Chapter 1

Why do you smoke?

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Introduction To Nicotine • What Is ‘Withdrawal?’ • No Willpower Required • The Little Monster • A Logical Conclusion • Great News • Brainwashing

Smokers give all sorts of reasons when asked why they smoke. They seldom give the correct answer. So we are going to begin by making sure you’re aware of the real reason you smoke or use nicotine.

INTRODUCTION TO NICOTINE

When you smoke a cigarette, you inhale a drug called nicotine. You could replace the word drug with poison. Let’s strip it down and examine it.

In its pure form, nicotine is a colourless, oily compound that is lethal to humans even in relatively small doses. It is the fastest-acting addictive drug known to humankind, faster than heroin. Each puff on a cigarette delivers a dose of nicotine to the brain, via the lungs, within just seven seconds – that’s faster than a dose of heroin injected directly into the bloodstream.

If you take 20 puffs to smoke a cigarette, then you’re taking 20 doses with every cigarette you smoke… this is like ‘machine-gunning’ nicotine into your body.

Nicotine is quick to enter the system, but it is also quick to leave it. As soon as you stub out a cigarette, the nicotine level rapidly subsides and the drug begins to withdraw from your body. If you measured the amount of the drug in your bloodstream after

smoking a cigarette, you would find it had fallen to roughly half after 30 minutes and to about a quarter after an hour. This explains why the standard pack contains 20 cigarettes and most smokers average a pack a day. After one hour, the withdrawal triggers the need for another cigarette. If you’re like I was as a smoker, puffing your way through three or four packs a day, don’t worry. It doesn’t mean you’re more addicted, and it doesn’t mean you’ll find it harder to quit.

Nicotine leaves the body very quickly. Within eight hours of stubbing out a cigarette, you are 97 per cent nicotine-free; within three days, you’re 100 per cent nicotine-free

WHAT DO YOU UNDERSTAND BY ‘WITHDRAWAL’?

Most smokers associate the word with the ‘terrible pangs and cravings’ they suffer when they try to quit. In fact, the physical symptoms of withdrawal are so slight as to be almost imperceptible.

Don’t misunderstand me: the really unpleasant physical symptoms you suffered when you may have attempted to quit previously were real. They’re just not caused by nicotine withdrawal; they’re a physical response to a mental process – of ‘wanting a cigarette’, but not being able to have one.

I’ll explain more later, but if, in principle, you can accept this fact, then you have taken a huge step towards being free. If you’re not sure you can accept it, even in principle, don’t panic; let’s look at it in more detail.

The unpleasant physical feelings are real, but they are the result of a mental process – of wanting a cigarette and not being able to have on

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Think of a child having their favourite toy taken away from them; the physical symptoms it causes are real and measurable – red face, bulging eyes, anger, rage, an anxious, uptight, insecure feeling.

Does that sound familiar? Doesn’t it describe how you’ve felt in the past when you’ve tried to quit smoking without success? But the child isn’t suffering from the physical withdrawal from a drug; he or she is experiencing a range of physical symptoms resulting from a mental process: ‘I WANT IT! I CAN’T HAVE IT! AAARGH!’

It’s ‘wanting a cigarette or an e-cigarette’ that causes the really unpleasant symptoms when you try to break free from nicotine addiction rather than the physical withdrawal from nicotine:

‘I WANT A CIGARETTE! I CAN’T HAVE ONE! AAARGH!’

The response to that thought process is the uptight, anxious, churned-up, angry feeling you identify as physical withdrawal.

The only reason you ‘want a cigarette’ is because you believe it will do something positive for you. Therefore, if I can explain that smoking, or nicotine in any form, does absolutely nothing for you, and if I can describe how you got fooled into thinking it did in the first place, then you won’t want a cigarette. True?

So let’s take it a stage further. If you don’t want a cigarette, then you won’t have that ‘I WANT A CIGARETTE! I CAN’T HAVE ONE! AAARGH!’ feeling.

That’s a lot to take in, especially so early on in this process, but please read the text from ‘What do you understand by “withdrawal”?’ again, just to recap on this point. I don’t expect you to agree entirely with what I’m saying at this stage, I just want you to consider the possibility that what I am saying could be true.

I’m not telling anybody what to do. Do your thing. All I’m saying is this: If you want to quit smoking, read Allen Carr.

Chrissie Hynde

NO WILLPOWER REQUIRED

Any real discomfort smokers experience when they try to quit is mostly psychological as they wrestle with the thought of wanting something they can’t have and feel the need to battle the temptation to smoke again.

Doesn’t this make sense of those ex-smokers you meet from time to time – the ones who haven’t smoked for months or even years but are still tearing their hair out? They don’t have a trace of nicotine left in their body – so there is no physical withdrawal at all – yet they still mope after the drug. It’s the ‘moping’ that causes the unpleasant physical feelings, not nicotine withdrawal. But you won’t go through this discomfort. With Easyway, there is no mental struggle. That’s why you don’t need willpower.

The physical withdrawal from nicotine is so slight that most smokers aren’t even aware they suffer it every day and every night of their smoking lives. Most of them are never aware of it. It manifests itself as nothing more than a mild, empty, slightly insecure feeling – not unlike hunger – which you interpret as the feeling of ‘something’s missing’.

Nicotine is an addictive drug that hooks you very quickly – just one cigarette is enough – but luckily, it’s just as easy to get ‘unhooked’. Nicotine leaves your system completely within a few days. Why, then, do smokers find it so hard to quit? And why do smokers who have not smoked for months or even years still crave a cigarette

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The addiction is 1 per cent physical and 99 per cent mental!

Given that this is true, can you see how pointless it is to use nicotine products in an attempt to quit being addicted?

E-cigarettes, nicotine patches and gum, nicotine inhalators and lozenges attempt to address just 1 per cent of the problem, leaving you suffering the other 99 per cent – the psychological side. No wonder you’ve failed in the past. Handle the mental side of things and the 1 per cent physical addiction is easy to break.

When I first started helping smokers to escape from the smoking trap, it was quite difficult for them to understand that they were addicted. These are much more enlightened times and most smokers and vapers these days are fairly comfortable with the idea that they’re addicts.

However, the problem is they believe that to be addicted to something you have to enjoy it, or get pleasure from it or gain some benefit from it.

By the time you finish this book, you’ll have a clear understanding of how addiction really works. And trust me, it has nothing to do with ‘liking’ the drug, ‘enjoying’ the drug or getting ‘pleasure’ or ‘benefits’ from the drug.

If you began this book unaware that you’re addicted, or reluctant to accept that you are, don’t worry. Just carry on reading, assess the evidence and allow yourself to come to a conclusion as you work your way through the book. Nothing bad is going to happen and you don’t have to smoke your final cigarette or JUUL or other nicotine product until you’re happy to do so.

Being an addict can be hard for some nicotine addicts to accept. Smoking is a much more socially acceptable drug than heroin and most smokers prefer to think of it as ‘just a habit’ they fell into and can’t seem to kick, rather than seeing themselves as drug addicts.

But the acceptance that you’re addicted to nicotine is key to your escape. Seeing yourself as anything but a drug addict will lead to misconceptions about why you smoke and what smoking does for you, and it’s these misconceptions that keep smokers in the trap.

Only by recognizing that you are an addict can you begin the process of becoming a non-addict again.

An addictive drug like nicotine works in a fiendishly clever way. Within seven seconds of lighting a cigarette, the addict receives a fresh dose of nicotine to the brain and the slightly edgy feeling of withdrawal from the previous cigarette subsides. This creates the impression of satisfaction, relaxation and confidence that smokers naturally attribute to the cigarette.

Think about that for a moment. Every single time you’ve lit a cigarette, every single day of your life as a smoker, you’ve felt slightly better than the moment before. But all that happened, on every occasion, is that the cigarette momentarily got rid of the unpleasant feeling caused by the previous one. This is the very slight, very mild feeling of nicotine withdrawal – so slight that you may have been unaware of it for most of your smoking life.

In fact, if you were to pay attention to the cigarette and the way you feel as you prepare to light it (very few, if any, smokers do this), you would notice that the edgy feeling stops as soon as you take the cigarette from the pack and bring it to your lips. It doesn’t take seven seconds.

You don’t even need to light it. You don’t need the drug to relieve the withdrawal symptoms; you just need to know that you’re about to get it. This goes to show that addiction is a condition not simply of the body but mainly of the mind.

It’s your mind we are working on, making sure you’re fully prepared to accept the changes that will lead you to freedom from smoking, freedom from addiction

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When we first start smoking we’re not aware of this process of withdrawal and relief because the pangs are so slight we don’t notice them. As smoking becomes a regular part of our life, we assume it’s because we enjoy it or we’ve just got into the ‘habit’. It doesn’t cross our minds that we’ve become addicted. But when you understand how addiction works, it’s easy to accept that you are addicted to nicotine, and that addiction is not driven by genuine pleasure or genuine relief – it’s a simple confidence trick.

Imagine someone you think of as a friend, stealing £100 from your bank account without your knowledge. After doing so, imagine they give you £10 to spend on whatever you want. It would appear to be a lovely thing for them to do. They’d appear to be generous and kind. But are they really?

Is the £10 real? Of course it is. How can you view someone giving you £10 as being anything other than kind and generous? It’s only when you have all the information, only when you find out that the £10 was already yours and, more than that, the thief has kept another £90 of yours in their back pocket, that you see the ‘gift’ of £10, and the so-called friend, as they really are. A sham. A con. A rip-off!

If you’re thinking, ‘Well, at least they gave £10 of the £100 back to me – they could have taken it all’, remember, this thief has been stealing from you like this for years. He or she doesn’t deserve one ounce of gratitude.

THE LITTLE MONSTER

The first cigarette introduces nicotine into your system for the first time. You stub it out and for the first time you experience the physical withdrawal from nicotine. It’s as if the first cigarette created a little nicotine monster inside your body, like a tapeworm that feeds on nicotine

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As the nicotine leaves your body, the little nicotine monster expresses its dissatisfaction. It’s a mild, empty, insecure feeling, so slight it’s almost imperceptible. When you light your next cigarette, the mild, empty, slightly insecure feeling disappears (you’ve effectively fed the Little Monster) and you feel slightly better than a moment before. A lifetime’s chain has started. Whatever you may think are your reasons for continuing to smoke, there is only one reason: to feed the Little Monster.

You know what it’s like when a neighbour’s burglar alarm has been ringing all day? You find a way to blot it out so you can get on with other things, but then suddenly the alarm stops and you experience a wonderful sense of relief. The peace feels heavenly, but all you’re enjoying is the end of the aggravation. It’s the same when a smoker lights a cigarette and feeds the Little Monster. All you’re trying to do is get rid of the aggravation of nicotine withdrawal. It’s an empty, insecure feeling that is hard to pinpoint but nevertheless leaves you feeling slightly out of sorts.

Non-smokers don’t suffer with that feeling and neither did you before you started smoking. So why do you smoke?

To feel like a non-smoker

Many smokers will argue until they’re blue in the face that smoking gives them pleasure. But the only pleasure you can hope to get from smoking is the feeling of removing the aggravation caused by the Little Monster and restoring the state of calm and confidence that you had before you became addicted. In fact, you can never return to the state of calm and confidence of a non-smoker by smoking.

The only way to feel like a non-smoker is by not smokin

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The great news is that the Little Monster is actually very weak – it’s easy to kill. What the Little Monster does, though, is act as a trigger for the Big Monster, a mental process that develops as a result of you appearing to feel better after lighting each cigarette. The effect of this process, day in, day out, every single day of your smoking life, confuses your brain into thinking that the cigarette provides some kind of pleasure or crutch. It’s like being fooled by the conman who steals £100 from your bank account without your knowledge and then gifts you £10.

Before you started smoking, your body was complete. Then you forced nicotine into your body and as the drug started to leave, your body suffered the slightly restless feeling of withdrawal. It wasn’t a physical pain; in fact, it was so slight you probably didn’t consciously register it. Your reaction to it, though, was to light another cigarette.

Time passes by and your conscious mind doesn’t understand the feelings or your response to them. All you know is that you want another cigarette, and when you have one the slightly empty feeling goes. Again, you don’t really register the feeling going, you just feel a little better, a little more confident and complete than a moment ago. In fact, the way you felt was how you felt your whole life before you first smoked. It was nothing more than relieving the aggravation caused by the first cigarette.

And so it goes on, each cigarette creating the desire for the next. It’s a vicious circle that ties you up for life – unless you break it.

Exercise: PAY ATTENTION

Smokers say they enjoy smoking. They insist that they like the taste, the smell, the feeling of the cigarette in their hand. In truth, the vast majority of cigarettes are smoked without you being aware of the taste, smell, feel or any other aspect of what you’re doing

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When you smoke your next cigarette or e-cigarette, pay attention to every part of the process. Concentrate on the pack or device – how does it look? What do the cigarettes look like in there? What does the cigarette look and feel like as you take it out of the pack? And how do you feel? Hold the cigarette under your nose and take notice of how you feel as you sniff the tobacco. How is your heartbeat?

Continue applying this level of attention as you go through your usual routine, placing the cigarette between your lips, lighting it, inhaling that first drag of smoke, blowing the smoke away from your face and eyes. As the cigarette burns down, how does it smell? How does it taste? What is the sensation on your tongue? In your throat? In your nose? In your lungs? How does the cigarette look between your fingers? As you reach the end and crush it out, how does it look in the ashtray? What taste has it left in your mouth? And how do you feel inside?

I’m not expecting this exercise to put you off smoking. That is not the point. What is important is that you have a clear perception of the truth when it comes to your personal experience of smoking. At the moment, your perception of smoking is shrouded in a fog of brainwashing. Like all smokers, you assume there must be something wonderful about the cigarette that keeps you coming back for more.

Make no mistake, the only reason you come back for more is to feed the Little Monster.

Please be vigilant here; if you are a smoker, please smoke a cigarette as I described above, completing the exercise before you move on. Likewise, if you vape or use dip, or any nicotine product or device, adapt the exercise accordingly. Only then are you ready to move on. Don’t feel under pressure to draw any conclusions from the exercise – however you feel is perfectly fine. Incidentally, if you haven’t smoked for a few days, please don’t feel obliged to do so. There’ll be guidance for you later on

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A LOGICAL CONCLUSION

If smoking is just an addiction, then it follows that you don’t do it for pleasure or a crutch, to help you concentrate or feel more confident. Does a heroin addict inject the drug because it helps him concentrate? Of course not. It’s easy to see that a heroin addict continues to take the drug because the addiction makes him feel terrible when he has to go without. There is nothing more complex or sophisticated about it than that. Be careful not to fall for Hollywood’s glamorized view of drugs as the providers of an amazing high. For the most part, someone taking heroin for the first time doesn’t feel fabulous or high or amazing; in fact, it’s quite the reverse.

So it should be just as easy to see smoking in the same light. You smoke to get nicotine. You want nicotine only because you’re addicted to it – the Little Monster makes you feel restless and empty without it.

And if addiction to nicotine is the only reason smokers smoke, or vapers vape or dippers dip, then it doesn’t make any difference who the smoker is. There is no genetic difference between smokers and non-smokers and there is no difference between different types of smoker. Smoking is simply a trap into which anybody can fall if they light an experimental cigarette. Because once you’ve put nicotine into your body, all it takes is the second cigarette to feed the Little Monster and you begin a lifetime’s journey into the nicotine pit.

THIS IS GREAT NEWS

If the only reason you smoke is because you’re addicted to nicotine, all you need to do to quit is remove the addiction. You don’t have to ‘give up’ anything; there is no sacrifice, no deprivation. You don’t need to draw on all your reserves of willpower to resist

the temptation to smoke, because there is no temptation.

Nor is there anything in your personality to hold you back. All there is is a gradual descent into addiction, which, you’ll be delighted to know, is easy to reverse.

Break the chain and you will be free

The real trick, and the one essential to making it easy to not just stop, but to stay stopped – and not just to be a non-smoker, but to be a happy non-smoker – is to truly understand why you thought you got tremendous pleasure, enjoyment and support from taking this drug.

We’ve dealt with the principle and process of the addiction, the Little Monster; later we’ll deal with the brainwashing, the Big Monster. It’s the Big Monster that has caused the torture and hell, along with the feelings of deprivation in your previous attempts to quit.

BRAINWASHING

Despite the success of Easyway, smoking remains the world’s number one killer. Working against us is a hugely powerful machine that continues to brainwash people into believing that they choose to smoke because it gives them some sort of pleasure or crutch.

I don’t just mean the tobacco industry. Television and films continue to play an influential role in portraying smoking as something cool, suave and characterful. Every celebrity seen with a cigarette in their mouth is responsible for hundreds if not thousands of impressionable fans taking up smoking.

Against this weight of propaganda, how is any smoker expected to see the simple truth

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You do not choose to smoke

Think about it – if you had any choice over whether you smoke or not, you wouldn’t be reading this book. You smoke because you are caught in a trap and because if you’ve tried to quit in the past, you’ve failed to do so. This time it’s going to be different.

Smokers who cannot see and understand this simple truth find it hard to quit. Why? Because they go about it in the wrong way. Follow the right method and quitting is easy. The starting point is understanding why you smoke.