I recently read a very liberating book. Allen Carr’s EASYWAY To Stop Smoking. And it helped me kick a lifetime habit – nail biting. Might seem like nothing to you, but nothing else I’ve tried has stopped me. This finally did it, and I became a non-biter.
His Bio reads: Allen Carr (1934-2006) was a chain-smoker for over 30 years. In 1983, after countless failed attempts to quit, he went from 100 cigarettes a day to zero without suffering withdrawal pangs, without using willpower and without gaining weight. He realised that he had discovered what the world had been waiting for – the Easy Way to Stop Smoking – and embarked on a mission to help cure the world’s smokers.
[Now, surely only a man with a 100-a-day habit could get away with calling his method the ‘easy way’ without being contemptuous.]
EASYWAY has grown to become a global phenomenon with seminar centres in 150+ cities in more than 50 countries around the world. Allen Carr’s Easyway books, online video programmes, and live group seminars have helped an estimated 50 million smokers worldwide.
So what’s his secret?
Remember, he’s the real deal: a 100-a-day smoker for 30 years, now, with a very different point of view.
The realisation he came to was this:
Most smokers find it impossible to quit, not because of the physiological dependency, but because they falsely believe that they enjoy smoking.
The perceived enjoyment of smoking is just a result of cognitive dissonance. Why would you continue to do something that is killing you and making you uglier, smell worse, feel worse AND you also don’t enjoy? The human brain finds it very difficult to cope with such discrepancies between belief and behaviour. So, when a physiological dependency makes it difficult to quit, it changes the belief instead. The physiological dependency does make it difficult, but Allen Carr argues that it’s the changed psychological belief (that one enjoys smoking) that makes it impossible.
Smokers feel like smoking makes them more relaxed. Carr argues that smoking doesn’t make you more relaxed, it raises your resting rate of anxiety, so as to create the illusion of making you more relaxed.
When reminding smokers of this illusion, Carr will say “It’s not non-smokers that crave a cigarette, it is smokers. All you are doing by smoking, is trying to get back to the non-craving state you were in when you were a non-smoker.”
By removing the cognitive bias, you can make it easy. (And that’s not just an empty claim. Allen Carr’s clinics have a 90% success rate, which means that 90% of smokers attending a seminar for just one day, walk out of there, leaving their cigarettes on the table, never to smoke again).
And, good news, since you’re probably not a smoker, it doesn’t just work for nicotine addictions! Allen Carr, despite not being a doctor or trained therapist of any kind, now has books and courses on all the following:
Stop Smoking
Stop drinking
Stop gambling
Stop emotional eating
Stop sugar
Stop caffeine
Stop technology addiction
Stop Cannabis
Yes, even…
Stop Cocaine
Stop Heroine
Stop debt
and
Enjoy flying!
The reason this method works for both what we might consider physical addictions and psychological addictions is that they all work in the same way. In both categories the real protagonist of the addiction is internal. Physically ingested substances such as nicotine and cocaine work on dopamine-producing cells to increase the amount of this naturally pleasure-inducing neurochemical available to our brains. Equally, visual and psychological stimuli cause this natural release of dopamine, so it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at a nude woman, smoking a cigarette, scrolling a facebook feed, gaming, snorting cocaine or feeding a slot machine, the thing causing the physiological addiction is the dopamine high.
But Allen Carr claims that it’s not the physical withdrawals that are hard to cope with, these are only hunger-like pangs, and restlessness, not physical pain; they are only intense for three days and last a maximum of three weeks. It is rather the fear of being deprived of something you love, that lingers on, making the ex-smoker who still falsely believes they enjoyed smoking, miserable for the rest of their lives.
And in this, he hit upon the truth that the Bible has always explained about addiction:
Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.
For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—
The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”
Sin creates an emptiness in our lives that causes us to want to fill it with more sin, something that we were not missing before we experienced it. All we are doing, by feeling that we will miss out on sin, is trying to get back to what it felt like BEFORE we “ate the fruit”. It is not non-sinners who crave sin, it is sinners. To paraphrase the words of Allen Carr: All you have to do is become a non-sinner, and you will never crave it again!
[I was rather hoping for a stop pornography edition, but he never wrote this and is now deceased. Since all of his books follow the same pattern and philosophy, a quit pornography version has been written in the same style by “Hackauthor2” and is available on Youtube as an audiobook. Personally, I found the stop smoking version more compelling, possibly because it is authentic, and also the audiobook was a bit fast-paced for me. I think the smoking book can be applied to any addiction on its own. However the porn version does help to cut out the work of transferring the applications in your mind. Hackauthor2 has this to say about their version: The Easy Peasy Way to Quit Pornography This book is a re-written adaptation of another book on addiction: Allen Carr’s “EasyWay to Stop Smoking”, published in 1985. While every addiction (and individual addict) is different, the spirit of Carr’s original work lives on in this book on pornography: That being the removal of fear. Regardless of what addiction you may be struggling with, the advice given here is invaluable to anyone who wants to retain true control over their mind and body.]
So reading this book really made me think: Is there anything that am I not a slave to?
If I don’t actually enjoy biting my nails, eating chocolate, watching Netflix (like I always thought I did) What do I actually enjoy doing?
All of us are battling with real addictions. Some are more obvious than others. All are eating up our lives, our marriages, and stealing our potential.
Thank God there is a way out!
HEBREWS 2
14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. 16 For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. 17 For this reason he had to be made like them,[k] fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. 18 Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.
Jesus Christ’s Easy Way – to free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of quitting and missing out forever. I’m sure he shakes his head in disbelief at my blindness when I cling to my little vice and pleads with me to understand: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind can conceive what God has in store for those who love him”! (1 Corinthians 2:9).
little words 