The Easy Way to Control Alcohol (Allen Carr's Easyway)

by Allen Carr

place. If you believed that drink gave you a genuine pleasure or crutch before you quit, how on earth can you prove that it doesn’t once you are not allowed to drink?

The moment you stop taking alcohol, all the powerful and valid reasons that made you want to quit begin to disappear. Your health begins to recover, and so does your financial situation. Your personal relationships and your job prospects start to improve. It’s rather like witnessing a horrific accident when you are driving. It will slow you down for a few miles, but the next time you are late for an appointment, you’ve forgotten about the accident and you step on the gas.

The fact is that the longer we abstain the less we remember about the misery of drinking, and the less reason we have to resist the other side of the tug-of-war, increasing the temptation to have:

we find an excuse that will enable us to have just one drink.

But of course alcohol dehydrates us, which makes us want another drink. It also removes our inhibitions, which makes it easier for us to have the second drink; and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad mortem.

And why shouldn’t you fall back in? The trap hasn’t changed and neither has your conception of alcohol.

If a mouse could understand the mechanics of a mouse-trap, do you think he would be stupid enough to attempt to eat that piece of cheese? He might do if he were hungry enough. But would he then run the risk if he knew the cheese itself was poisoned? Of course not.

Let’s establish once and for all that there are no advantages whatsoever to drinking alcohol. Ask anyone why they drink and they’ll give you: EXCUSES NOT REASONS

The booze might be ruining our lives, but our whole lifestyle is now dependent upon it.

We believe we can’t enjoy social occasions without it, we think we can’t handle stress without it, and we have nothing to take its place. Life seems utterly miserable without it and that is why it can be so difficult to quit.

You are fooled by the ploy because you are distracted by the thought of how you explain to this idiot that if you had just one sip, you would end up drinking three bottles and pour the fourth over his head.

bottles. It’s little wonder that recovering alcoholics tend to keep their own company.

DRINKING ALCOHOL GIVES NO ADVANTAGES TO YOU WHATSOEVER! •THE SAME APPLIES TO OTHER DRINKERS! YOU WON’T BE MISSING OUT! •ALL DRINKERS TELL LIES!

She made poisons smell and taste foul and food smell and taste nice.

Consider the ingenuity of the system. When food turns to poison, such as when fruit putrefies, it will smell awful and taste awful. It will also feel awful and look awful.

Incidentally, alcohol is the product of vegetable matter that has gone past the putrefaction or rotting stage and started to ferment.

Alcohol has its uses. It is a powerful detergent and can be burnt as a fuel. (Just think what it does to your insides!)

But to conclude that the Almighty supplied us with alcohol so that we could poison ourselves with it, is about as logical as claiming that the sole purpose of streams is for us to drown ourselves in them.

One of the sad aspects of all drug addiction is that when you do manage to abstain using the willpower method, you will probably be envying those friends who still drink.

You can get involved in a sort of war of poker in which you are trying to bluff them about how nice it is not to have to drink, and they are trying to kid you that you are being deprived of a genuine pleasure or crutch.

This is why your own common sense is so vital. If you ever start to doubt yourself, whether it be before you finish reading this book, or after you have escaped, always remember that it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks: you are reading this book because you have a problem and this book will show you an easy way to solve that problem.

This is another point that can be difficult to counter: that a liquid that has a foul taste can be more acceptable if blended with another liquid that has a pleasant flavour. That is undoubtedly true. I find I cannot refute that point. But that doesn’t explain why we should want to mix a foul-tasting liquid with a drink that tastes pleasant, especially when the foul-tasting liquid happens to be a very expensive and powerful poison. I fail to see the logic in that.

But wine is alcohol diluted with water and other additives to sweeten it and make it taste good.

But didn’t you switch to dry white wine because you heard sweet wine tends to make you gain weight?

Some smokers believe they enjoyed the taste of their first cigarette in spite of the fact that they didn’t actually eat it.

at such an excitable and happy occasion it wouldn’t be surprising if you formed the impression that you did. In any event your senses, including your memory, would be distorted and unreliable after just one glass.

But alcohol has the dual effect of making you thirsty and deadening your senses to the unpleasant taste, so the tendency is to have another pint and another, and another.

Does the incredible machine give up on you and allow you to kill yourself? No. Instead it brings into play another ingenious survival technique with which Mother Nature has equipped us: vomiting!

It is also about as loud and as clear a warning as you are going to get that you are doing something to your body that you shouldn’t.

But because 90 percent of adults drink, including our role models and our parents, we ignore the real expert and follow the example of intelligent mankind, and persist in learning to take alcohol on a regular basis.

One of the ingenious aspects of the immunity process is that it not only partially negates the poisonous effects, but the taste gradually begins to seem less foul. In fact, if you persist long enough, you actually start to believe that you enjoy the taste.

Acquiring a taste is merely building an immunity to a foul-tasting poison.

We tend to regard fear as an evil. It might be an unpleasant experience, but it is in fact an ally and a friend.

It is Mother Nature’s ingenious device to warn us that danger threatens, and thus it enables us to take remedial action.

In fact it wasn’t bravery but instinct. His first natural instinct was to run. When he could no longer do that, he followed another natural instinct and tried to defend himself by attacking. And it saved his life.

we can adapt past experiences to solve new problems. But that intelligence should be used to enhance our natural instincts, not to confuse and contradict them with double standards.

But how could alcohol possibly make you feel truly brave? Bravery involves surmounting fear. So if you reduce the level of fear, doesn’t it follow that it takes less bravery to surmount it?

It is an established fact that alcohol inebriates you, and that the process of inebriation reduces all your faculties, including your faculty to feel fear.

No way do they delude themselves that alcohol makes them feel braver, because they don’t feel brave even after they’ve taken the alcohol! There is no doubt they are taking it to remove the fear.

You might ask what difference it makes whether it reduces fear or increases courage?

But it is essential to realize that it didn’t give him courage, but removed a sufficient part of his fear to enable him to board the plane.

To remove fear through any means other than removing the cause of the fear, is like believing that you put out the fire merely by turning off the alarm. In fact by doing so you’ve also prevented a solution to the problem: the fire brigade won’t come if the alarm doesn’t sound. Turning off the alarm is exactly what you do when you use alcohol to remove fear. You negate any possibility of dealing with the source of the fear and thus removing it permanently.

What’s the difference between making yourself ‘blind’ drunk and sticking your head in the sand? Either way you have rendered yourself defenceless!

Of course not, it’s more like cowardice. So how can we possibly claim that inebriating ourselves in the face of danger gives us courage?

It also means that, in spite of our huge brains and advanced technology, we are even more stupid than the ostrich!

And just as reducing fear by drinking alcohol at times of danger creates the illusion of giving you courage, so creating fear by drinking alcohol at such times creates the illusion of removing courage.

It is equally obvious that drinking alcohol during times of danger will increase your fear, because you know that by doing so you are removing your defences. The effect is to make you feel less courageous. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you genuinely lack courage. It just means that the alcohol prevented you from using it.

Do we see a drunk as someone bravely facing up to the trials and tribulations of life? On the contrary, he is clearly someone who feels that he cannot face life on its own terms, and is trying to block it out, unsuccessfully I might add.

It is equally obvious that his predicament is caused by alcohol!

He’s forgotten what it feels like to wake up bursting with energy and full of confidence.