How to quit smoking
Published by Hypno on Thursday, May 29, 2008 - 23:57:04 - Filed under
NO, No, No, I WON’T try to scare you. I won’t talk about how unhealthy smoking is. I won’t be posting lists about why you should quit smoking. You know all that!
I won’t try to convince you to stop smoking either (It’s almost impossible to convince a smoker to stop). I’ll just write down how I quit smoking. And hopefully inspire a few people to do the same.
I was a smoker for nine years. I enjoyed smoking like most smokers do. I knew that smoking is unhealthy and everything, but I didn’t care much about it. Then somewhere around the autumn of 2006 I got the idea that I should quit it. The benefits would be nice, but quitting seemed too hard, so I dismissed the idea quickly, until I saw a thread about quitting smoking in an internet forum. I started reading the thread and some guy talked about his experience that he read a book by a guy called Allen Carr, and that book made him quit smoking…..
“Yeah … Right…. quit smoking by READING A BOOK??? LOL! Impossible! Nicotine causes chemical dependency, and it’s IMPOSSIBLE to break that addiction just by reading a book. The guy probably wasn’t addicted to it in the first place, that’s why he thought that it is that simple.”
Well that’s what I thought back then. So I dropped the idea of quitting smoking by reading a book. I continued smoking for a few months, until a thread about the author of the book popped up on that forum again. Sadly the thread was about the author leaving us (R.I.P. Allen). What caught my attention was that a LOT of people responded to that thread, and all of them said a lot of good things about him and the book. That’s when my thinking started to change. So many people CAN’T be wrong.
I decided to buy the book. I ordered it. Got it and started reading it. The beginning immediately caught my attention:
If you are expecting me to inform you of the terrible health risks that smokers run, that smokers spend a small fortune during their smoking lives, that it is a filthy, disgusting habit and that you are a stupid, spineless, weak-willed jellyfish, then I must disappoint you. Those tactics never helped me to quit and if they were going to help you, you would already have quit.
He’s right, – I thought – he definitely knows something about quitting smoking that I don’t. The regular fear based method definitely doesn’t work.
I wanted to read it further, but something in me was stopping me from reading it. I thought that it would be nice to quit, but I didn’t want to “hurry“ it. So I stopped reading it, and continued my existence as a smoker. I smoked for a few months more until the prices of cigars went up. I didn’t have much money back then and it got me angry that all those rich cigar companies were making profits out of me. That was the last straw! I decided that I’m going to READ THE BOOK! If I quit by reading it, then I’ll be a “non-smoker” and if I don’t quit then I’ll try something else.
I started reading the book….finished it …. and all I can say is WOW! It’s one of the BEST books I ever read. Carr doesn’t try to scare you, you can even smoke while you read the book. He simply explains how he managed to quit smoking. It’s a real life changing book, and it’s fun to read too. People who read the book say only good things about it. I highly recommend it.
The book is designed in a way that it reframes all the subconscious beliefs that you may have about smoking. After I finished it I felt strange. Even the thought of being a smoker seemed unnatural for me, also the need for smoking way DRASTICALLY reduced, which totally disappeared after a few weeks.
Of course you can quit using other “classical” methods of quitting smoking, like the willpower method (that doesn’t work in most cases) or the method of putting yourself into a situation where you can’t smoke (a businessman put posters around the city where he lived that said that: “he will give 100,000$ to the person that catches him smoking”) or there is the nicotine patch method that produces miserable success rates, and so on. I’m not saying that those methods are bad, I’m saying that those methods are nowhere near as effective as Allen Carr’s method.
P.S.: You already know that you can use this website for free to quit smoking. Which is good but I think that you will have faster results with Allen Carr’s book called “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking” I can’t suggest it highly enough.