Chapter 6

BELIEF NOT WILLPOWER

IN THIS CHAPTER

• The Wrong Method • Tightening The Rope • How Weak Willed Are You? • Beware Other Quitters • Crossing The Line The Easy Way

Most people believe that smokers who fail to quit lack the willpower to make the necessary sacrifice. When you quit with Easyway, there is no sacrifice, so you don’t need willpower. In fact, the willpower method is more likely to make your addiction worse.

THE WRONG METHOD

So the solution to ending the nicotine craving is NOT to smoke or vape. That way you break the cycle of addiction, kill the Little Monster and get free. Wait a minute! Isn’t that what all smokers do when they try to quit? Why doesn’t it work for them? If it’s so easy to quit, why do so many people find it incredibly hard?

Simple: they’re using the wrong method

It’s not their fault. A fundamental part of the brainwashing is the myth that it’s hard to quit. Just about every so-called expert says so, thus adding to every smoker’s fear of trying to quit: ‘I’m going to have to go through some terrible trauma.’

This brainwashing is so powerful that smokers actually feel suspicious when they’re told that Easyway can help them quit easily and without willpower. It goes against everything they’ve

ever been told about smoking and sounds too good to be true. Believe me, that is not the case and I will explain why. With Easyway, there is no painful withdrawal period, no traumatic wrestling match with the continuing desire to smoke. With Easyway, you remove the desire completely.

The simplest of tasks becomes difficult if you go about it the wrong way. Opening a door, for example. You know how to open a door – you push on the handle and it swings open with the minimum of effort. But have you ever come across a door with no handle and pushed on the wrong side, where the hinges are? You’re met with firm resistance. The door might budge a tiny bit, but it won’t swing open. It requires a huge amount of effort and determination. Push on the correct side and the door opens without you even having to think about it.

Most smokers find it difficult to stop because they use the willpower method. They choose the difficult method because they’ve been brainwashed into believing that it is the only way to quit. The method assumes that while the nicotine is leaving your body, you need to be strong-willed to get through two ordeals:

• The painful withdrawal period

• The sacrifice of your pleasure or crutch

You should now be able to see the flaws in this theory. First, there is no physical pain with nicotine withdrawal. Smokers go through it every moment they’re not smoking, every day of their smoking lives. You barely notice it.

The second flaw in the willpower theory is the assumption that quitting involves a sacrifice. This is true only if you regard the cigarette as your friend. But when you can see through the illusion that smoking gives you pleasure or a crutch and you know it does

absolutely nothing for you, there is no sense of sacrifice. Whenever the thought of smoking enters your mind, you don’t mope because you can’t smoke; you rejoice because you no longer have to. You’re not ‘giving up’ anything when you quit – you’re getting rid of something that’s plagued your life.

TIGHTENING THE ROPE

People who try to quit with the willpower method constantly endure the tug-of-war of fear. You kill the Little Monster but leave the Big Monster alive. On one side, your rational brain knows you should stop smoking because it’s making you ill, costing you a fortune, controlling your life and making you miserable. On the other side, your addicted brain makes you panic at the thought of being deprived of your pleasure or crutch. With the willpower method, you focus on all the reasons for stopping and hope you can last long enough without smoking for the desire to eventually go.

Some people do manage to stop smoking through sheer force of will, but they don’t become happy non-smokers. They never actually break free of their addiction, so they are always fighting the temptation to fall back into the pit.

In most cases, the willpower method fails and you end up feeling more helpless and miserable than before.

With the willpower method, the struggle never ends. It becomes an ordeal, like running a marathon – except there is no finish line. You’re forever waiting for something NOT to happen, so you never feel the elation of knowing you’re free. With Easyway, you know you’re a happy non-smoker the moment you kill the Big Monster and smoke your final cigarette.

As long as you continue to believe that you’re giving something up, you will always be running in pain. The stronger your will,

the longer you will withstand the agony. The longer you go on suffering a sense of deprivation, the more powerful your craving for a cigarette becomes.

The feeling of deprivation makes you miserable, which in turn increases your desire for a cigarette – the crutch you always used to turn to in a crisis. You have to succumb to this temptation only once, and all that hard work is wasted. Worse still, once you’ve failed with the willpower method, it’s even harder to try again.

Failing to quit with the willpower method leaves you more addicted than before because it reinforces the belief that it is impossible to cure your problem. People will tell you they felt an enormous sense of relief when they gave in and had that first cigarette, but this relief is nothing more than a temporary end to the self-inflicted pain.

Nobody thinks, ‘Great! I’m smoking again!’ It is not a pleasure. In fact, it is accompanied by strong feelings of failure and foreboding, guilt and disappointment. Any hope you had that you might be free of the tyranny of smoking is snuffed out in that moment.

If you believe you lack the willpower to quit smoking, then you haven’t yet understood the nature of the trap you’re in. The more you will yourself to quit, the more you build up the belief that you’re depriving yourself of something precious, so the more you crave the very thing you’re trying to give up.

This is how the rope tightens, keeping you firmly imprisoned. The only way to break the bonds is to understand the nature of the nicotine trap, let go of the struggle and unravel the brainwashing.

In other words:

You don’t need willpower; you just need to kill the Big Monste

r

HOW WEAK-WILLED ARE YOU?

If you have tried and failed to quit in the past, did you put it down to a lack of willpower? Because the willpower method is so widely promoted, smokers don’t question the validity behind it. You just assume that your failure to quit must be a flaw in yourself rather than the method. Believe me:

Telling someone to quit with the willpower method is like telling them to open a door by pushing on the hinges

Ask yourself whether you’re weak-willed in other ways. Perhaps you drink or eat too much and you regard this as further evidence of a weak will. There is a connection between all addictions, but it’s not that they are signs of a lack of willpower. On the contrary, they are more likely evidence of a strong will. What they all share is that they are traps created by misleading information and untruths. And one of the most misleading untruths is that quitting requires willpower.

In fact, most smokers are stubbornly strong-willed. It takes a strong-willed person to persist in doing something that goes against all their instincts. You know that smoking is dragging you further and further into the pit, making you increasingly stressed and unhappy, and threatening to destroy your life, and yet you continue to do it.

The biggest fear for any drug addict is running out of their supply of the drug. Smokers go to incredible lengths to make sure they have a supply of cigarettes at all times. This requires tremendous organization, forethought and determination. Drug addicts are also determined liars. They will go way beyond the point of reason to deny their addiction to others and to themselves.

It also takes a strong will to persist in following a method that patently doesn’t work. If I saw you trying to open a door by

pushing on the hinges and I told you that you’d find it easier if you pushed on the handle, but you ignored me and insisted on pushing on the hinges, I’d call you wilful, not weak-willed.

Think of all the people you know who are smokers. There are enough smokers in positions of power to illustrate that smoking is not exclusive to the weak-willed. World leaders, captains of industry, entertainers, doctors… we have more people from the medical profession coming to Easyway for help than from any other walk of life.

All of them reached their position in life through determination and hard work. In other words, they have immense willpower. So why would their willpower fail them when they try to stop doing something that’s destroying their health?

In fact, it tends to be the most strong-willed people who find it hardest to quit by using the willpower method. Why? Because when the door fails to open, they won’t give up and try to find an easier method; they’ll force themselves to keep pushing on the hinges until they can push no more.

Exercise: TIME FOR YOUR CIGARETTE OR E-CIGARETTE

OK, it’s time for your next cigarette. Not for any good reason – only that I’ve told you to keep smoking as you read the book, so I think you should. So, are you going to do it or not?

A lot of people who come to Easyway hesitate at this instruction to keep smoking. Smokers don’t like being told what to do and just as they don’t like being told when they can’t smoke, they don’t like being told when they can either.

Smokers like to tell themselves that they’re in control of their smoking and one way of doing this is to choose when you smoke

.

It is only the illusion of control, but smokers cling to it stubbornly. Anyway, carry on smoking or vaping as normal for the time being.

BEWARE OTHER QUITTERS

People who try to quit by the willpower method can have a harmful effect on your own desire to quit. They either brag about the sacrifices they’re making or they whine about them. Either way, they reinforce the false belief that quitting demands a sacrifice.

The braggers are easy to spot. They’re the ones who become anti-smoking zealots the moment they stub out what they hope will be their final cigarette. Up go the No Smoking signs in their homes and cars. They’ll invite you around just so they can forbid you to smoke. And they gloat.

They will take great delight in reminding you that by smoking you are ruining your health and burning a fortune and they will tell you how they find it incomprehensible that an intelligent person like you still finds reasons to put those filthy things in your mouth and set light to them. Of course, they’ve conveniently forgotten that they spent years doing the very same thing.

Ex-smokers who have quit through willpower are far more vitriolic in their attacks on smoking than people who have never smoked. Why are they so angry? Because beneath all the bragging and bluster they have not overcome their addiction. They still believe they’ve made a sacrifice and they resent anyone who continues to feed their addiction.

Beware of the braggers; they can have a very negative effect on smokers who are thinking of quitting. Their bullying can drive you into the arms of your little crutch and make you lose sight of the real enemy. But worse than that, they reinforce the belief that ‘Once a smoker, always a smoker.’ It’s obvious that they still

crave cigarettes, so they create the impression that you can stop smoking but you can’t escape.

This impression is confirmed by the whiners. Whiners will be the first to congratulate you when you smoke your last cigarette and throw the rest in the fire at midnight on New Year’s Eve. They will shake your hand, wish you success, fuel your elation by telling you how much healthier and wealthier you’ll be, that you’ve made a really important decision and will never regret it… and then bring you crashing down by telling you how they quit years ago but still miss it terribly on occasions like this.

It can be enough to send you scrambling to rescue your cigarettes from the fire and sneaking outside to light up while everyone else celebrates.

The last thing you want to hear when you’re trying to quit is that you’ll still be craving cigarettes years from now. The good news is you won’t. Braggers and whiners continue to crave cigarettes only because they haven’t killed the Big Monster. They have followed the wrong method and so they have nothing to offer you from their experience.

Fifth instruction: ignore any advice that goes against Easyway

In particular, ignore the advice of anyone who claims to have quit by the willpower method. The fact is there is no sacrifice. The cigarette is NOT your friend, so you are not ‘giving up’ anything. People who quit with the willpower method are always waiting for the moment when the struggle ends and they become a happy non-smoker. But because the Big Monster is still alive, there is no finish line, no point in time when they stop wishing they could smoke

.

CROSSING THE LINE THE EASY WAY

With Easyway, there is nothing to wait for. You become a happy non-smoker the moment you unravel all the illusions that have led you into the nicotine trap. You free yourself from fear, and stop smoking with a feeling of excitement and elation. The elation of crossing the finish line occurs as soon as you remove the fear and illusions and stop smoking. That’s when you kill the Big Monster and walk free from the addiction that has kept you enslaved. You need to understand that you will NOT get to that line by forcing yourself to suffer.

The psychology of the addict is such that a hard-line approach will not work. This actually encourages you to stay hooked because:

It reinforces the myth that quitting is hard and therefore adds to your fear.

It creates a feeling of deprivation, which you will seek to alleviate in your usual way – and you will fall back into the trap.

You need willpower only if you have a conflict of will. We are going to resolve that conflict by removing one side of the tug-of-war of fear. Using willpower for the rest of your life to try not to smoke is unlikely to prove successful; but by removing the need and desire to smoke you will succeed.