Go to a book store and buy Allen Carr's "The Easyway to stop smoking". It's a slim volume and written in simple english (and other languages I gather). Read a couple of chapters a day, follow the simple instructions and in a couple of weeks you'll be a non-smoker. A happy non-smoker that is. He instructs you to continue smoking while you read - how easy can it be!
There is no willpower required nor trickery involved. Just the truth about cigarettes.Here are a few posts from iano, the guy who recommended the book I see he recommended it first a few years ago, and then again recently when the thread was revived. He emphasizes that the way is really EASY, that the usual struggle people have when they quit just doesn't happen with this method.
Reading the intro and some reviews of the book at Amazon it seems to me that Allen Carr has really hit on something. Testimony after testimony of giving up smoking with an amazing ease. Although I quit years ago I am very curious about this method and would like to read the book, so I will when I can.
I used to be a heavy smoker and tried to quit time after time as smokers often do, as the intro to this book also affirms. When I was out of cigarettes I'd do the usual rummaging through the garbage to find a bit of a butt to smoke, I'd throw out partial packs, even drown them in water to make them unsmokeable, then find myself going down to the Seven Eleven at midnight to get another pack.
I did manage to quit for two years once and it was exactly as the author describes, a daily struggle that made going back to it inevitable when life got a little more stressful.
When I did quit it was at a Christian seminar where we were asked to pray about something we thought the Lord would want us to get out of our lives. I prayed to give up smoking. When I got in my car after the seminar I automatically lit up the half-smoked cigarette I'd left in the ashtray and smoked it down to the filter, thinking the whole time "Why am I doing this after praying to stop?"
I don't know what made it possible but that was the last cigarette I ever smoked. And the urge was gone gone gone, never had the slightest desire after that.
That was in August of 1989.
So I'm wondering if whatever happened to me psychologically that made it so easy for me to quit through prayer was similar to what happens to people who quit with such ease from this book. I'd like to find out.
I mean of course God changed my desire to smoke because I did pray, but I'm talking here about the psychological component of it, HOW He changed my desire, what mental change occurred that made it possible to simply put cigarettes absolutely out of mind as I did from then on.
=========================
Later: The above was my reaction to hearing about the Allen Carr book and I've been pondering the psychological aspect of it since then. I haven't read more of the book than the introduction but I think I've figured it out: What the book does is the same thing God did for me: gives you a clear unconflicted DESIRE to stop smoking. I still want to read the book when I can but as I was thinking over how easy it was for me to quit after so many years of frustrating struggle it seemed to me that what happened was that I absolutely simply no longer wanted to smoke.
When people talk about it taking "will power" to quit, it implies the struggle so many experience, and what that means in reality is a divided will, a will only partly dedicated to quitting, against another part of your will that doesn't want to quit at all. That's why it's such a struggle, you're in a fight with yourself. When I finally quit it wasn't that my will wasn't involved, it was that my will was 100% devoted to quitting for the first time ever. If the mere thought of a cigarette came to mind I shoved it out of my mind instantly with all the energy of my undivided will, without any struggle at all because I did not want anything to do with cigarettes. And it only very rarely came to mind even in the early days, and after that just about never. Desire to smoke was gone, "need" to smoke was gone. So I'm saying So in reality I HAD will power for the first time, and when you have it the whole thing is easy. NO struggle, NO edginess or nervousness, NO steeling yourself, NO crabbiness.
If this is what it's all about, the idea that smoking is an addiction to a drug is even called into question. Seems to me the addiction is to the whole psychological experience of smoking. You experience it in a positive way despite the unpleasant aspects that keep making you want to quit, and when you stop seeing anything positive about it, it's just gone without a fight.
So I'm not entirely sure how this book goes about it but I'd bet that's WHAT it does. Somehow or other by the time you're finished reading it you are 100% in favor of quitting for the first time ever. No struggle, just blessed freedom.
--------
Realized I never really said how I lost the desire to smoke, what turned my will so completely against it. I think it was a combination of wanting to please God, hating to be the only smoker in a Christian group, having to draw attention to myself by going outside to smoke; just wanting to be "normal" like all the nonsmokers; hating smelling like a smoker; being ashamed of it overall I suppose; but all the health reasons too. Not that any of that entered my mind at the time, I'm only trying to reconstruct it in retrospect and all those things NOW make me happy I don't smoke. Glad glad glad to be able to breathe again, glad not to be controlled by a habit that makes me spend money on something I really don't like doing; and that's a big part of it too: for all the liking of smoking, I really DIDN'T like smoking, it's unpleasant, it hurt my chest, I was always out of breath, it caused and aggravated a lump on my lip that sometimes hurt, and so on.
All those reasons I'm glad I no longer smoke I now think were behind my giving it up so easily even if I wasn't all that conscious of it at the time. Most of that was there in my previous efforts to quit too, however, so there may still be a question how it all came together all at once in such a total way.
So some time I'd like to read that book and see how my experience compares with their method.
