The Easiest Way to Stop Smoking Around

I've discussed Allen Carr's great book many times before (here, here and here for example) but I would be remiss not to do it again as this book has been more important to me than any other. Having tried to quit smoking for years on my own using what Carr would refer to as "the willpower method" I finally read his book and quit easily.

Right now, the book has almost 3000 reviews on Amazon.com with a 4 and half star rating. Their seminars offer a money-back guarantee and less than 10 percent cash in on it. And a study by the Internal Archives of Occupational Environmental Health showed Allen Carr's method had a 51.4 percent 12-month cessation success rate, which blew out every other kind (usually around 5 percent). So the method works.

Basically, what Carr does is flip the script. Instead of talking about all of the reasons you shouldn't smoke like most methods do, Carr investigates the reasons people actually do. Yes, we all know that smoking is expensive and gross and terrible for your health and all the rest. Every smoker knows all of that and still smokes. So highlighting those issues obviously doesn't help.

But why do we smoke? Well, we've all come up with a bunch of excuses. Carr takes time to destroy each one. "Smoking cures boredom." Umm, no, smoking is about the most boring thing you can do. "Smoking relaxes me." No, nicotine is a stimulant. "Smoking helps me concentrate." Wait, I thought you said smoking relaxes you? What magic drug has two completely opposite effects?

Of course, it doesn't. All nicotine does is relieve nicotine withdrawal, nothing more. But here's the kicker, nicotine withdrawal is almost all in the mind. The actual physical effects are incredibly mild,

"There is no physical pain in the withdrawal from nicotine. It is merely a slightly empty, restless feeling, the feeling that something isn’t quite right, or that something is missing… 
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"…Most smokers go all night without a cigarette. The withdrawal “pangs” do not even wake them up. Many smokers will leave the bedroom before they light that first cigarette; many will have breakfast first. Increasingly people don’t smoke in their homes and won’t have that first cigarette until they are in the car on the way to work… These smokers have eight or maybe ten hours without a cigarette—going through withdrawal all the while, but t doesn’t seem to bother them."

It's all a trick, and once you see it for what it is, quitting is quite easy indeed. Please, if you are a smoker, give Allen Carr's method a try!