Smokers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your jones(ing)!

[ed_rex]

Smokers of the world unite!
You have nothing to lose but your jones(ing)!

Book Review:
Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking

Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking 2004, Clarity Publishing 186 pages, $19.95

At some point or another we've all heard the phrase, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, and most of us have probably used it.

"Easy" ways to make money, lose weight, find love, and cetera and cetera, are forever singing their syren songs from television adds, email spam and the self-help sections of bookstores, to name just a few.

So you can imagine my scepticism when a friend gave me his copy of Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking. My friend told me he butted his final cigarette when he finished the book and he felt sure that I would do the same.

I've been smoking since I was 16 or 17 years old, very nearly as long as he and I have been friends and almost as long as he had been smoking — what did I have to lose? he asked me, and I had to agree to give it a try, no matter that I couldn't even imagine that quitting smoking could possible be "easy".

Well, it seems there's a reason the truism I mentioned at the outset includes the word, probably. Because I too butted my last cigarette at the precise moment I finished Allen Carr's remarkable book. Every once in a very long while, something that sounds too good to be true, actually is true.

Over the more than quarter century I've been smoking, I've quit quite a few times. All failures (up 'till now, I believe), my attempts at becoming smoke-free have lasted as long as two months (or almost — the lies a drug addict will tell himself and others are remarkable) and as briefly as five or 10 minutes. And every single one of those attempts was hard, a constant battle of Addiction versus Will (or "willpower", to use Carr's un-hyphenated term).

Whether quitting "cold turkey" (a term Carr correctly notes is inappropriately lifted from the much more physically debilitating symptoms of heroin withdrawal) or using nicotine gum or the patch, my previous tries have left me pretty miserable, and forever craving a cigarette so that, when temptation or pressure showed up, it was a relief to light up a smoke and suck that poison into my lungs.

Carr promises — and delivers! — an entirely different experience.

Early on, he promises not to flood the reader with health warnings about issues every smoker already knows, he promises that the reader will want to stop by the end of the book, and he insists that the smoker keep smoking until the end of the book.

What's not to like? And what, as Carr asks, has the smoker to lose?

Nothing but the chains of addiction, of course; and if it doesn't work, one can just keep on smoking.

I said that all my previous attempts to quit have been hard, even agonizing. This time really was easy, which is why, only nine [edit: now 10] days after butting out, I feel almost completely confident — not confident that I have "quit smoking", but confident that I am once again, for the first time in more than 25 years, a non-smoker.

The difference between a quitter and a non-smoker to my mind (to my mind now; I'm cribbing from Carr) is that the former feels as if he or she has given up smoking, that they have made some kind of sacrifice, whereas the latter (finally!) understands that he has lost nothing but his chains, that she has lost only her servitude to a drug addiction.

And smoking is a drug addiction, not a "habit" or a "choice" or anything other excuse or lie used to justify it.

But if (I hear you cry) smoking is an addiction, how can it possibly be easy to stop?

Simply put, because it's not a very serious addiction. After three days, all the nicotine is gone from the former smoker's body (half is gone within hours, which means every smoker sleeps through the worst of his or her withdrawal symptoms just about every night of their life. An addiction to nicotine is not remotely as serious as alcoholism or heroin addiction!) and, in the interim, the physical withdrawal symptoms are, in truth, very similar to the feeling one gets when one is begining to get hungry, nothing more. As Carr points out repeatedly, every smoker goes many hours at a time in "withdrawal" from nicotine day in and day out, if only while asleep. And usually doesn't even notice the craving.

Nevertheless, how does it work? Why did Carr's method enable me to quit when neither will-power, nicotine patches or nicotine gum have been of any use to me?

I think the answer lies in Carr's use of the repetition I mentioned above, of which the book contains a great deal, sometimes almost word-for-word. The effect is almost hypnotic as he repeatedly reminds us of things were already know in the abstract.

Things like it's not actually fun to hang around outside at minus-30 degrees in a howling snow-storm in order to have a smoke; nor is it a genuine pleasure to interrupt a date in order to grab a butt. Things like the fact cigarettes actually taste awful (and I am someone who, even two weeks ago, claimed that I "enjoyed" the process of smoking. I now know I was lying to myself).

Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking doesn't lecture, doesn't hector and doesn't try to scare you with horror stories about lung cancer or rotting gums. It just calmly and quietly reminds the smoker that he or she is addicted to a drug, that he or she doesn't enjoy smoking (it must be the only addictive drug that doesn't get its users high), and that their lives would be much better off without the addiction.

And after 186 pages, this former smoker is convinced that he will never light up again.

If you're a smoker, gamble the 20 bucks on a copy of the book — that's about two large packs of cigarettes. If you have a loved one who is a smoker, buy a copy, read it yourself, then pass it on to them — there's hardly a smoker alive who doesn't (if only secretly) want to stop.

Just this once, something that sounds too good to be true actually is true: if you know what you're doing, it's easy to become the non-smoker you once were.

This essay originally appeared in the October 16, 2009, edition of True North Perspective.

Comments

Awesome!

[jade-noir.livejournal.com]

I am honestly surprised that you actually quit. That is awesome.
I can't see my step-dad ever quitting but if you did it, I cannot see why he can't. I'm going to see if my library system has this book.
Because while I am cheap. But hey! they pay me so little per hour that I make more money by the absence of library fines than I do from my wage.

Re: Awesome!

[jade-noir.livejournal.com]

They have it. And I am on the waiting list.

Re: Awesome!

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Not "quit" — I've stopped smoking. I think the distinction is important, because the former implies I've made some kind of sacrifice, while the latter reminds me that I've given up only a kind of slavery and have gained a great deal (already my wind has greatly improved).

But anyway, I'm honestly surprised that I did it as well, especially with so little effort. I haven't started to eat more, I'm not chewing gum and I'm not barking at any or everything that moves; I'm just ... living.

If your dad is willing to read the book I think it's very possible he'll actually stop. And by the way, when you're a student getting by on a part-time job you're not only allowed to be "cheap", it's more or less de rigueur, unless things are even more different south of the border than I had believed.

[sirs-littleone.livejournal.com]

It's a shame my baby brother mostly refuses to read anything, and my (step)brother doesn't have a very high reading level. They are both smokers and I wish they would quit. *grumbles*

Teenagers!

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

If he can read at all, he should be able to manage the book. Carr's writing is definitely of the plain and simple variety. However, he also mentions that teenagers are the one group that is very often deaf his method, at least in part because teens often don't yet realize that they're actually addicted. (Does he still say, "I could quit any time I want!"?)

But the first time you hear either of them talk about wanting to quit, show them this review, tell them my smoking history (if you think it will help) and then, maybe, they'll give it a try. God knows the other methods (patch, gum, anti-depressants(!) (Zanax)) have, at best, an 85% failure rate.

Re: Teenagers!

[sirs-littleone.livejournal.com]

Eric struggles with simple language, he really does. He reads very slowly and not well at all. It wouldn't work for him. And yes, he does still say that "I could quit any time I want!"

There was a party here last night and a bunch of people were talking about wanting to quit smoking. My dad was offering one kid, his "third son", to pay for the patch or other quit-smoking aids. I mentioned the book to another guy who was talking about quitting, but the trouble is they all party hard and like to smoke while they drink, or have a cigarette after they've been smoking pot.

Re: Teenagers!

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Okay, the book probably won't be of much help to Eric; so I'm looking into whether I can get an audio copy of it for you. If yes, I'll pop a CD into the mail for you shortly.

In terms of their habits, though, keep in mind that I have associated smoking with drinking longer than you've been alive — and I haven't cut down on the former since I've stopped smoking, nor have I changed any other habits (other than those resulting from the move, of course).

It really seems to be a method that allows the (former) smoker to not even want to light up. Which is why is seems like such a fucking miracle to me!

[ultrasexified.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'm debating giving it a go. My lungs have been getting an ass-kicking whenever I play hockey. Buuttttt the shitty thing is living in Europe and EVERYONE smokes. What to do, what to do...

Do it! (Doooooo iiiiiittt ...)

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

I've been around smokers a couple of times since I stopped. No problem at all. When I've quit before, hanging out with smokers was at once a temptation as well as a way to breathe in some of that "sweet" second-hand smoke.

Now? The stuff just stinks. Honest to god.

Also, I hopped on my bike and did a 10 or 12 kilometre ride at fairly high speed. And holy moly! but in less than two weeks my wind is a lot better. (I can hardly imagine how I'll feel after a couple of months!)

[mijopo.livejournal.com]

I quit a number of times before quitting for good, once for 7-8 months. For me, the hardest was never the immediate cravings, it was the thought of never smoking again, it really did feel like losing a dear friend. And while I've quit for close to 20 years, I started very young, about 13, I still have moments when I think, "ah, a smoke would be great now" And I still love the smell of cigarette smoke.

I am much in agreement ...

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

... about some of what you said.

Previously when I've quit, if I managed to make it past the first three days of hell, there then started an interminable war of attrition that (till now?) I always ended up losing. I doff my fedora in admiration for your having managed to do it via will-power.

The happy thing (yes, just so far, less than three weeks into the game), is that somehow Carr's "hypnotism" worked in such a way as to make the cigarettes I was smoking while I read taste more and more foul. When I got to the last one, it tasted like, well, smoke from a bunch of toxic leaves which I'd set aflame and, for some unfathomable reason was then sucking into my lungs as if my life depended on it.

Amazingly to me, I find even a whiff from someone smoking on the sidewalk unpleasant, something that I haven't felt since I started to smoke in the first place.

Ahem. Yes, I'm really enthused about this book ...

Re: I am much in agreement ...

[mijopo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's sort of what I was getting at it, i.e., sounds this method is a lot more effective.

Re: I am much in agreement ...

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

I think I knew that, but my enthusiasm got the better of me. Apologies. (And it's a good lesson for me: I don't want to become one of those ex-smokers.)