Free Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr Page B

triggers are the normal, mild stresses of life, like answering the telephone or socializing. I couldn’t even change the TV channel on my remote without lighting up.
    I knew it was killing me. There was no way I could kid myself otherwise. But what I fail to understand is why I couldn’t see what it was doing to me mentally and emotionally. It was almost jumping up and biting me on the nose. The really ridiculous thing is I never even suffered the illusion that I enjoyed smoking. I smoked because I thought it helped me to concentrate and because it helped my nerves. Now I am a non-smoker, it is difficult to believe that those days actually happened. It’s like waking up from a nightmare, and that’s about the size of it. Nicotine is a drug, and your senses are drugged—your taste buds, your sense of smell. The worst thing about smoking is not the damage to your health or bank account; it’s the warping of your mind. You search for any excuse to go on smoking, despite being acutely aware of the harm it is causing.
    I remember at one stage switching to a pipe, after another failed attempt to kick cigarettes, in the belief that it was less harmful and would enable me to cut down my intake.
    Some of those pipe tobaccos are absolutely foul. The smell can be pleasant, as most pipe tobaccos are infused with artificial aromas, 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 mixture of tar 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 to throw up immediately, no matter whose company you are in.
    It took me three months to learn to cope with the pipe, but what I cannot understand is why, during that three months, it didn’t occur to me to ask why I was subjecting myself to the torture to begin with.
    Of course, once they learn to cope with the pipe, few seem as contented as pipe smokers. Most are convinced that they smoke because they enjoy the pipe. But surely the question is why did they have to work so hard to learn to ‘enjoy’ it when they were perfectly happy without it?
    The answer is that once we are hooked, we have to find a way to service our addiction. You need to get this very clear in your mind. You didn’t get addicted to nicotine because you fell into the habit of smoking. It’s the other way around. You had to get into the habit of smoking to service your addiction.
    Even the expression ‘giving up’ is part of the brainwashing. This phrase implies a genuine and substantial sacrifice. The beautiful truth is that there is absolutely nothing to give up. On the contrary, you will be freeing yourself from this terrible slavery and achieving marvelous positive gains. We are going to start to remove this brainwashing now. From this point on, no longer will we refer to ‘giving up’, but to stopping, quitting or the most accurate descriptor of all: ESCAPING!
    What tempts us to smoke in the first place is the influence of people already smoking, whether they are the older kids at school, movie stars or our own family. We assume that smokers are getting some tremendous pleasure from smoking and fear that we are missing out on it. We work so hard to become hooked, yet no smoker ever finds out what it is they were missing. Every time we see another smoker we are reassured that there must be something to smoking, otherwise other people wouldn’t be doing it.
    Because he’s brainwashed into believing he has made a genuine sacrifice when he quits, the cigarette continues to dominate the ex-smoker who quits using willpower. This is why people quitting using willpower are often so miserable.
    As a child in the 1940s I remember listening to the Paul Temple detective series, which was a very popular program on BBC radio. One