I found it not only easy but unbelievably enjoyable to stay stopped. I read Allen Carr's book and would recommend it to anybody trying to kick the filthy habit.
I didn't miss it at all and I was free' Ruby Wax Read this book and you'll never smoke another cigarette again. As the world's bestselling book on how to stop smoking and with over nine million copies sold worldwide, Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking is the one that really works.
What have you got to lose? I read Allen Carr's book and would recommend it to anybody trying to kick the habit' Michael McIntyre 'Achieved for me a thing that I thought was not possible - to give up a thirty-year smoking habit literally overnight. It was nothing short of a miracle' Anjelica Huston 'Instantly I was freed from my addiction.
I found it not only easy but unbelievably enjoyable to stay stopped' Sir Anthony Hopkins. The unique method promises: No scare tactics No weight-gain That you'll never feel the need to smoke again That you'll feel great to be a non-smoker Join the estimated 25 million men and women that Allen Carr has helped set free.
See inside for details. Score: 5. You'll soon be able to: - Achieve the right frame of mind to quit - Avoid weight gain - Quit without dependence on rules or gimmicks - Enjoy the freedom and choices that non-smokers have in life - Quit without willpower It's time to begin your new life as a non-smoker with Allen Carr's The Only Way to Stop Smoking Permanently.
Allen Carr's Easyway a global phenomenon. Read this book. Allen Carr is without doubt one of the most potent weapons in the world's fight against nicotine addiction. Having sold over 13 million books and establishing a chain of clinics spanning the globe, Allen Carr's Easyway is the most successful stop smoking method of all time. Smaller, more concise than the original but lacking none of its pu Allen Carr's Easyway is the most successful stop-smoking method of all time.
It has helped millions of smokers from all over the world quit instantly, easily, painlessly and permanently. Stop Smoking Now is the new, cutting-edge presentation of the method.
Updated and set out in a clear, easy-to-read format, this book makes it simpler than ever before to get free. Allen Carr's Easyway does not rely on willpower as it removes your desire to smoke. It eliminates the fears that keep you hooked and you won't miss cigarettes. It works both for heavy and casual smokers and regardless of how long you've been smoking. There are no gimmicks or scare tactics, you won't put on weight, and you can even smoke when you read.
Allen Carr's books have sold over 15 million copies to date in more than 40 different languages and Stop Smoking Now is the newest presentation of the Easyway message, updated for the 21st century but still centred on the world's most effective stop-smoking programme—the tried and tested Easyway method, 'the one that works'. The Allen Carr method has been presented here in a lively, informative and streamlined way. This book brings the original Easyway concept bang up do date, incorporating lessons that have been learned from those who teach in the global network of Allen Carr clinics.
No one has more experience of helping smokers quit. Eat as much of your favourite foods as you want, whenever you want, as often as you want, and be the exact weight you want to be without dieting, special exercise, using willpower or feeling deprived. This book helps explain the truth about bad sugar and introduces a proven method to cut it out of your diet entirely. Once you free yourself from addiction, you'll feel happier and healthier, and you'll be able to choose the weight you want to be for the rest of your life.
Allen Carr's Easyway is the most successful stop smoking method of all time. It works by unravelling the brainwashing that leads us to desire the very thing that is harming us, and it has now been applied to other areas. The Easy Way to Quit Sugar tackles the biggest dietary threat to the modern world: addiction to refined sugar and processed carbohydrates.
With the brilliant additional writing skills and illustrations of Bev Aisbett, you'll free yourself of addiction and enjoy better health, higher levels of energy, dramatically improved body shape and a happier, healthier lifestyle.
Do you pull out your phone at every idle moment? Do hours slip away as you mindlessly scroll? Has your smartphone added a level of detachment between you and the outside world?
Sadly technology which should be a wonderful boon to us has started to blight our lives. The average adult spends nearly ten hours a day looking at digital screens, leading to unprecedented levels of stress, isolation, procrastination and inertia. The fact is that digital dependence is an addiction and should be treated as such. Allen Carr's Easyway is a breath of fresh air when it comes to addiction treatment. Tried and tested as an incredibly successful stop-smoking method, its principles have since been applied to other addictions such as alcohol, gambling and caffeine with outstanding results.
Here, for the first time, the Easyway method has been used to overcome digital addiction, and it really works! Smart Phone Dumb Phone rewires our relationship to technology. By unravelling the brainwashing process behind our addictive behaviour, we are freed from dependence and can reassert control over our time and productivity. Including 20 practical steps to help you along your way, this wonderful guide will release you from the clutches of your smartphone and allow you to live in the moment.
It truly is the easyway. Allen Carr's Easyway method has helped millions of people to stop smoking. This is the first ever interactive Allen Carr book. No species, even the lowest amoeba or worm, can survive without knowing the difference between food and poison.
Through a process of natural selection over thousand of years, our minds and bodies have developed techniques for distinguishing between food and poison and fail- s a f e methods for ejecting the latter. All human beings are averse to the smell and taste of tobacco until they become hooked. If you blow diluted tobacco into the face of any animal or child before it becomes hooked, it will cough and splutter. When we smoked that first cigarette, inhaling resulted in a coughing fit, or if we smoked too many the first time, we experienced a dizzy feeling or actual physical sickness.
It is a fallacy that physically weak and mentally weak- willed people become smokers. The lucky ones are those who find that first cigarette repulsive; physic ally their lungs cannot cope with it, and they are cured for life, Or, alternatively, they are not mentally prepared to go through the severe learning process of trying to inhale without coughing. To me this is the most tragic part of this whole business.
How hard we worked to become hooked, and this is why it is difficult to stop teenagers. Because they are still learning to smoke.
Why do they not learn from us? Then again, why did we no t learn from our parents? It is an illusion. What we are actually doing when we learn to smoke is teaching our bodies to become immune to the bad smell and taste in order to get our fix, like heroin addicts who think that they enjoy injecting themselves. The withdrawal pangs from heroin are relatively severe, and all they are really enjoying is the ritual of relieving those pangs.
The smoker teaches himself to shut his mind to the bad taste and smell to get his 'fix'. Ask a smoker who believes he smokes only because he enjoys the taste and smell of tobacco, 'If you cannot get your normal brand of cigarette and can only obtain a brand you find dis tasteful, do you stop smoking?
A smo ker will smoke old rope rather than abstain, and it doesn't matter if you switch to roll - ups, mentholated cigarettes, cigars or a pipe; to begin with they taste awful but if you persevere you will learn to like them. Smokers will even try to keep smoking during colds, flu, sore throats, bronchitis and emphysema. If it did, no one would smoke more than one cigarette. There are even thousands of ex-smokers hooked on that filthy nicotine chewing gum that doctors prescribe, and many of them are still smoking.
During my consultations some smokers find it alarming to realize they are drug addicts and think it will make it even more difficult to stop.
In fact, it is all good news for two important reasons: 1 The reason why most of us carry on smoking is because, although we know the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, we believe that there is something in the cigarette that we actually enjoy or that it is some sort of prop. We feel that after we stop smoking there will he a void, that certain situations in our life will never be quite the same.
This is an illusion. The fact is the cigarette gives nothing; it only takes away and then partially restores to create the illusion. I will explain this in more detail in a later chapter. Because it is a quick-acting drug it takes only three weeks for 99 per cent of the nicotine to leave your body, and the actual withdrawal pangs are so mild that most smokers have lived and died without ever realizing that they have suffered them.
You will quite rightly ask why it is that many smokers find it so difficult to stop, go through months of torture and spend the rest of their lives pining for a cigarette at odd times. The answer is the second reason why we smoke - the brainwashing. The chemical addiction is easy to cope with.
Most smokers go all night without a cigarette. The withdrawal pangs do not even wake them up. Many smokers will actually leave the bedroom before they light that first cigarette; many will have breakfast first; many will wait until they arrive at work.
They can suffer ten hours' withdrawal pangs, and it doesn't bother them, but if they went ten hours during the day without a cigarette, they'd be tearing their hair out. Many smokers will buy a new car nowadays and refrain from smoking in it. Many will visit theatres, supermarkets, churches, etc. Even on the Tube trains there have been no riots. Smokers are almost pleased for someone or something to force them to stop smoking.
Nowadays many. In fact, most smokers have extended periods during which they abstain without effort. In the later years as a smoker I actually used to look forward to the evenings when I could stop choking myself what a ridiculous 'habit'. The chemical addiction is easy to cope with, even when you are still addicted, and there are thousands of smokers who remain casual smokers all their lives.
They are just as heavily addicted as the heavy smoker. There are even heavy smokers who have kicked the 'habit' but will have an occasional cigar, and that keeps them addicted. As I say, the actual nicotine addiction is not the main problem. It just acts like a catalyst to keep our minds confused over the real problem: the brainwashing, It may be of consolation to lifelong and heavy smokers to know that it is just as easy for them to stop as casual smokers.
In a peculiar way. The further you go along with the 'habit', the more it drags you down and the greater the gain when you stop. It, may be of further consolation for you to know that the rumors that occasionally circulate e.
Do not think the bad effects of smoking are exaggerated. If anything, they are sadly understated, but the truth is the 'five minutes' rule is obviously an estimation and applies only if you contract one of the killer diseases or just 'gunge' yourself to a standstill. In fact, the 'gunge' never leaves your body completely. If there are smokers about, it is in the atmosphere, and even non-smokers acquire a small percentage. However, these bodies of ours are incredible machines and have enormous powers of recovery, providing you haven't already triggered off one of the irreversible diseases.
If you stop now, your body will recover within a matter of a few weeks, almost as if you had never been a smoker. As I have said, it is never too late to stop. I have helped to cure many smokers in their fifties and sixties and even a few in their seventies and eighties. A year-old woman attended my clinic with her year-old son. When I asked her why she had decided to stop smoking, she replied, 'To set an example for him. The further it drags you down, the greater the relief.
In fact, it was actually enjoyable, even during the withdrawal period. But we must remove the brainwashing. To understand this fully you need to examine the powerful effect of the subconscious mind or, as I call it, the 'sleeping partner'. We all tend to think we are intelligent, dominant human beings determining our paths through life. In fact, 99 per cent of our make- up is moulded.
We are a product of the society that we are brought up in -the sort of clothes we wear, the houses we live in, our basic life patterns, even those matters on which we tend to differ, e.
Labor or Conservative governments. It is no coincidence that Labor supporters tend to come from the working classes and Conservatives from the middle and upper classes. The subconscious is an extremely powerful influence in our lives, and even in matters of fact rather than opinion millions of people can be deluded.
Before Columbus sailed round the world the majority of people knew it to be flat. Today we know it is round. If I wrote a dozen books trying to persuade you that it was fiat, I could not do it, yet how many of us have been into space to see the ball? Even if you have flown or sailed round the world, how do you know that you were not traveling in a circle above a flat surface?
Advertising men know well the power of suggestion over the subconscious mind, hence the large posters the smoker is hit with as he drives around, the adverts in every magazine. You think they are a waste of money? That they do not persuade you to buy cigarettes? You are wrong! Try it out for yourself. Next time you go into a pub or restaurant on a cold day and your companion asks you what you are having to drink, instead of saying, 'A brandy' or whatever , embellish it with 'Do you know what I would really enjoy today?
That marvelous warm glow of a brandy. From our earliest years our subconscious minds are bombarded daily with inform at ion telling us that cigarettes relax us and give us confidence and courage and that the most precious thing on this earth is a cigarette.
You think I exaggerate? Whenever you see a cartoon or film or play in which people are about to be executed or shot, what is their last request? That's right, a cigarette. The impact of this does not register on our conscious minds, but the sleeping partner has time to absorb it. What the message is really saying is, 'The most precious thing on this earth, my last thought and action, will be the smoking of a cigarette.
You think that things have changed recently? Cigarette advertising is supposed to be banned on television nowadays, yet during peak viewing hours the world's top snooker players and darts players are seen constantly puffing away.
The programmes are usually sponsored by the tobacco giants, and this is the most sinister trend of all in today's advertising: the link with sporting occasions and the jet set.
Grand Prix racing cars modeled and even named after cigarette brand names or is it the other way round? There are even plugs on television nowadays depicting a naked couple sharing a cigarette in bed after having sex. The implications are obvious. How my admiration goes out to the advertisers of the small cigar, not for their motives but for the brilliance of their campaign, whereby a man is about to face death or disaster his balloon is on fire and about to crash, or the sidecar of his motorbike is about to crash into a river, or he is Columbus and his ship is about to go over the edge of the world.
Not a word is spoken. Soft music plays. He lights up a cigar; a look of sheer bliss covers his face. The conscious mind may not realize that the smoker is even watching the advert, but the 'sleeping partner' is patiently digesting the obvious implications.
True, there is pub licity the other way - the cancer scares, the legs being amputated, the bad- breath campaigns - but these do not actually stop people smoking. Logically they should, but the fact is they do not. They do not even prevent youngsters from starting. The truth is that it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference.
The trap is the same today as when Sir Walter Raleigh fell into it. All the anti-smoking campaigns just help to add to the confusion. Even the products themselves, those lovely shining packets that lure you into trying their contents, contain a deadly warning on their sides. What smoker ever reads it, let alone brings himself to face the implications of it? I believe that a leading cigarette manufacturer is actually using the Government Health Warning to sell its products.
Many of the scenes include frightening features such as spiders, dragonflies and the Venus flytrap. The health warning is now so large and bold that the smoker cannot avoid it, however hard he tries.
The pang of fear that the smoker suffers prompts an association of ideas with the glossy gold packet. Ironically, the most powerful force in this brainwashing is the smoker himself. It is a fallacy that smokers are weak-willed and physically weak specimens. You have to be physically strong in order to cope with the poison. This is one of the reasons why smokers refuse to accept the overwhelming statistics that prove that smoking cripples your health.
Everyone knows of an Uncle Fred who smoked forty a day, never had a day's illness in his life, and lived to eighty. They refuse even to consider the hundreds of other smokers who are cut down in their prime or the fact that Uncle Fred might still be alive if he hadn't been a smoker. If you do a small survey among your friends and colleagues, you will find that most smokers are, in fact, strong-willed people.
They tend to be self-employed, business executives or in certain specialized professions, such as doctors, lawyers, policemen, teachers, salesmen, nurses, secretaries, housewives with children, etc. The main delusion of smokers is that smoking relieves stress and tends to be associated with the dominant type, the type that takes on responsibility and stress, and, of course, that is the type that we admire and therefore tend to copy. Another group that tends to get hooked are people in monotonous jobs because the other main reason for smoking is boredom.
However, the idea that smoking relieves boredom is also an illusion, I am afraid. The extent of the brainwashing is quite incredible. As a society we get all uptight about glue-sniffing, heroin addiction, etc.
Actual deaths from glue-sniffing do not amount to ten per annum, and deaths from heroin are less than a hundred a year in this country. There is another drug, nicotine, on which over 60 per cent of us become hooked at some time in our lives and the majority spend the rest of their lives paying for it through the nose. Most of their spare money goes on cigarettes and hundreds of thousands of people have their lives ruined every year because they became hooked.
It is the No. I killer in society, including road accidents, fires, etc. Why is it that we regard glue-sniffing and heroin addiction as such great evils, while the drug that we spend most of our money on and is actually killing us we used to regard a few years ago as a perfectly acceptable social habit? In recent years it has been considered a slightly unsociable habit that may injure our health but is legal and on sale in glossy packets in every newsagent, pub, club, garage and restaurant.
The biggest vested interest is our own government. You need to start building resistance to this brainwashing, just as if you were buying a car from a secondhand dealer. You would be nodding politely hut you would not believe a word the man was saying. Do not be fooled by the cut-glass ashtrays or the gold lighter or the millions who have been conned.
Start asking yourself: Why am I doing it? Do I really need to? Why is it that an otherwise rational, intelligent human being becomes a complete imbecile about his own addiction? It pains me to confess that out of the thousands of people that I have assisted in kicking the habit, I was the biggest idiot of all. Not only did I reach a hundred a day myself, but my father was a heavy smoker. He was a strong man, cut down in his prime due to smoking.
I can remember watching him when I was a boy; he would be coughing and spluttering in the mornings. I could see he wasn't enjoying it and it was so obvious to me that something evil had got possession of him. I can remember saying to my mother, 'Don't ever let me become a smoker.
Sport was my life and 1 was full of courage and confidence. If anybody had said to me in those days that I would end up smoking a hundred cigarettes a day, I would have gambled my lifetime's earnings that it would not happen, and I would have given any odds that had been asked.
At the age of forty I was a physical and mental cigarette junky. I had reached the stage where I couldn't carry out the most mundane physical or mental act without first lighting up. With most smokers the triggers are the normal stresses of life, like answering the telephone or socializing. I knew it was killing me. There was no way I could kid myself otherwise. But why I couldn't see what it was doing to me mentally 1 cannot understand. It was almost jumping up and biting me on the nose.
The ridiculous thing is that most smokers suffer the delusion at some time in their life that they enjoy a cigarette. I never suffered that delusion, I smoked because 1 thought it helped me to concentrate and because it helped my nerves. Now I am a non-smoker, the most difficult part is trying to believe that those days actually happened. It's like awakening from a nightmare, and that is about the size of it.
Nicotine is a drug, and your senses are drugged - your taste buds, your sense of smell. The worst aspect of smoking isn't the injury to your health or pocket, it is the warping of the mind.
You search for any plausible excuse to go on smoking. I remember at one stage switching to a pipe, after a failed attempt to kick cigarettes, in the belief that it was less harmful and would cut down my intake. Some of those pipe tobaccos are absolutely foul. The aroma can be pleasant but, to start with, they are awful to smoke.
I can remember that for about three months the tip of my tongue was as sore as a boil. A liquid brown goo collects in the bottom of the bowl of the pipe. Occasionally you unwittingly bring the bowl above the horizontal and before you realize it you have swallowed a mouthful of the filthy stuff.
The result is usually to throw up immediately, no matter what company you are in. It took me three months to learn to cope with the pipe, hut what 1 cannot understand is why I didn't sit down sometime during that three months and ask myself why I was subjecting myself to the torture.
Most of them are convinced that they smoke because they enjoy the pipe. But why did they have to work so hard to learn to like it when they were perfectly happy without it? The answer is that once you have become addicted to nicotine, the brainwashing is increased.
Your subconscious mind knows that the little monster has to be fed, and you block everything else from your mind. As I have already stated, it is fear that keeps people smoking, the fear of that empty, insecure feeling that you get when you stop supplying the nicotine. Because you are not aware of it doesn't moan it isn't there.
You don't have to understand it any more than a cat needs to understand where the under-floor hot-water pipes are. It just knows that if it sits in a certain place it gets the feeling of warmth. It is the brainwashing that is the main difficulty in giving up smoking. The brainwashing of our upbringing in society reinforced with the brainwashing from our own addiction and, most powerful of all, the brainwashing of our friends, relatives and colleagues.
Did you notice that up to now I've frequently referred to 'giving up' smoking, I used the expression at the beginning of the previous paragraph. This is a classic example of the brainwashing. The expression implies a genuine sacrifice.
The beautiful truth is that there is absolutely nothing to give up. On the contrary, you will be freeing yourself from a terrible disease and achieving marvelous positive gains. We are going to start removing this brainwashing now. The only thing that persuades us to smoke in the first place is all the other people doing it.
We feel we are missing out. We work so hard to become hooked, yet nobody ever finds out what they have been missing. But every time we see another smoker he reassures us that there must be something in it, otherwise he wouldn't be doing it. Even when he has kicked the habit, the ex-smoker feels he is being deprived when a smoker lights up at a party or other social function. He feels safe. He can have just one. And, before he knows it, he is hooked again.
This brainwashing is very powerful and you need to be aware of its effects. Many older smokers will remember the Paul Temple detective series that was a very popular radio programme after the war.
One of the series was dealing with addiction to marijuana, commonly known as 'pot' or 'grass'. Unbeknown to the smoker, wicked men were selling cigarettes that contained 'pot'. There were no harmful effects. People merely became addicted and had to go on buying the cigarettes. During my consultations literally hundreds of smokers have admitted to trying 'pot'.
None of them said they became hooked on it. I was about seven years old when I listened to the programme. It was my first knowledge of drug addiction. The concept of addiction, being compelled to go on taking the drug, filled me with horror, and even to this day, in spite of the fact that I am fairly convinced that 'pot' is not addictive.
I would not dare take one puff of marijuana. How ironic that I should have ended up a junky on the world's No. If only Paul Temple had warned me about the cigarette itself. How ironic too that over forty years later mankind spends thousands of pounds on cancer research, yet millions are spent persuading healthy teenagers to become hooked on the filthy weed, our own government having the largest vested interest.
And what does he gain from these considerable sacrifices? In fact, this an illusion. The actual reason is the relief of withdrawal pangs. In the early days we use the cigarette as a social prop. We can take it or leave it. However, the subtle chain has started. Our subconscious mind begins to learn that a cigarette taken at certain times tends to be pleasurable.
The more we become hooked on the drug, the greater the need to relieve the withdrawal pangs and the further the cigarette drags you down, the more you are fooled into believing it is doing the opposite. It all happens so slowly, so gradually, you are not even aware of it. Each day you feel no different from the day before. Most smokers don't even realize they are hooked until they actually try to stop, and even then many won't admit to it, A few stalwarts just keep then- heads in the sand all their lives, trying to convince themselves and other people that they enjoy it.
I have had the following conversation with hundreds of teenagers. ME: You realize that nicotine is a drug and that the only reason why you are smoking is that you cannot stop. T: Nonsense! I enjoy it. If I didn't, I would stop.
ME: Just stop for a week to prove to me you can if you want to. T: No need. If I wanted to stop, I would. ME: Just stop for a week to prove to yourself you are not hooked. T: What's the point? As already stated, smokers tend to relieve their withdrawal pangs at times of stress, boredom, concentration, relaxation or a combination of these.
This point is explained in greater detail in the next few chapters. Let us use the telephone conversation as an example. For most people the telephone is slightly stressful, particularly for the business man. Most calls aren't from satisfied customers or your boss congratulating you. There's usually some sort of aggro - something going wrong or somebody making demands. At that time the smoker, if he isn't already doing so, will light up a cigarette. He doesn't know why he does this, but he does know that for some reason it appears to help.
What has actually happened is this. Without being conscious of it, he has already been suffering aggravation i. By partially relieving that aggravation at the same time as normal stress, the total stress is reduced and the smoker gets a boost.
At this point the boost is not, in fact, an illusion. The smoker will feel better than before he lit the cigarette.
However, even when smoking that cigarette the smoker is more tense than if he were a non-smoker because the more you go into the drug, the more it knocks you down and the less it restores you when you smoke.
I promised no shock treatment. In the example I am about to give, I am not trying to shock you, I am merely emphasizing that cigarettes destroy your nerves rather than relax them. Try to imagine getting to the stage where a doctor tells you that unless you stop smoking he is going to have to remove your legs. Just for a moment pause and try to visualize life without your legs.
Try to imagine the frame of mind of a man who, issued with that warning, actually continues smoking and then has his legs removed. I used to hear stories like that and dismissed them as cranky. In fact, I used to wish a doctor would tell me that: then I would have stopped.
Yet I was already fully expecting any day to have a brain hemorrhage and lose not only my legs but my life, I didn't think of myself as a crank, just a heavy smoker. Such stories are not cranky. That is what this awful drug does to you. As you go through life it systematically takes away your nerve and courage. The more it takes your courage away, the more you are deluded into believing the cigarette is doing the opposite.
We have all heard of the panic that overtakes smokers when they are out late at night and in fear of running out of cigarettes. Non- smokers do not suffer from it. The cigarette causes that feeling. At the same time, as you go through life the cigarette not only destroys your nerves but is a powerful poison, progressively destroying your physical health.
By the time the smoker reaches the stage at which it is killing him, he believes the cigarette is his courage and cannot face life without it. Get it clear in your head that the cigarette is not relieving your nerves; it is slowly but steadily destroying them. One of the great gains of breaking the habit is the return of your confidence and self-assurance.
Another fallacy about smoking is that cigarettes relieve boredom. When you smoke a cigarette your mind isn't saying, 'I'm smoking a cigarette. I'm smoking a cigarette. The true situation is this: when you are addicted to nicotine and are not smoking, there is something missing. If you have something to occupy your mind that isn't stressful, you can go for long periods without being bothered by the absence of the drug. However, when you are bored there's nothing to take your mind off it.
When you are indulging yourself i. Even pipe smokers and roll-your-own smokers can perform this ritual automatically. If any smoker tries to remember the cigarettes he has smoked during the day, he can only remember a small proportion of them - e. The truth is that cigarettes tend to increase boredom indirectly because they make you feel lethargic, and instead of undertaking some energetic activity smokers tend to lounge around, bored, relieving their withdrawal pangs.
This is why countering the brainwashing is so important. Because it's a fact that smokers tend to smoke when they are bored and that we've been told since birth that smoking relieves boredom, it doesn't occur to us to question the fact. We've also been brainwashed into believing that chewing gum aids relaxation. It is a fact that when under stress people tend to grind their teeth. All chewing gum does is to give you a logical reason to grind your teeth.
Next time you watch someone chewing gum, observe them closely and ask yourself whether they looked relaxed or tense. Observe smokers who are smoking because they are bored. They still looked bored. The cigarette doesn't relieve the boredom. As an ex-chain-smoker I can assure you that there are no more boring activities in life than lighting up one filthy cigarette after another, day in day out, year in year out.
That is just another illusion. When you are trying to concentrate, you automatically try to avoid distractions like feeling cold or hot. The smoker is already suffering: that little monster wants his fix.
So when he wants to concentrate he doesn't even have to think about it. He automatically lights up, partially ending the craving, gets on with the matter in hand and has already forgotten that he is smoking. Cigarettes do not help concentration. They help to ruin it because after a while, even while smoking a cigarette, the smoker's withdrawal pangs cease to be completely relieved.
The smoker then increases his intake, and the problem then increases. Concentration is also affected adversely for another reason. The progressive blocking up of the arteries and veins with poisons starves the brain of oxygen. In fact, your concentration and inspiration will be greatly improved as this process is reversed. It was the concentration aspect that prevented me from succeeding when using the willpower method.
I could put up with the irritability and bad temper, but when I really needed to concentrate on something difficult, I had to have that cigarette. I can well remember the panic I felt when I discovered that I was not allowed to smoke during my accountancy exams, I was already a chain- smoker and convinced that 1 would not be able to concentrate for three hours without a cigarette.
But I passed the exams, and I can't even remember thinking about smoking at the time, so, when it came to the crunch, it obviously didn't bother me.
The loss of concentration that smokers suffer when they try to stop smoking is not, in fact, due to the physical withdrawal from nicotine. When you are a smoker, you have mental blocks. When you have one, what do you do? If you are not already smoking one, you light a cigarette. That doesn't cure the mental block, so then what do you do? You do what you have to do: you get on with it, just as non- smokers do.
When you are a smoker nothing gets blamed on the cigarette. Smokers never have smoking coughs; they just have permanent colds. The moment you stop smoking, everything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on the fact that you've stopped smoking. Now when you have a mental block, instead of just getting on with it you start to say, 'If only I could light up now, it would solve my problem. If you believe that smoking is a genuine aid to concentration, then worrying about it will guarantee that you won't be able to concentrate.
It's the doubting, not the physical withdrawal pangs, that causes the problem. Always remember: it is smokers who suffer withdrawal pangs and not non-smokers.
When I extinguished my last cigarette I went overnight from a hundred a day to zero without any apparent loss of concentration. The truth is that nicotine is a chemical stimulant. If you take your pulse and then smoke two consecutive cigarettes, there will be a marked increase in your pulse rate. One of the favorite cigarettes for most smokers is the one after a meal.
A meal is a time of day when we stop working; we sit down and relax, relieve our hunger and thirst and are then completely satisfied. However, the poor smoker cannot relax, as he has another hunger to satisfy. He thinks of the cigarette as the icing on the cake, but it is the little monster that needs feeding. The truth is that the nicotine addict can never be completely relaxed, and as you go through life it gets worse, The most unrelaxed people on this planet aren't non-smokers but fifty-year-old business executives who chain-smoke, are permanently coughing and spluttering, have high blood pressure and are constantly irritable.
At this point cigarettes cease to relieve even partially the symptoms that they have created. I can remember when I was a young accountant, bringing up a family. One of my children would do something wrong and I would lose my temper to an extent that was out of all proportion to what he had done.
I really believed that I had an evil demon in my make-up. I now know that I had, however it wasn't some inherent flaw in my character, but the little nicotine monster that was creating the problem. During those times I thought I had all the problems in the world, hut when I look back on my life I wonder where all the great stress was. In everything else in my life I was in control. The one thing that controlled me was the cigarette.
The sad thing is that even today I can't convince my children that it was the smoking that caused me to be so irritable. Every time they hear a smoker trying to justify his addiction, the message is ' Oh, they calm me. They help me to relax. A man rang up, irate. He said, 'You are completely wrong. I can remember when I was a child, if 1 had a contentious matter to raise with my mother, I would wait until she lit a cigarette because she was more relaxed then.
Why are smokers so unrelaxed when they are not smoking, even after a meal at a restaurant? Why are non- smokers completely relaxed then? Why are smokers not able to relax without a cigarette?
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