Chapter 8

CONQUERING CONCENTRATION

IN THIS CHAPTER

• A Brainwashed Belief • No Option, No Distraction • It’s Not A Weighty Matter • The Truth Initiative • TV Is So Yesterday! • Rebel Without A Cause • So What About The Weight Issue? • Depression And Self-harm • How To Concentrate • Boring Boring Smoking • Freedom From Brainwashing • Achieving Certainty

The image of Sherlock Holmes puffing away on his pipe as he tries to crack his latest case has become a symbol for another of the great myths: that smoking helps you concentrate. It’s essential that you remove this belief from your mind before you quit. It’s embarrassing in our live seminars when a smoker cites Sherlock as an example of an intellectual high achiever who smoked. It never occurs to them, until we gently point it out, that of course Holmes is an entirely fictional character.

A BRAINWASHED BELIEF

Up until now you have been encouraged not to change your normal smoking pattern because we don’t want you to suffer any distractions while you’re reading the book. You may have interpreted this to mean that continuing to smoke will help you concentrate. Believe me, it means nothing of the sort

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SMOKING DESTROYS CONCENTRATION

Smokers are brainwashed into believing that smoking aids concentration and the back-to-front nature of the trap appears to confirm the fact. Until you remove this belief from your mind, you will find it hard to concentrate if you’re craving a cigarette. So have a cigarette when you feel the craving and continue to read the book without distractions.

We all have times, whether in our work or our home life, when we need to focus on a problem and we don’t relish the thought. For smokers, this is a common trigger for reaching for a cigarette. You believe that smoking can do two things: relieve the anxiety of confronting the problem and help you to rally your thoughts into finding a solution. As soon as this belief is planted in your mind, it becomes impossible to concentrate. No matter how hard you try to concentrate on the problem, the thought that a cigarette will make the situation better becomes an increasing distraction.

Eventually you cave in and light up a cigarette. The anxiety disappears and you find the answer you’ve been looking for. Naturally you conclude that the cigarette has made all the difference. You needed the cigarette to be able to concentrate. So far, so predictable:

You believed a cigarette would help you concentrate.

You smoked a cigarette.

You found the concentration you needed…

What’s the problem?

The problem is that it’s an illusion – one that’s keeping you in the nicotine trap, choking you to death and burning your money

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So what really happened?

You believed a cigarette would help you concentrate.

The problem is that you became obsessed with the idea so much that you were unable to concentrate until you smoked.

The cigarette appeared to solve the problem, but actually it caused it.

It’s like someone stealing the tiles off your roof and then coming around and offering to sell them back to you the very next day.

Non-smokers don’t suffer the distraction of craving cigarettes, a craving that is only partially relieved by the cigarette. Nor do they starve their brain of oxygen, as you do every time you smoke, so their ability to think clearly and creatively is not hampered.

Not only does smoking cause an irritating distraction when you least want one (when you’re not able to smoke), but when you’re able to smoke you’re not even aware you’re doing it, let alone that you’re distracted by it. It also destroys your ability to concentrate.

NO OPTION, NO DISTRACTION

When we’re faced with a problem we don’t like, we seek comfort in distractions because they delay the dreaded moment when we have to get to grips with the problem. Some people make a cup of coffee, some make themselves something to eat, some check their emails or look at their phone. We convince ourselves that there’s value in doing these things because that gives us the excuse to put off the inevitable.

But none of these things helps to solve the problem. In fact, they only make it worse. Leave a problem unsolved and it will usually get bigger. It certainly won’t go away. But as long as we have the belief that any of these things will help, we won’t be able

to tackle the problem properly until we do them. Smoking is just another self-imposed distraction. It’s not the physical craving for a cigarette that prevents us from being able to concentrate, because that craving is almost indiscernible. It’s the psychological obsession caused by the Big Monster.

You can prove your own ability to concentrate without cigarettes by putting yourself in a situation where smoking is not an option. A good example is an exam room. Every year countless students sit their finals. A proportion of them are smokers, who are used to studying with a cigarette on the go.

When it dawns on them that they are going to have to sit through hours in an exam room without smoking, panic sets in. They try sitting a practice paper without smoking and find their hands shaking so much they can’t write!

Yet when it comes to the exam proper, they sit through it without the thought of smoking ever entering their heads. It’s clear that they are perfectly capable of concentrating for several hours without their little crutch. So what makes all the difference? Quite simply the fact that smoking was never an option in the exam room, so it never became a distraction.

When you know you can’t have something, it’s easy to put it out of your mind. Millions of smokers have discovered this since smoking was banned on planes and trains. What would once have been a dreaded situation is no problem at all because they don’t spend the journey moping for something they can’t have. They can put the thought out of their mind until they reach their destination.

Actually, let me digress for a few moments here, because I’d like to recap on how weak nicotine addiction is and there’s a great example involving a smoker on a flight which illustrates this perfectly.

Consider the case a heavy smoker on a long-haul flight who cannot smoke

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They resign themselves to this fact. Most smokers – even the heaviest in these circumstances – don’t even bother using nicotine patches or gum.

For most of the flight, they feel calm. Yet, 10 hours into an 11-hour flight, something begins to happen. The flight is coming to an end and the smoker begins to anticipate getting off the plane and being able to light up a cigarette.

As the smoker checks his watch carefully and notes there is now only the small matter of 20 minutes until the end of the flight, he smiles. Now imagine that smoker when the flight’s captain announces that he is very sorry, but due to severe weather conditions at their destination, the flight has been diverted to a different airport and the flight will now last a further 60 minutes.

Wow! All of a sudden, the calm disappears, along with the smile from the smoker’s face, as they lurch into a condition that they would immediately describe as nicotine withdrawal: anger, tension, anxiety, upset and stress.

Nicotine withdrawal didn’t just happen in the six seconds that it took the pilot to announce the delayed landing. It had been occurring continuously since the smoker stubbed out his cigarette before he boarded the flight more than 10 hours and 40 minutes ago.

But nicotine withdrawal did not cause the sudden onset of unpleasant symptoms. Something in the smoker’s mind changed as a result of the pilot’s announcement: it was the Big Monster.

John’s Nicotine Withdrawal Story

John Dicey, former chain-smoker cured by Allen Carr, Global CEO & Senior Therapist, Allen Carr’s Easyway

I remember very clearly as a smoker, when I used to go to parties, particularly the wilder ones of my youth, I’d take at least three

packs of cigarettes with me. I’d plan it all well in advance.

Now, I was a chain-smoker, but not even I would need 60 cigarettes for a few hours at a party. So why did I take so many?

Well, at parties you have these terrible people who smoke only other people’s cigarettes. Maybe you’re one of them… if so, I mean no offence, but for a chain-smoker such people are to be feared more than any drunken bore.

That’s because they have a tendency to smoke ‘real’ smokers’ cigarettes, never buying their own, not even when they know they will be smoking at a party. It’s not the cost of the cigarettes that upsets chain-smokers; it’s the fact that these so-called social smokers deplete their evening’s supply of cigarettes… that’s why the chain-smoker will always think ahead and take extra.

Probably even worse are the ‘light smokers’, the kind that don’t mind at all if they run through their personal supply of cigarettes at the party, knowing they’ll almost certainly be able to smoke someone else’s. They don’t care about exhausting that person’s supplies.

And have you noticed that even casual or light smokers tend to become chain-smokers at parties? Eventually, these part-time smokers leave the poor ‘real smoker’ short of cigarettes at the end of the evening when the stores are closed. It’s a chain-smoker’s nightmare. It was for this very reason that I always carried several packs secreted in my jacket pockets.

But I recall one party when I suffered a terrible blow. Having left my extra packs of cigarettes in my jacket, which had been stolen during the party, I arrived home and absent-mindedly reached into my pocket for my only remaining pack.

It was like being struck by lightning when I noticed the first tell-tale sign: the pack was TOO light – not heavy enough to

contain many cigarettes. There was a soft rattle as I shook the pack. My heart seemed to stop; my pulse was racing. Fear! Anxiety! Stress! Panic! It was the dire feeling that I once used to mistake for the physical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal.

I could hardly bear to open the pack. I knew it wasn’t going to be good news. I looked inside. There were just TWO cigarettes.

My feelings of panic got worse.

If you’re a heavy smoker, you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about. It’s the feeling we think of as the physical need for nicotine. Yet it appeared in a matter of seconds when I felt the lightness of the cigarette pack.

Where had it been a few seconds before?

What’s more, I was so panicked I immediately lit one of the cigarettes. NOW I ONLY HAD ONE CIGARETTE left. And the physical feeling was actually getting worse.

Consider the fact that my body was flooded with nicotine; it was rushing into my body faster than heroin does when injected into a vein – yet somehow, I was experiencing a feeling I identified at the time as physical withdrawal from nicotine.

There was no withdrawal, though. Nicotine was on its way INTO my body. I was smoking! Whatever was happening couldn’t possibly have been nicotine withdrawal.

I was experiencing real physical feelings, but they were purely the result of a mental process. A thought process created those feelings – not withdrawal from the drug. Something in my mind changed as a result of the cigarette shortage.

Now, if you follow what I have said, I hope that this reminds you that nicotine withdrawal doesn’t cause the really unpleasant symptoms. They originate in the mind, courtesy of the Big Monster, and Easyway will kill them

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IT’S NOT A WEIGHTY MATTER

One of the most common misconceptions about smoking is that it plays a part in helping to control weight.

There are several factors involved in this illusion: the belief that smoking acts as an appetite suppressant, enabling smokers to skip meals and snacks (substituting food for cigarettes); the idea that smoking burns calories by increasing the smoker’s metabolic rate; and the relentless influence of the tobacco industry, which continues the work it started years ago, portraying glamorous svelte stars of the silver screen with cigarettes permanently attached to their fingers and lips – Big Tobacco has infiltrated the fashion and music industries and continues to manipulate the film industry.

Young bands, solo performers and sports stars continue to have their images used in adverts and sponsorship tours across the globe. And in countries where advertising is banned, they influence the inclusion of smoking in photo shoots, and paparazzi shots in newspapers. The fashion industry is the most blatant in its cosy arrangements with the tobacco giants, with cigarettes frequently appearing on the fashion show runways and in glossy shoots for magazines.

Hollywood is always eager to assist too. There are many examples of leading characters being portrayed as smokers – even, bizarrely, in films set hundreds of years into the future. It’s always the same message: smoking is cool, smoking is tough and, even more important, smoking will survive.

No wonder by the time a potential smoker reaches an age whereby they might be tempted to smoke, they’re already convinced that it’s a cool, sophisticated, stylish, sexy thing to do, with the added benefit that it’s also some kind of magical means of controlling weight

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You’re not an idiot; you don’t need me to tell you that those sexy, glamorous, stylish and sophisticated stars weren’t made to look that way by cigarettes. It was the other way around: the stars made cigarettes appear sexy, glamorous, stylish and sophisticated. Cigarettes just aren’t sexy!

THE TRUTH INITIATIVE

Studies and reports by The Truth Initiative state that 86 per cent of the 2018 Oscar nominees in major categories featured tobacco imagery on screen.

Kid-rated films on the Oscar list feature twice as much smoking as in 2017 and they’ve already delivered 2.5 times more tobacco impressions to theater audiences. Of the 2019 Oscar-nominated films that were rated PG-13, the ones that had the most smoking included Bohemian Rhapsody (152 tobacco incidents) and Green Book (381 tobacco incidents).

Tobacco use in streaming series such as Stranger Things , House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black is pervasive, rising and more prominent than it is in traditional broadcast content.

Seventy-nine per cent of the shows most popular with young people, aged 15–24 years, depict smoking prominently, the research finds. The critically acclaimed Stranger Things , nominated for two Golden Globe Awards in 2018, including best television drama series, has emerged as the worst offender. The Netflix hit, which won five Creative Arts Emmy Awards in 2017 and drew an estimated 15.8 million viewers within three days of its second-season launch, features more than 180 tobacco incidents in the 2016 season. It is followed by Orange is the New Black (45 incidents) and House of Cards (41 incidents). Other Netflix shows analyzed in the research include Making a Murderer , Fuller House , Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Daredevil

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Netflix say they will reduce smoking in their films.

Even those incidences that you may feel are low, such as in House of Cards , don’t present the full picture. The way in which cigarettes, smoking and vaping have been portrayed as being hugely desirable, highly sexualized and an essential, albeit rare ‘treat’ does powerful work for Big Nicotine in the minds of our young people.

I stopped for ten years, but it just had the effect of making me really miserable. This time, it was so easy due to Allen Carr’s Easyway. The great thing is he insists that you keep smoking right until the end.

James Spader

TV IS SO YESTERDAY!

It’s not just traditional TV. As mentioned, it’s streaming services such as Netflix and mainstream films which are leading the onslaught against our youngsters – and social media is awash with every kind of e-cigarette, vaping, JUULing and smoking propaganda imaginable, some of which you’d struggle to even imagine! Young, beautiful people earn big money by promoting any number of brands of nicotine addiction – without restriction and without the viewers/followers even knowing that the influential social media starlet has been paid to big up the products.

Tobacco use is widespread in video games, including those rated appropriate for teenagers, but tobacco warnings are not. Many of the top games include the glamorization of smoking or vaping.

Does the advertising, product placement and targeting of youngsters really work

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JUUL: In December 2018, US Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams declared e-cigarette use among kids an ‘epidemic’ in the US. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar stated: ‘In the data sets we use, we have never seen use of any substance by America’s young people rise as rapidly as e-cigarette use is rising.’

These are simply unprecedented increases.

In 2019 JUUL was estimated to be worth a staggering $38 billion. That alone is extraordinary, especially when you consider that the company didn’t exist before 2017.

They’re very good at sales and marketing, have deliberately targeted youngsters, and their growth, of course, is greatly assisted by the fact that their product is highly addictive. A lifetime of addiction awaits those who do not know how to get free and the gateway effect (vaping leading to smoking) is firmly becoming established.

Aside from that, it will be many years before the true harm that vaping causes is properly known. It’s a nicotine time bomb.

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

Then there’s the myth of the smoking rebel. There are a million ways of rebelling, none of which involve being a victim of an awful addiction. You choose to rebel; you don’t choose whether you smoke or not.

There is truly nothing sadder than a smoker who claims they’re doing it for this reason – deep down inside, not even they believe it. They know that, far from smoking being rebellious, they’re smoking because they’re enslaved.

SO WHAT ABOUT THE WEIGHT ISSUE?

First, you know you see plenty of overweight smokers. If smoking was that efficient, surely that wouldn’t be the case. More

importantly, if that were the case, the more someone smoked, the skinnier they’d be, but chain-smokers tend to be the most overweight of all.

Smoking does indeed increase your metabolic rate, the rate at which your body burns calories. Glossy fitness magazines go on endlessly about this. What they don’t tell their readers is that the impact of smoking on your metabolic rate is insignificant in terms of weight control. Think how hard and long you have to pedal on an exercise bike at the gym to burn off a few hundred calories. There simply isn’t this fat-burning, calorie-burning process going on in your body as a result of your smoking.

Another favourite myth of these magazines is that smoking acts as an appetite suppressant. It seems to make sense to us as smokers. We get hungry, have a cigarette, and the hunger goes. In our mind, it’s the cigarette that’s magically taken away our hunger. What we don’t realize is that when a non-smoker ignores hunger for a couple of minutes, their hunger also disappears. Non-smokers don’t give the credit for this to cigarettes; but for smokers, it confirms the myth that smoking suppresses appetite. They ignore the fact that when they experience more severe hunger, a cigarette won’t do the trick. And it never did.

Pick up your pack of cigarettes. Examine the pack carefully. Can you find the text that says, ‘Used as part of a calorie-controlled diet these cigarettes will help you control weight’? Of course, nothing of the sort is written on the pack. Why not? Because it’s not true. If it was, the tobacco companies would be allowed to write it on the pack, and no one could stop them.

So how have we become so convinced that smoking helps with weight control? It’s our, and others’, failed attempts to quit smoking using willpower that causes the problem. If it hasn’t happened to you, it will have happened to someone you know.

Smokers quit smoking and put on weight. Why? They haven’t killed the Big Monster and therefore constantly feel deprived.

In an attempt to get rid of the desire to smoke and the feeling of deprivation, they tend to eat or drink in place of smoking. It doesn’t really work, but nevertheless they carry on and gain weight as a result. When they finally cave in and smoke again, they stop overeating, and the weight seems to drop off. It confirms the myth, meaning the fear of gaining weight stays with them and puts them off ever trying to quit smoking again.

This doesn’t happen with Easyway. Why not? Because Easyway removes the desire to smoke. If there is no desire to smoke, there is no feeling of deprivation, and there is no need or compulsion to substitute (eat or drink instead of smoke).

You won’t be inclined to substitute when you quit smoking with Easyway, so there is no need for you to gain weight. Far from it, you’ll be so full of energy you’ll be glowing with good health.

I’ll talk more about the link between smoking and hunger later, but for the time being, if you’re concerned about weight gain, rest assured it simply isn’t going to happen this time.

You won’t cure a weight problem by smoking; nor will you cause one when you quit using Easyway.

DEPRESSION AND SELF-HARM

We receive letters and emails every week from smokers all over the world asking for clarification on certain points.

Be reassured that as a result of all this correspondence, you hold in your hands the most up-to-date and comprehensive version of the written Easyway method.

Two issues that arise with a small number of correspondents are those relating to acute/chronic depression and self-harm. These are two quite separate issues; nevertheless, I’m happy to

handle them in the same section. Smokers who live with those conditions are concerned that Easyway may not work for them. Those suffering with severe depression sense that smoking helps them deal with the problem in some way. In fact, it’s quite the reverse. Smoking has been proven to cause and exacerbate depression rather than ease it, so please rest assured, if you live with that extremely challenging condition, Easyway will still work for you. Any belief that smoking helps you deal with your depression is understandable, but it’s no different from any smoker who believes, for example, that smoking helps them cope with stress. You can relate to every part of the method and the way we’re fooled into believing that smoking helps us cope with depression is exactly the same as with stress.

As far as self-harm is concerned, a smoker might say something to the effect of ‘I smoke to punish myself or hurt myself or because I don’t care about myself.’ If you harbour those beliefs, you need to understand that you don’t smoke because it harms you; you smoke because you are addicted to nicotine.

On some level, in other ways, you may be choosing to self-harm, yet you have no choice as to whether you smoke or not. In this way, you’re no different from any smoker on this planet.

Self-harm may well have been the motivation to start smoking, but remember we all started smoking for a variety of phoney and foolish reasons; whether it was to be part of the gang, or the opposite, to go against the flow and rebel, or to try to look tough, cool or sophisticated, or just out of sheer curiosity, or to show the world that we didn’t care. The fact is that the reason we start smoking has no bearing on why we then continue to smoke, nor does it prevent us from stopping.

There are many more effective, efficient and significant ways that you might be able to self-harm if that is what you wish to

do. Smoking is entirely unsatisfactory in that regard, since it takes years, sometimes decades, to get what might be described as the self-harm pay-off. People who want to self-harm do it immediately and painfully. Put simply, self-harm isn’t why you smoke.

It might be one of the reasons you lit your first cigarette, and it might be an excuse you use to justify the fact that you have carried on smoking or to excuse yourself for your failure to quit, but it simply is not why you smoke. To claim otherwise implies that you have some kind of choice or control over smoking. If you had any choice over whether you smoke or not, you wouldn’t be reading this book. Don’t get me wrong, perhaps in the past, when you fell back into smoking, after a period of freedom, you did so with an attitude of ‘So what – I don’t care if I live or die!’ But at that point you didn’t throw yourself off a cliff. In that situation, it’s no more than a phoney justification for returning to smoking. The real reason for the return to smoking was the belief that smoking does something for you.

The great news is that, because self-harm isn’t why you’ve been smoking, you have no need to swap smoking as a means of hurting yourself for any other self-harming activity once you’ve quit. People who live with depression and genuine self-harming issues do so with amazing strength and resilience and deserve our respect and admiration for doing so. The wonderful news is that, no matter what highs or lows might befall you once you’ve quit, I can assure you that the highs will be higher and the lows will be less intense and easier to handle.

HOW TO CONCENTRATE

The first thing you need to do in order to concentrate on anything is remove all distractions. If someone’s making a distracting noise, you can ask them to stop or you can move to somewhere quiet.

But suppose you’re the one causing the distraction – perhaps you have a cold and are constantly sniffing – it’s a distraction, but what can you do about it? Nothing, so you just put it out of your mind and focus on the job in hand.

If there is something you can do to remove a distraction, you need to do it or else it will irritate you and that will become an added distraction. If there is nothing you can do about it, it’s much easier to ignore it and put it out of your mind. When you have a choice, you have to make a decision. Until you make that decision, you will be distracted by the choice. Take away the choice and you take away the pressure to make a decision.

Perhaps you think I’m suggesting that enforced denial is the key to quitting smoking permanently. Absolutely not. But the way that smokers are able to get by quite happily when smoking is not an option does prove it’s easy to put smoking out of your mind, even when you’re still hooked.

The problem for smokers and vapers is that the option to smoke is available most of the time. When you try to quit with the willpower method, you are always aware of that option and always distracted by it. With Easyway, you remove the option to smoke, not by denying yourself cigarettes and not by avoiding being around them but by removing all desire to smoke or vape.

For non-smokers, smoking is never a serious option, and it won’t be for you when you reach the end of this book.

BORING BORING SMOKING

Closely associated with the concentration myth is the myth that smoking helps to alleviate boredom. Again, this myth is created by the back-to-front nature of the trap. When your brain is not stimulated, you have nothing to take your mind off the cries of the Little Monster, and so you tend to scratch the itch

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Smoking becomes your default response to boredom. But it doesn’t remove the boredom.

Boredom is relieved by occupying your mind with something interesting. The exam room scenario proves that smokers can go for long periods without a cigarette and not even notice it when their minds are occupied. But there’s nothing interesting about smoking a cigarette.

When you’re taking a drag of that toxic smoke, are you really thinking, ‘This cigarette is fascinating!’ There are few more tediously repetitive activities than smoking a cigarette, again and again, day in, day out. It may be a fascination at the very beginning, but it quickly becomes so boring that you’re not even aware of most of the cigarettes you smoke.

Take a close look at smokers next time you’re stuck in traffic. They’ll have a cigarette lit, but they’ll be every bit as bored as everyone else in the jam. Look at the smokers huddled outside work taking one of their cigarette breaks. Do they look stimulated and happy? Or do they look bored and miserable?

Just as smoking destroys concentration, it also increases boredom by reducing your opportunities for physical and mental stimulation, depleting your energy, making you sluggish, lethargic and lazy, and destroying your zest for life.

FREEDOM FROM BRAINWASHING

Nicotine addiction is a tyrant. Just when you think you’re putting up a resistance to the desire to smoke, something comes along that triggers the belief that you ‘need’ a cigarette, and all your resistance crumbles. A typical trigger is a problem that demands your attention. Up go your stress levels and, because you’ve been brainwashed into believing that smoking relieves stress, you reach for a cigarette

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So how can you avoid these triggers after you quit? Simple:

You don’t need to avoid the triggers

When you understand how the triggers work, they cease to be triggers. Everybody comes up against tricky problems from time to time. It’s a fact of life. But not everybody reaches for a cigarette every time they’re faced with a problem that demands concentration. Non-smokers don’t see cigarettes as a crutch that will help them cope with the challenge, and consequently they spend much less time agonizing over problems.

The problem smokers have is that, in addition to the real-life problem that’s facing them, they have the uncertainty about whether or not they should smoke. So they have not one difficult decision to make but two. This delays the process of tackling the real problem, dragging it out and making it worse while they try to cope with the distraction of the cigarette.

Remove the doubt from a smoker’s mind and quitting becomes easy

After you’ve smoked your final cigarette, you may find yourself faced with a stressful situation and the thought enters your head to light up a cigarette. It’s important you prepare yourself for this and are not alarmed. The thought is just a hangover from your smoking days. You don’t have to go along with it. All you have to do is remind yourself of what you know to be the truth: smoking benefits you in no way; you know you’ve made the right decision; and no purpose will be served by doubting your decision.

Instead of feeling deprived, rejoice in the fact that you are now a non-smoker and you have no need to fall into the tyrant’s trap

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People who quit with the willpower method spend the rest of their lives trying to avoid the triggers that used to make them reach for a cigarette. They don’t trust themselves to resist the temptation to smoke if any of those triggers occur. When you enjoy the certainty that smoking does nothing for you, there is no need to avoid the triggers because they no longer work as triggers. Indeed, the triggers can serve to reinforce your sense of satisfaction at having quit. Every time something happens that reminds you of when you used to smoke, enjoy the reminder that you are free.

ACHIEVING CERTAINTY

Removing the doubt and achieving the certainty you need is a simple process of looking at the facts and seeing things as they really are. Most smokers don’t do this when they try to quit. They just look at the reasons for not smoking – the health risks, the wasted money, the smell, etc. – and hope these will be enough to overcome their desire to smoke.

Of course, the Big Monster isn’t going to be silenced by such concerns. If it was, no smoker would have any trouble quitting. In order to kill the Big Monster, you need to see smoking for what it really is – a drug addiction that does nothing for you whatsoever – and allow understanding to replace brainwashing.

Sixth instruction: have no doubt about your decision to quit

When you are certain that smoking does nothing for you, you will find that your desire to smoke evaporates. The only reason anyone chooses to smoke is because of the myth that it provides some sort of pleasure or crutch. Unravel the myth and you remove the desire

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You are now part of the way to achieving your dream of becoming free from nicotine, a happy non-smoker. I should add the word ‘again’, because you were free from the tyranny of addiction before you started smoking. You may have forgotten what it felt like. After your final cigarette, you will quickly rediscover the pleasures and benefits of being a happy non-smoker:

Better health

More money

Greater self-esteem

In addition, you will discover the truth that has been hidden from you while you’ve been under the tyranny of nicotine addiction. That without cigarettes you will be:

More relaxed

More resilient against stress

Better able to concentrate

You will also enjoy all your meals more because your taste buds will regain their sensitivity and you’ll be happy to take your time rather than rush to the end so you can smoke or vape. You will have the energy to get more out of exercise and sex. And, best of all, you’ll be free from the sense of slavery that leaves all smokers feeling helpless and stupid. Soon you’ll finish off the Big Monster. So enjoy the thought that you are taking steps to free yourself from the tyranny of nicotine addiction.

And carry on smoking, vaping or using whatever nicotine product you use. Don’t feel guilty, don’t be concerned about it – freedom awaits.

All you need to do is follow the instructions.

CHECKLIST

I understand that:

• I am not ‘giving up’ anything.

• No smoker has ever enjoyed smoking.

• Quitting is hard only if you use the wrong method.

• Willpower won’t help me quit – if anything it will make it harder.

• People who brag or whine about quitting by willpower still believe they are making a sacrifice.

• My addiction to nicotine is all to do with the drug and nothing to do with my personality.

• Smoking, vaping and all nicotine products destroy concentration.

• Smoking, vaping and all nicotine products do not help with weight control or appetite suppression, reduce depression or act as an expression of self-harm.

• There is no need to avoid the triggers when you have no desire to smoke.

We are going to deliver the final fatal blows to the Big Monster, free your mind from any lingering belief that smoking provides you with any kind of pleasure or crutch, and snuff out your desire for a cigarette once and for all.

On the way, we will examine more of the myths that keep smokers in the trap, including the theory that substitutes can help you get through the process of quitting by keeping you topped up with nicotine while you work on getting out of ‘the habit’. Remember, you don’t smoke out of habit; you smoke because you’re hooked on nicotine. Keep taking nicotine – in any form – and you’re going to stay hooked.

A lot of people are drawn to smoking and many are therefore put off trying to quit by the myth that smoking is a good way to

keep your weight down. We will look closely again at the connection between smoking and weight and explain why you will find it much easier to get in shape when you’re not a slave to nicotine.

We will then look at the different types of smoker – the casual smokers, heavy smokers, stoppers and starters, and so on – and examine what, if anything, makes them different. You might be surprised by the conclusion. But if you’re clear on everything you’ve read so far, you should already have guessed it.

By the end of this book, you will be ready and eager to stub out your final cigarette and get on with life as a happy non-smoker, but you might still have one or two burning questions that are making you feel uncertain. We need to eradicate all uncertainty when it comes to your decision to quit. We will address all the lingering doubts, so that you are fully prepared to take that momentous step and walk free from the nicotine trap and smoke your final cigarette.

Congratulations on your achievements so far. You have come a very long way towards freeing yourself from the tyranny of smoking. Your mindset is already very different from what it was before you started the book. The myths that have kept you in the nicotine trap have started to unravel and you are moving closer and closer to destroying the Big Monster once and for all.

Perhaps you feel you have already destroyed it; in which case you’re ahead of the game. That’s great news, but beware! Remember what I said about the instructions: you need to follow them all in order until the end. If you skip past any part of the book, you will not be following the method and you will miss out on a key step in your journey to freedom. This might not seem important now while you’re full of zeal for quitting, but later you may be vulnerable to being dragged back into the trap if you don’t follow the method in full

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So let’s continue and take a close look at the way the Big Monster takes shape in your mind.