban only began to make sense to me after a conversation I had with a doctor from Vancouver who attended
a seminar. He said that he prescribed Zyban to Willpower quitters ‘to cope with the symptoms of depression caused by quitting using willpower.' This makes perfect sense to me: he is prescribing it as an anti-depressant, which is precisely what it is.

Using the EASYWAY, you don't need an anti-depressant, because there is nothing to be depressed about. On the contrary, this can and should be one of the most enjoyable experiences of your life.

The latest quit smoking ‘wonder drug' is Chantix. The varenicline molecule contained in Chantix sits on receptor cells in the brain, blocking nicotine from acting on those cells and in theory preventing smoking from removing the slightly anxious, edgy feeling of withdrawal. Pfizer's five initial trials of Chantix showed an average twelve month success rate of 22%, but it should be noted that these rates were achieved under highly artificial clinic study conditions. How much of that 22% success rate was due to the 26 one-on-one counseling sessions provided to study participants? How many real-world Chantix quitters would have such a luxury? In addition, ever since it was launched, Chantix has been associated with brutal side-effects including suicidal thoughts, depression and anxiety. The smokers we see in our seminars instinctively back away from taking such heavy medication, and rightly so, in my view.

But the chief downside of substitutes is that they prolong the real problem, which is the brainwashing. When you recover from a bad dose of the ‘flu', do you look for a replacement disease? Of course you don't. By saying ‘I need a substitute for smoking' you are really saying ‘I am making a sacrifice by quitting'. This is the cause of the depression and misery experienced by both smokers (throughout their smoking lives whenever they are in a situation when they can't smoke) and people quitting using Willpower. All substitutes do is substitute one problem for another. There is no pleasure in stuffing candy down your throat. You will just get fat and miserable, and in no time at
all, you'll find yourself back on the weed, but this time twenty pounds heavier.

Casual smokers find it difficult to dismiss the belief that they are being deprived of their little reward or crutch: the cigarette during the coffee break at work or the smoke break while working in a dull or high-pressure job. Some say, ‘I wouldn't even take the break if I didn't smoke.' This proves my point. Often, the break is taken not because we want or need it, but so we can feed the ‘little monster'. Those smokers aren't enjoying the cigarette though; just the ending to the feeling of needing it. By removing that feeling, they get to feel temporarily like a non-smoker. These cigarettes are the equivalent of wearing tight shoes to get the pleasure of taking them off.

So if you absolutely feel that you must have your little reward then wear a pair of tight shoes and don't take them off until you go on a break. Then you can experience the reward of relaxation and satisfaction of taking them off. Perhaps you would feel rather stupid doing this. You would be right to. However, this is pretty much what smokers do all day every day. Soon you will see this whole aspect of the ‘reward' for what it really is—just another occasion when smokers have to go on feeding the ‘little monster'.