My mother once said to my wife, ‘Why don’t you threaten to leave him if he doesn’t stop smoking?’ My wife said, ‘Because he’d leave me if I did.’
‘Stop doing it. You are a fool,’ but in fact they make it harder. We smoke, for example, when we are nervous. Tell smokers that it is killing them, and the first thing they will do is to light a cigarette.
Some say it is because of the powerful withdrawal symptoms. In fact, the actual withdrawal symptoms from nicotine are so mild (see chapter 6) that most smokers have lived and died without ever realizing they are drug addicts.
Most smokers who think about it eventually come to the conclusion that it is just a habit. This is not really an explanation but, having discounted all the usual rational explanations, it appears to be the only remaining excuse. Unfortunately, this explanation is equally illogical. Every day of our lives we change habits, and some of them are very enjoyable. We have been brainwashed to believe that smoking is a habit and that habits are difficult to break. Are habits difficult to break? In the UK we are in the habit of driving on the left side of the road. Yet when we drive on the Continent or in the United States, we immediately break that habit with hardly any aggravation whatsoever.
It is clearly a fallacy that habits are hard to break.
One of the many pathetic aspects of smoking is how hard we have to work in order to become hooked.
You know that feeling when a neighbour’s burglar alarm has been ringing all day, or there has been some other minor, persistent aggravation. Then the noise suddenly stops – that marvellous feeling of peace and tranquillity is experienced. It is not really peace but the ending of the aggravation.
It’s when you are not smoking that you suffer that empty feeling, but because the process of getting hooked is very subtle and gradual in the early days, we regard that feeling as normal and don’t blame it on the previous cigarette.
The moment you light up, you get an almost immediate boost or buzz and do actually feel less nervous or more relaxed, and the cigarette gets the credit.
The main reason that smokers find it difficult to quit is that they believe that they are giving up a genuine pleasure or crutch.
this is why it is difficult to stop teenagers. Because they are still learning to smoke, because they still find cigarettes distasteful, they believe they can stop whenever they want to.
A 91-year-old woman attended my clinic with her 66-year-old son. When I asked her why she had decided to stop smoking, she replied, ‘To set an example for him.’ She contacted me six months later saying she felt like a young girl again.
Try it out for yourself. Next time you go into a pub or restaurant on a cold day and your companion asks you what you are having to drink, instead of saying, ‘A brandy’ (or whatever), embellish it with ‘Do you know what I would really enjoy today? That marvellous warm glow of a brandy.’ You will find that even people who dislike brandy may join you.
When you are a smoker nothing gets blamed on the cigarette. Smokers never have smoking coughs; they just have permanent colds. The moment you stop smoking, everything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on the fact that you’ve stopped smoking. Now when you have a mental block, instead of just getting on with it you start to say, ‘If only I could light up now, it would solve my problem.’ You then start to question your decision to quit smoking.
It’s the doubting, not the physical withdrawal pangs, that causes the problem. Always remember: it is smokers who suffer withdrawal pangs and not non-smokers.
During those times I thought I had all the problems in the world, but when I look back on my life I wonder where all the great stress was. In everything else in my life I was in control.
Cigarettes do not improve meals. They ruin them. They destroy your sense of taste and smell. Observe smokers in a restaurant, going outside for cigarettes between courses. They’re not enjoying the meal. In fact, they can’t wait for the meal to be over as it’s interfering with their smoking.
The worst thing we ever suffer from is fear, and the greatest gain you will receive is to be rid of that fear.
For most smokers the price of a packet is bad enough. Occasionally we work out what we spend in a week, and that is alarming. Very occasionally (and only when we think about stopping) we estimate what we spend in a year and that is frightening, but over a lifetime – it is unthinkable.
All you have to do to remain a non-smoker is not to fall for the trap again. That is, do not smoke that first cigarette. If you do, that one cigarette will cost you £40,000.
You would think: ‘Will I really feel this good?’ Or what it really amounts to: ‘Have I really sunk that low?’
21 The Advantages of Being a Smoker 22
So, instead of starting with the feeling ‘Great! Have you heard the news? I haven’t got to smoke any more,’ he starts with a feeling of doom and gloom, as if he were trying to climb Everest, and he firmly believes that once the little monster has got his hooks into you, you are hooked for life. Many smokers even start the attempt by apologizing to their friends and relatives: ‘Look, I am trying to give up smoking. I will probably be irritable during the next few weeks. Try to bear with me.’ Most attempts are doomed before they start.
They are left with a certain amount of the brainwashing and believe that during good and bad times the cigarette can give you a boost. (Most non-smokers also suffer from that illusion. They are subject to the brainwashing also but either find they cannot learn to ‘enjoy’ smoking or don’t want the bad side, thank you very much.)
If you had not enough willpower to stop, then you certainly have not got enough to cut down. Stopping is far easier and less painful.
Many smokers believe that they are confirmed smokers or have addictive personalities. I promise you there is no such thing. No one needs to smoke before they become hooked on the drug. It is the drug that hooks you and not the nature of your character or personality. That is the effect of these drugs, they make you believe that you have an addictive personality.
Remember, just as all alcoholics started off as casual drinkers, so all smokers started off as casual smokers.
She said, ‘I know you are not, but how would you feel if you had to watch someone you love systematically destroying themselves?’ It was an argument that I found irresistible, hence the attempt to stop. The attempt ended after three weeks after a heated argument with an old friend. It did not register until years afterwards that my devious mind had deliberately triggered off the argument.
I felt justly aggrieved at the time, but I do not believe that it was coincidence, as I had never argued with this particular friend before, nor have I since. It was clearly the little monster at work. Anyway, I had my excuse. I desperately needed a cigarette and started smoking again.
An intelligent person will fall for a confidence trick. But only a fool will go on falling for it once he realizes that it’s a confidence trick.
The easiest way is to pick what you consider to be the most difficult time to do it, whether it be stress, social, concentration or boredom. Once you’ve proved that you can cope with, and enjoy, life in the worst possible situation, every other situation becomes easy.
The real trap is the belief that now isn’t the right time, that it will always be easier tomorrow.
‘My family and I can have a marvellous holiday on the money I will save.’ This appears to be a logical and sensible approach, but in fact it is false because any self-respecting smoker would rather smoke fifty-two weeks in the year and not have a holiday.