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Allen Carr: My Experience with Smoking
Excerpts from: The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, Selected with an introduction by Ellopos
21 Pages
Page 13
Obviously, the less you smoke the better off you are, but, as a stepping-stone to stopping, cutting down is fatal. It is our attempts to cut down that keep us trapped all our lives.
The main difficulty of stopping smoking is not the chemical addiction. That's easy. The real problem when stopping smoking is the brainwashing, the illusion that the cigarette is some sort of prop or reward and life will never be quite the same without it. Far from turning you off smoking, all cutting down does is to leave you feeling insecure and miserable and to convince you that the most precious thing on this earth is the next cigarette, that there is no way that you will ever be happy again without one.
If smokers smoked because they enjoyed the taste, nobody would ever smoke more than one cigarette.
'Just one cigarette' is a myth you must get out of your mind. It is just one cigarette that gets us started in the first place. It is just one cigarette that, when smokers have succeeded in breaking the addiction, sends them back into the trap. Sometimes it is just to confirm that they do not need them any more, and that one cigarette does just that. It tastes horrible and convinces the smoker he will never become hooked again, but he already is. There is no such thing as just one cigarette. It is a chain reaction that will last the rest of your life unless you break it.
Jaspers, Truth is in communication * Kierkegaard, My work as an author * Emerson, Reading and writing as self-knowledge * Francis Bacon, Reading & writing as moral activities * Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society * Gibson - MacRury, The man without a face * Dostoevsky, The dream of ridiculous man
