almotamar.net, google news - Every Thursday this month, ex-smokers tell how they exorcised their nicotine demons. This week: The reading cure. "Allen Carr will bore you to tears." That's how a softball buddy sold me on Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking, and the idea of limited motivational song-and-dance appealed to me. The book had apparently worked for my friend, and for many of his friends in turn. And with less than a week to go before my self-imposed date to quit on Nov. 1, 2007 -- in an effort to beat my impending 30th birthday and get a headstart on New Year's resolutions -- I was desperate to stock up on as much anti-smoking paraphernalia as possible.
Carr, a smoker of 30 years who once had a habit of 100 cigarettes a day, had an epiphany in 1983 that not only cured him of his addiction but earned him nearly US$250-million. Carr's technique claims a success rate of 51.4%, which doesn't sound impressive until he suggests that all other anti-smoking methods have an effectiveness rate of less than 10%.
Carr himself died of lung cancer on Nov. 29, 2006. With over seven million copies sold, Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking remains the highest selling book on quitting. Yet, despite all the praise and celebrity endorsement (my favourite being Ellen DeGeneres' comment that, "Everybody who reads this book stops and I stopped;" forget the 6,999,999 other people, Ellen DeGeneres quit by using this book!), I was certain that Carr just wouldn't get me.
I always thought my addiction was special, that my personality depended on smoking -- that it somehow defined me. Whether it was the romanticism that cigarettes brought to enhance almost any occasion ("Remember when our band played that great gig? And then we smoked afterward?"), or the easy getaway it provided in awkward social interactions, I had to smoke. While I envied social smokers, I could never do the same. I smoked impulsively, which probably explained my pack-a-day habit over the past 11 years. I figured Carr's book would be added to all the gum, patches, hypnotism and acupuncture sessions -- and complete nic-fit freakouts -- that I imagined would make up the story I'm writing now. But a trip to the bookstore made it so that I never needed to turn to any other antismoking aids.
Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking provided immediate confidence by quashing the idea that my special addiction was special at all. Carr laid out every scenario I'd thought was unique to my own cravings. It wasn't so much his rationale for why people smoke -- Fear! Hey, didn't Michael Moore use that same reason to explain why there's a gun problem in the U.S.? -- but rather the simple words of someone who's been there.
Carr doesn't tell you anything you don't already know. Cigarette addiction is caused by the physical and mental addiction to nicotine, duh. But it's the repetition of these facts that make it so effective. The 150-page abridged Canadian edition of Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking is really the same five pages over and over again. Even before I started smoking, I realized the only stress cigarettes relieve are the stress of not having a cigarette. But Carr's repetition of such maxims creates a real understanding of exactly how nicotine enslaves you. And the more it's repeated, the more confidence you have in your ability to quit.
But in my implicit trust in Carr's words lies the one flaw that made my experience of using his method a bit warped. While Carr writes with astonishing clarity about why we are addicted to cigarettes, his actual procedure on how to quit gets fuzzy at times.
He states that you must follow his rules exactly, but there's never really a clear set of rules. It became even more distressing when, three days into my smoke free existence, I read that "It is essential to keep smoking until you have finished the book completely." I ended up hitting the convenience store immediately to pick up a pack of cigarettes and start smoking all over again -- because Allen Carr told me to. Shouldn't this have been pointed out on the first page? Or maybe in the title even?
Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking Provided that You Continue to Smoke While You Read the Book?
No matter. I raced through the rest of book over the next three days, hiding my brief foray back into smoking from friends. My confidence was back, at least until I reached Chapter 40: "The Final Cigarette." Carr goes over how, now that I had finished reading the book, I was ready to smoke my final cigarette. But there were still 15 pages to go! Were those post-last-cigarette comments? I opted to speed-read the rest and rush out to the street corner for my last cigarette. I inhaled the smoke deeply, as Carr suggests. I'm supposed to consciously feel the filth entering my lungs and be repulsed. Problem was, I had never inhaled deeply in all my years of smoking, and this proved to be somewhat of a rush. I started to freak out a bit, as I was actually kind of enjoying my final cigarette! When it was, done I reluctantly threw the remaining smokes away in the garbage and headed back home to begin my new smoke-free life. But I seriously worried that I somehow turned Carr's Easy Way into the hard way, and that it will make this whole effort futile.
Surprisingly, the next day went by without a hitch. And the next day. And the day after that. And the weeks started to go by with hardly a serious craving for what I had depended on for years to get me through work, band practice, evenings out at the bar, awkward social occasions and, well, pretty much any excuse to have a cigarette.
I'm now two months smoke free, and while I can't say I feel the way Nelson Mandela must have when he was released from prison -- as Allen Carr claimed I would at the start of the book -- I will say that I am no more stressed or unhappy because of it. In fact, I'll go so far as to say I'm happier because of it, and I'm not the sort to make a proclamation like that.
If there is a downside to Carr's method, it's that you
find yourself talking people' ears off about it. It's funny that Carr should compare cigarette smoking to brainwashing, as that seems to be what he's done to me. I do still think about smoking a lot, and I'll probably always miss the idea of smoking. But I can't actually imagine ever lighting up again. I have no desire to, and I don't think I could even physically inhale cigarette smoke anymore with gagging. I still had to resort to willpower to quit after finishing the book, but I found that rereading as much as a paragraph of Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking eased the few times I got a craving to smoke. It's hard to say exactly what changed, but somehow the logic of the book stuck. It provides the necessary confidence to realize that you are not depriving yourself of anything by quitting. As smokers trying to quit, we should know we're not depriving ourselves of anything anyway. We want to quit, right? But that's what I always thought I was doing in my previous attempts to quit. And that's why I kept going back. But I can honestly say I think I'm done for good now.