Marketing and Other Lies
Yes, you can do it. But it won’t be easy.
Make no mistake. You CAN become free from cigarettes. But will it be easy? Nope.
Health, love, sex, and money. These topics are filled with books, products, and programs that promise to give you a secret that will change everything for you. They are billion-dollar industries for a reason. We all want and need these things, and our brains make us susceptible to wanting them with little or no effort.
Remember this good old parental advice: “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
You won’t get the results without following the process required to achieve them. Sorry!
Three Truths and A Lie
You can get free from cigarettes and smoking.
It takes commitment and sustained effort.
You must become a different person than you are today, i.e., change your identity to someone who doesn’t smoke.
It will be easy.
I’ll let you guess which is the lie.
About ten years ago, I was desperate to quit. In one of my many internet searches for a quick fix, I stumbled across Alan Carr’s book, The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. I remember reading the reviews and testimonials and crying because I knew it wouldn’t work for me. A better title for that book might have been, The Simple Way to Stop Smoking. Simple is almost always better, but it’s rarely easy.
In hindsight, I can see that my belief that I could not quit was the real problem, not the book title. However, when someone tells you that their product will help you easily achieve something your experience tells you is difficult, you are wise to be skeptical.
This post is not a negative review of The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. A great many people have succeeded using this method, and you have nothing to lose from checking it out at your local library or investaging the online program. Carr was a former 100-cigarette-a-day chain smoker who quit after 33 years and became a millionaire from his smoking cessation books, seminars, and clinics. He died of inoperable lung cancer in 2006 after publicly stating it was a price worth paying because he had been able to “cure at least 10 million smokers.”
In summary, the “easy way” helps you remove the veil of denial from your positive associations with smoking and see them for what they are: an addiction to nicotine that is “1% physical and 99% mental,” according to Carr. When you realize the unpleasant effects of nicotine withdrawal are actually caused by smoking and renewed each time you light up or vape, you will no longer want to keep smoking. Then you can experience the truth of how short-lived the actual physical addiction to nicotine is—only a few days. Also according to Carr, all the unpleasant feelings you might experience after the time that nicotine has completely left your system result only from your thoughts about how badly you want to smoke, but can’t. He advised that you change those thoughts of deprivation and negativity to positive ones. For example, instead of saying you want a cigarette and can’t have one, say, “Isn’t it great I’m free!”
Alan Carr may have been 100% right about my own brain being the cause of all my suffering and not any physical addiction to nicotine. But so what? His method wasn’t easy, and it didn’t work for me. I needed more space for imperfection. I needed to give myself permission not to end my physical addiction to nicotine and to be okay with long-term nicotine replacement therapy before I was finally successful in beating my addiction to smoking.
Let me be blunt and transparent: my advice will probably not make quitting smoking “easy” for you. Instead, I am offering insights and tools from my own experience that will set you up for success and make it easier than if you didn’t learn anything new about your brain, addiction, and behavior change before trying to quit. I am doing this especially for people who want to quit, but think it’s impossible. That was me, less than ten years ago. And I know that if I could become a non-smoker, so can you.