Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking

by Allen Carr

Cigarettes do not help social occasions; they destroy them. Excusing ourselves every half-an-hour to go and stand outside alone in the freezing cold, smoking half a cigarette, wondering what on earth we are doing and why, stubbing it out in frustration, trying to hide the evidence with a quick spray of breath freshener, going back inside—only to go through the exact same ritual half-an-hour later.

I personally believe that the greatest gains from stopping are psychological, and they include: 1. The return of your confidence and courage 2. Freedom from the slavery of drug addiction 3. Not having to go through life knowing you are being despised by half of the population and, worst of all, despising yourself Not only is life better as a non-smoker, it is infinitely more enjoyable. I do not only mean you will be healthier and wealthier. I mean you will be happier and enjoy life far more.

Withdrawing from the first cigarette caused that slightly panicky feeling; and each subsequent one, far from relieving the feeling, was keeping it alive. At the same time I could see that all these other ‘happy’ smokers were going through the same nightmare that I was. For the first time in my smoking life, my fear of quitting was replaced by a feeling of excitement about how wonderful it would be to break free!

As an aside, it is interesting to note and also ironic that cigarettes only seem precious to us when we aren’t smoking. When we are smoking, we take it for granted and we’re barely even aware that we are doing it. It’s only when we can’t do it that it seems so precious. What a ridiculous state of affairs...

‘Why?’ What is it that the cigarette gives us that is so wonderful that we are prepared to give up our freedom and be treated like a second-class citizen?

If he is a pack-a-day smoker I say to him, “I still cannot believe you are not worried about the money. You will need to earn over $150,000 in your lifetime to finance your addiction. What are you doing with that money? You are not even setting light to it or throwing it away. You are actually using that money to ruin your physical health, to destroy your courage and confidence, and to suffer a lifetime of slavery, bad breath and stained teeth. These are all priceless and irreplaceable. It’s like paying an assassin to kill you. Surely that must worry you?”

Whenever any smoker weighs up the pros and cons of smoking, the answer is the same: ‘STOP SMOKING! YOU FOOL!’ We can do this exercise a thousand times and a thousand times the answer would be the same. We have two options at this stage: to sacrifice the cigarette, or sacrifice rationality. So we sacrifice rationality. We sense that we are not smoking because we want to or because we like it, but because we think we can’t stop. We have to keep our head in the sand and believe the brainwashing, because otherwise we feel stupid being a smoker.

Smokers can’t allow themselves to think about the health risks because if they do, even the illusion of enjoyment disappears.

It also explains why smokers, recalling Uncle Fred who smoked forty a day until he was eighty, will ignore the millions of smokers who are cut down in their prime because of this poisonous weed.

The smoker goes to a lot of trouble not to step under a bus, and the odds are hundreds of thousands to one against it happening. Yet the smoker risks the near certainty of being crippled by smoking and seems oblivious to the risks. Such is the power of the brainwashing.

I remember one famous British golfer who wouldn’t travel to the US to play because he was afraid of flying. Yet he would chain-smoke round the golf course. Isn’t it strange that if we felt there was the slightest fault in an aircraft, we wouldn’t go up in it, yet we accept the one-in-two odds that smoking will kill or disable us? And what is our reward for taking this truly staggering risk? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

A cough is one of nature’s fail-safe methods for expelling foreign matter and poisons from the lungs. The cough itself is not a disease; it is a symptom. When smokers cough it is because their lungs are trying to get rid of the cancer-triggering tars and irritants contained in tobacco smoke. When they don’t cough, the poison remains in their lungs, and this is when they can cause cancer and the many other horrendous diseases associated with smoking. Smokers tend to avoid exercise and get into the habit of shallow breathing in order not to cough. I used to believe that my smoker’s cough was going to kill me. In truth, by expelling much of the filth from my lungs, it probably added years to my life.

Wise up. You don’t have to smoke, and remember: it is doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR YOU. Just for a moment take your head out of the sand and ask yourself, if you knew for certain that your next cigarette would be the one that triggered off the cancer in your body, whether you would actually smoke it.

Make no mistake; if you choose to continue to smoke after reading this book, you’ll be a smoker for the rest of your life. Is this really the future you are choosing for yourself and your family?

Even the on-pack health warning is a waste of time because the smoker doesn’t even register it. And if he does see the warning, it is likely to cause anxiety and stress, which will make him want a cigarette.

the deterioration to your health is already happening. Every time you take a drag you are breathing cancer-triggering fumes deep into your lungs, and lung cancer—horrific as it is—is by no means the worst of the killer diseases that cigarettes cause or contribute to.

We tend to think of smoking as a tug-of-war. On the one side we have the fear that it’s killing us, costing a fortune and making us a slave and an addict. On the other side, it’s our pleasure or crutch. It never occurs to us that these perceived ‘benefits’ of smoking are really just more thinly disguised fears: the fear that I won’t be able to have fun, relax or handle stress without the cigarette. Of course both sets of fear are caused by the cigarette. And I hardly need to point out that non-smokers have none of these fears.

it’s not so much that we genuinely enjoy smoking, but that we get miserable when we can’t. This is not genuine pleasure, it is an attempt to avoid discomfort—a discomfort that non-smokers don’t get.

The cigarette causes those symptoms and the next cigarette partially relieves them. But the smoker withdraws from that cigarette too, and the need to smoke returns. So the smoker has to light up again and again.

The fear of contracting lung cancer scared me but didn’t make me quit because I believed it was rather like walking through a minefield. You either got away with it or you didn’t. It didn’t even occur to me that I didn’t have to walk through the minefield in the first place.

my method is not to frighten you into quitting, but the complete opposite—to make you realize just how more enjoyable your life will be when you have escaped.

The industry and its apologists hide behind an argument based on something called etiology. Their argument goes something like this: because we know that many things (possibly thousands) might contribute to the formation of cancer cells, it is impossible to blame one thing (i.e. the cigarette), so long as even one of these other so-called confounding factors is also present. You can never be certain, they argue, which caused the cancer. Using this as a model, it is impossible to prove that banging your head against a brick wall causes headaches, so long as another co-factor (listening to Swiss yodeling music, for example) is present.

So it is with smoking. If I had a time machine that could transport you forward in time just three weeks to experience the mental and physical benefits of quitting, that is all I’d need to do to persuade you to quit. You would think: ‘Will I really look and feel that good?’ Actually, what it really amounts to is, ‘Have I really sunk this low?’ I emphasize that the benefits are not only physical; you will have tons more energy, confidence, courage and self-esteem. You’ll also be more able to relax, concentrate and handle stress.

Today, at age seventy-two I jog two to three miles a day, work out for thirty minutes in the gym and swim twenty lengths. It’s great to have energy, and when you feel mentally and physically strong, it feels great to be alive.

Grasp this wonderful opportunity and enjoy the benefits of breaking free from this unremitting, unrewarding addiction. Begin to let yourself get excited about this wonderful thing you are doing for yourself. USE YOUR IMAGINATION!

Some smokers find it difficult to believe that the cigarette actually causes that insecure, slightly panicky feeling you get when you are out late at night and realize that you’re running low on cigarettes. This is because we have been brainwashed into believing that smoking relieves this feeling. But non-smokers don’t ever have that feeling, so the only conclusion we can come to is that the cigarette creates it. We fall for a con trick: we acknowledge the slight boost that the cigarette gives us by partially removing the slight feeling of emptiness and insecurity when we light up, but we conveniently forget that it was withdrawing from the previous cigarette that created those symptoms in the first place.

As a smoker the only thing we look forward to is the next opportunity to smoke, and we go out of our way to create such opportunities. This burden creates even more stress for the smoker on top of the existing stress of going through permanent nicotine withdrawal and the stress of bombarding your body with hundreds of toxic chemicals twenty times a day.

It is truly ironic that we look to the cigarette to relax us when in fact it creates the stress in the first place. Smoking for relaxation is like drinking bourbon to get sober.

When I finally broke free from the smoking trap I was astonished to realize that I was far more relaxed and confident as a non-smoker. Such is the brainwashing that I thought that I would never be able to relax without a cigarette.

Because I got panicky when I couldn’t smoke, I assumed that the cigarette gave me courage and confidence. It never occurred to me that non-smokers don’t have that panic feeling and they therefore don’t need the artificial boost (of removing the symptoms of withdrawal created by the previous cigarette) the cigarette gives.

I didn’t feel I was entitled to a future. I didn’t relate any of this to my smoking, but when I stopped I suddenly acquired the confidence and courage to face these issues head on. Nowadays I look forward to every day. Of course, bad things happen in my life—this is the human condition—and I am subject to the normal stress and strains, but it is wonderful to have the confidence and courage to deal with them. And the improved health, energy and freedom make the good times more enjoyable too.

Smokers can’t block their minds to the health and financial aspects of smoking—they are just too big and too obvious to ignore—but I still struggle to understand how I could have blocked my mind to the sheer slavery of smoking. Spending half of my life not smoking, wishing I could, and the other half smoking, wishing I didn’t have to.

I knew that I was strong-willed and I was in control of every other aspect of my life. I loathed myself for being dependent on something I despised so much and that I knew was ruining my life and my family’s future.

I cannot even begin to describe to you the utter joy of being free from these sinister black shadows, the dependency and the self-loathing. I can’t tell you how nice it is to be able to look at smokers not with a feeling of envy, but with a feeling of pity for them and a sense of elation that you have broken free and are no longer trapped.

We quickly conclude that doing without our ‘crutch’ at a time of such stress is not an option (it never occurs to us that the cigarette is causing some of the stress), so we begin to look for an excuse to smoke. We tell ourselves that it ‘wasn’t the right time’ to quit. So we decide to wait until there is less stress or no stress in our lives before trying again. Of course, this gives us the perfect excuse to keep smoking indefinitely because so long as you are smoking, you will have stress. If we ever do have a period when we aren’t stressed we don’t quit because we need the stress to provide the motivation to do so. This becomes a common pattern among what we call ‘serial quitters’.

We believe that if we have the requisite amount of Willpower we will be able to muscle through these issues, but of course Willpower is useless because it doesn’t help the smoker to resolve the smoking dilemma and remove the desire to smoke. As a consequence, because he hasn’t changed his thinking about the cigarette and retains the desire to smoke, the Willpower quitter is not really a non-smoker but a smoker who is not currently allowing himself to smoke. This is why relapse is so common among people who quit using Willpower—they never remove the desire to smoke. They believe that the cigarette gave them something and that they are now depriving themselves of that something. It is this sense of deprivation and sacrifice that keeps the desire to smoke alive. Think about it, who is more likely to relapse: someone that doesn’t want to smoke or someone that does? Quite simply, the key to being a happy non-smoker is to remove the desire to smoke. With no desire to smoke, it takes no Willpower not to do so. In the same way that it doesn’t take you willpower not to do other things you have no desire to do. So long as Willpower quitters don’t understand this, they will continue to have a desire to smoke and will need to use Willpower to combat that desire.

However, although the smoker knows he would be better off as a non-smoker, he believes that becoming one will involve making a tremendous sacrifice. Although this is an illusion, it is a powerful one. The smoker doesn’t know why, but cigarettes seem to be very precious to him, and he seems to need them, in good times and in bad. For years he has been subjected to brainwashing that cigarettes are precious, and this illusion has been reinforced by his physical addiction to nicotine, which causes him to feel uneasy when he can’t smoke. On top of this he also has to deal with even more powerful brainwashing of how difficult it is to quit.

Some people are just born to be smokers.” (This one kept me smoking for thirty-three years.) At this stage, the smoker usually admits defeat and caves in. When he lights up a kind of schizophrenia takes over. On the one hand there is the illusion of relief at being able to do something that he has been ‘depriving himself’ of. On the other hand, the cigarette tastes awful. The smoker profoundly resents having to smoke it and can’t understand why he is doing it. This is why the smoker thinks that he lacks Willpower. In fact, it isn’t a lack of willpower that is the problem, but a conflict of wills. It is this conflict that is at the root of the smoker’s dilemma: every smoker wants to quit, but every smoker wants to keep smoking. The smoker fails to quit not because he doesn’t have enough willpower but because he has failed to resolve the conflict of wills. As a result of this failure to resolve the conflict he is forced to revert to the status quo. Given the information he has at his disposal, this is a fairly rational decision. What’s the point of being healthy if you’re miserable? What’s the point of being rich if you’re miserable? Surely it is far better to have a shorter, sweeter life than a longer, more miserable one? 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 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.

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.

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?

Cutting down not only doesn’t work, but it is also the worst form of torture. It doesn’t work because smoking is not a habit, it is an addiction. You can’t become less addicted to something, you’re either addicted or you are not. We can’t break a pack-a-day addiction and re-make it as a two-a-day addiction. You aren’t deciding how much you will smoke; the rate at which your body metabolizes nicotine dictates how much you will smoke.

As I said, the main problem with stopping is not the chemical addiction, but the mistaken belief that the cigarette gives you some pleasure and that as a non-smoker you will be depriving yourself of that pleasure. This mistaken belief is triggered by the brainwashing we are subjected to before we become smokers, and is reinforced by the chemical addiction once we do.

It is the myth of the occasional or ‘special’ cigarette that keeps willpower quitters mourning the loss of their ‘little friend’ instead of celebrating the death of an enemy. You must teach yourself to see smoking for what it really is. That ‘just one cigarette’ led to the years and years of slavery and torture you have had to endure as a smoker.

These are the facts of smoking. A lifetime of paying an exorbitant amount of money for the privilege of feeding yourself poison. A lifetime of shame, anger, guilt, bad breath, and mental and physical torture. And for what do we put ourselves through this awful experience? So we can remove the slightly empty feeling of withdrawal caused by the previous cigarette, and feel like a non-smoker.

The cigarette has got you by the throat and, so long as you remain a smoker, it never lets go. You never get a day off, or even a couple of hours off. It doesn’t matter if it’s twenty below outside, or if you have a cough or a cold, or if you’re on a plane or at the movies—it never lets up and gives you a break.

is that it’s so unrewarding. It’s only when we are not smoking that the cigarette seems desirable.

All the cigarette does is remove the need to smoke and in doing so, momentarily lets you feel like a non-smoker.

In order to make it easy to stop smoking there are certain fundamentals to get clear in your mind. We have already dealt with three of them up to now: There is nothing to give up. On the contrary, by quitting you are earning yourself the wonderful gifts of health, happiness and freedom. There is no such thing as ‘just one cigarette’, just a lifetime’s chain of filth, disease and misery. Your very first cigarette led to every single cigarette you have ever smoked. In a smoking context, there is nothing unique or different about you. All smokers fell into the same trap, and with the right information and mindset, all smokers can find it easy to stop.

Many believe that they are confirmed smokers or have ‘addictive personalities’, but I’m not so sure. No one needed to smoke before they lit that first cigarette and became hooked. It is the effect of all drugs to make us feel powerless and helpless. This makes us want the drug more so that we can remove the feeling and once again feel normal.