There were two other advantages on the health side that never occurred to me until I had stopped smoking. One was that I used to have repetitive nightmares every night. I would dream that! was being chased. I can only assume that these nightmares were the result of the body being deprived of nicotine throughout the night and the insecure feeling that would result. Now the only nightmare that I have is that I occasionally dream that I am smoking again. This is quite a common dream among ex-smokers. Some worry that it means that they are still subconsciously pining for a cigarette. Don't worry about it. The fact that it was a nightmare means that you are very pleased not to be a smoker. There is that twilight zone after any nightmare when you wake up and are not sure whether it is a genuine catastrophe, but isn't it marvelous when you realize that it was only a dream?
When I described being chased every night in a dream, I originally typed 'chaste'. Perhaps this was just a 'Freudian slip', but it does give me a convenient lead into the second advantage. At clinics, when covering the effect that smoking has on concentration, I would some times say: 'Which organ in your body has the greatest need of a good supply of blood?' The stupid grins, usually on the faces of the men, would indicate that they had missed the point. However, they were absolutely right.
Being a somewhat shy Englishman, I find the subject rather embarrassing, and I have no intention of doing a miniature 'Kinsey' report by going into detail about the adverse effect that smoking had on my own sexual activity and enjoyment, or that of other ex-smokers with whom I have discussed the subject. Again, I was not aware of this effect until some time after I had stopped smoking and had attributed my sexual prowess and activity, or rather lack of it, to advancing years.
However, if you watch natural-science films, you will be aware that the first rule of nature is survival, and that the second rule is survival of the species, or reproduction. Nature ensures that reproduction does not take place unless the partners feel physically healthy and know that they have secured a safe home, territory, supply of food and a suitable mate. Man's ingenuity has enabled him to bend these rules somewhat, however, I know for a fact that smoking can lead to impotency. I can also assure you, that when you feel fit and healthy, you'll enjoy sex much more and more often.
Smokers also suffer the illusion that the ill-effects of smoking are overstated. The reverse is the case. There is no doubt that cigarettes are the No. 1 cause of death in society. The trouble is that in many cases where cigarettes cause the death or are a contributory factor, it is not blamed on cigarettes in the statistics.
It has been estimated that 44 per cent of household fires are caused by cigarettes, and I wonder how many road accidents have been caused by cigarettes during that split second when you take your eye off the road to light up.
I am normally a careful driver, but the nearest I came to death (except from smoking itself) waswhen trying to roll a cigarette while driving, and I hate to think of the number of times I coughed a cigarette out of my mouth while driving it always seemed to end up between the seats. I am sure many other smoking drivers have had the experience of trying to locate the burning cigarette with one hand while trying to drive with the other.
The effect of the brainwashing is that we tend to think like the man who, having fallen off a 100-storey building, is heard to say, as he passes the fiftieth floor, 'So far, so good!' We think that as we have got away with it so far, one more cigarette won't make the difference.
Try to see it another way, the 'habit' is a continuous chain for life, each cigarette creating the need for the next. When you start the habit you light a fuse. The trouble is, YOU DON'T KNOW HOW LONG THE FUSE IS. Every time that you light a cigarette you are one step nearer to the bomb exploding. HOW WILL YOU KNOW IF IT'S THE NEXT ONE?
среда, 18 ноября 2009 г.
Tips on Stopping Smoking
I can understand why the congestion and the risks of contracting lung cancer didn't help me to quit. I could cope with the former and block my mind to the latter. As you are already aware, my method is not to frighten you into quitting, but the complete opposite - to make you realize just how more enjoyable your life will be when you have escaped.
However, I do believe that if I could have seen what was happening inside my body, this would have helped me to quit. Now I'm not referring to the shock technique of showing a smoker the color of a smoker's lungs. It was obvious to me from my nicotine-stained teeth and fingers that my lungs weren't a pretty sight. Provided they kept functioning, they were less embarrassment than my teeth and fingers - at least nobody could see my lungs.
What I am referring to is the progressive gunging- up of our arteries and veins and the gradual starving of every muscle and organ of our bodies of oxygen and nutrients and replacing them with poisons and carbon monoxide (not just from car exhausts but also from smoking).
Like the majority of motorists, I don't like the thought of dirty oil or a dirty filter in my car engine. Could you imagine buying a brand-new Rolls Royce and never changing the oil or the oil filter? That's what we effectively do to our bodies when we become smokers.
Many doctors are now relating all sorts of diseases to smoking, including diabetes, cervical cancer and breast cancer. This is no surprise to me. The tobacco industry has labored the fact that the medical profession has never scientifically proved that smoking is the direct cause of lung cancer.
The statistical evidence is so overwhelming as not to need proof. No one ever scientifically proved to me exactly why, when I bang my thumb with a hammer, it hurts. I soon got the message.
I must emphasize that I am not a doctor, but just like the hammer and the thumb, it soon became obvious to me that my congestion, my permanent cough, my frequent asthma and bronchial attacks were directly related to my smoking. However, I truly believe that the greatest hazard that smoking causes to our health is the gradual and progressive deterioration of our immune system caused by this gunging-up process.
All plants and animals on this planet are subjected to a lifetime of attack from germs, viruses, parasites, etc. The most powerful defense we have against disease is our immune system. We all suffer infections and diseases throughout our lives. I believe we all suffer from some form of cancer during our lives. However, I do not believe that the human body was designed to be diseased, and if you are strong and healthy, your immune system will fight and defeat these attacks. How can your immune system work effectively when you are starving every muscle and organ of oxygen and nutrients and replacing them with carbon monoxide and poisons? It's not so much that smoking causes these other diseases, it works rather like AIDS, it gradually destroys your immune system.
Several of the adverse effects that smoking had on my health, some of which I had been suffering from for years, did not become apparent to me until many years after I had stopped smoking.
While I was busy despising those idiots and cranks who would rather lose their legs than quit smoking, it didn't even occur to me that I was already suffering from arteriosclerosis myself. My almost permanently grey complexion I attributed to my natural coloring or to lack of exercise. It never occurred to me that it was really due to the blocking up of my capillaries. I had varicose veins in my thirties, which have miraculously disappeared since I stopped smoking. I reached the stage about five years before I stopped when every night 1 would have this weird sensation in my legs. It wasn't a sharp pain or like pins and needles, just a sort of restless feeling. I would get Joyce to massage my legs every night. It didn't occur to me until at least a year after I had stopped that I no longer needed the massage.
About two years before I quit, I would occasionally get violent pains in my chest, which I feared must be lung cancer but now assume to have been angina. I haven't had a single attack since I quit.
When I was a child I would bleed profusely from cuts. This frightened me. No one explained to me that bleeding was in fact a natural and essential healing process and that the blood would clot when its healing purpose was completed. I suspected that I was a hemophiliac and feared that I might bleed to death. Later in life I would sustain quite deep cuts yet hardly bleed at all. This browny-red gunge would ooze from the cut.
The color worried me. I knew that blood was meant to be bright red and I assumed that I had some sort of blood disease. However I was pleased about the consistency, which meant that 1 no longer bled profusely. Not until after I had stopped smoking did I learn that smoking coagulated the blood and that the brownish color was due to lack of oxygen. I was ignorant of the effect at the time, but in hindsight, it was this effect that smoking was having on my health that most fills me with horror.
When I think of my poor heart trying to pump that gunge around restricted blood vessels, day in and day out, without missing a single beat, I find it a miracle that I didn't suffer a stroke or a heart attack. It made me realize, not how fragile our bodies are, but how strong and ingenious that incredible machine is!
I had liver spots on my hands in my forties. In case you don't know, liver spots are those brown or white spots that very old people have on their face and hands, I tried to ignore them, assuming that they were due to early senility caused by the hectic lifestyle that I had led. It was five years after I had quit that a smoker at the Raynes Park clinic remarked that when he had stopped previously, his liver spots disappeared. I had forgotten about mine, and to my amazement, they too had disappeared.
As long as I can remember, I had spots flashing in front of my eyes if ever I stood up too quickly, particularly if I were in a bath. I would feel dizzy, as if I were about to black out. I never related this to smoking. In fact I was convinced that it was quite normal and that everyone else had a similar reaction. Not until only five years ago, when an ex-smoker told me that he no longer had that sensation did it occur to me that I no longer had it either.
You might conclude that I am somewhat of a hypochondriac. I believe that I was when I was a smoker. One of the great evils about smoking is that it fools us into believing that nicotine gives us courage, when in fact it gradually and imperceptibly dissipates it. I was shocked when I heard my father say that he had no wish to live to be fifty. Little did I realize that twenty years la ter I would have exactly the same lack of joie de vivre. You might conclude that this chapter has been one of necessary, or unnecessary, doom and gloom. I promise you it is the complete opposite. I used to fear death when I was a child. I used to believe that smoking removed that fear. Perhaps it did. If so, it replaced it with something infinitely worse: A FEAR OF LIVING I
Now my fear of dying has returned. It does not bother me. I realize that it only exists because I now enjoy life so much. I don't brood over my fear of dying any more than I did when I was a child.
I'm far too busy living my life to the full. The odds are against my living to a hundred, but I'll try to.
I'll also try to enjoy every precious moment!
However, I do believe that if I could have seen what was happening inside my body, this would have helped me to quit. Now I'm not referring to the shock technique of showing a smoker the color of a smoker's lungs. It was obvious to me from my nicotine-stained teeth and fingers that my lungs weren't a pretty sight. Provided they kept functioning, they were less embarrassment than my teeth and fingers - at least nobody could see my lungs.
What I am referring to is the progressive gunging- up of our arteries and veins and the gradual starving of every muscle and organ of our bodies of oxygen and nutrients and replacing them with poisons and carbon monoxide (not just from car exhausts but also from smoking).
Like the majority of motorists, I don't like the thought of dirty oil or a dirty filter in my car engine. Could you imagine buying a brand-new Rolls Royce and never changing the oil or the oil filter? That's what we effectively do to our bodies when we become smokers.
Many doctors are now relating all sorts of diseases to smoking, including diabetes, cervical cancer and breast cancer. This is no surprise to me. The tobacco industry has labored the fact that the medical profession has never scientifically proved that smoking is the direct cause of lung cancer.
The statistical evidence is so overwhelming as not to need proof. No one ever scientifically proved to me exactly why, when I bang my thumb with a hammer, it hurts. I soon got the message.
I must emphasize that I am not a doctor, but just like the hammer and the thumb, it soon became obvious to me that my congestion, my permanent cough, my frequent asthma and bronchial attacks were directly related to my smoking. However, I truly believe that the greatest hazard that smoking causes to our health is the gradual and progressive deterioration of our immune system caused by this gunging-up process.
All plants and animals on this planet are subjected to a lifetime of attack from germs, viruses, parasites, etc. The most powerful defense we have against disease is our immune system. We all suffer infections and diseases throughout our lives. I believe we all suffer from some form of cancer during our lives. However, I do not believe that the human body was designed to be diseased, and if you are strong and healthy, your immune system will fight and defeat these attacks. How can your immune system work effectively when you are starving every muscle and organ of oxygen and nutrients and replacing them with carbon monoxide and poisons? It's not so much that smoking causes these other diseases, it works rather like AIDS, it gradually destroys your immune system.
Several of the adverse effects that smoking had on my health, some of which I had been suffering from for years, did not become apparent to me until many years after I had stopped smoking.
While I was busy despising those idiots and cranks who would rather lose their legs than quit smoking, it didn't even occur to me that I was already suffering from arteriosclerosis myself. My almost permanently grey complexion I attributed to my natural coloring or to lack of exercise. It never occurred to me that it was really due to the blocking up of my capillaries. I had varicose veins in my thirties, which have miraculously disappeared since I stopped smoking. I reached the stage about five years before I stopped when every night 1 would have this weird sensation in my legs. It wasn't a sharp pain or like pins and needles, just a sort of restless feeling. I would get Joyce to massage my legs every night. It didn't occur to me until at least a year after I had stopped that I no longer needed the massage.
About two years before I quit, I would occasionally get violent pains in my chest, which I feared must be lung cancer but now assume to have been angina. I haven't had a single attack since I quit.
When I was a child I would bleed profusely from cuts. This frightened me. No one explained to me that bleeding was in fact a natural and essential healing process and that the blood would clot when its healing purpose was completed. I suspected that I was a hemophiliac and feared that I might bleed to death. Later in life I would sustain quite deep cuts yet hardly bleed at all. This browny-red gunge would ooze from the cut.
The color worried me. I knew that blood was meant to be bright red and I assumed that I had some sort of blood disease. However I was pleased about the consistency, which meant that 1 no longer bled profusely. Not until after I had stopped smoking did I learn that smoking coagulated the blood and that the brownish color was due to lack of oxygen. I was ignorant of the effect at the time, but in hindsight, it was this effect that smoking was having on my health that most fills me with horror.
When I think of my poor heart trying to pump that gunge around restricted blood vessels, day in and day out, without missing a single beat, I find it a miracle that I didn't suffer a stroke or a heart attack. It made me realize, not how fragile our bodies are, but how strong and ingenious that incredible machine is!
I had liver spots on my hands in my forties. In case you don't know, liver spots are those brown or white spots that very old people have on their face and hands, I tried to ignore them, assuming that they were due to early senility caused by the hectic lifestyle that I had led. It was five years after I had quit that a smoker at the Raynes Park clinic remarked that when he had stopped previously, his liver spots disappeared. I had forgotten about mine, and to my amazement, they too had disappeared.
As long as I can remember, I had spots flashing in front of my eyes if ever I stood up too quickly, particularly if I were in a bath. I would feel dizzy, as if I were about to black out. I never related this to smoking. In fact I was convinced that it was quite normal and that everyone else had a similar reaction. Not until only five years ago, when an ex-smoker told me that he no longer had that sensation did it occur to me that I no longer had it either.
You might conclude that I am somewhat of a hypochondriac. I believe that I was when I was a smoker. One of the great evils about smoking is that it fools us into believing that nicotine gives us courage, when in fact it gradually and imperceptibly dissipates it. I was shocked when I heard my father say that he had no wish to live to be fifty. Little did I realize that twenty years la ter I would have exactly the same lack of joie de vivre. You might conclude that this chapter has been one of necessary, or unnecessary, doom and gloom. I promise you it is the complete opposite. I used to fear death when I was a child. I used to believe that smoking removed that fear. Perhaps it did. If so, it replaced it with something infinitely worse: A FEAR OF LIVING I
Now my fear of dying has returned. It does not bother me. I realize that it only exists because I now enjoy life so much. I don't brood over my fear of dying any more than I did when I was a child.
I'm far too busy living my life to the full. The odds are against my living to a hundred, but I'll try to.
I'll also try to enjoy every precious moment!
Effects of Smoking Weed
While 7 was still smoking, I'd never heard of arteriosclerosis or emphysema. I knew the permanent wheezing and coughing and the ever-increasing asthma and bronchitis attacks were a direct result of my smoking. But though they caused me discomfort there was no real pain and I could handle the discomfort.
I confess that the thought of contracting lung cancer terrified me, which is probably why I just blocked it from my mind. It's amazing how the fear of the horrendous health risks attached to smoking are overshadowed by the fear of stopping. It's not so much that the latter is a greater fear, but that if we quit today the fear is immediate, whereas the fear of contracting lung cancer is a fear of the future. Why look on the black side? Perhaps it won't happen. I'm bound to have quit by then anyway.
We tend to think of smoking as a tug-of-war. On one side fear: it's unhealthy, expensive, filthy and enslaving. On the other side the pluses: it's my pleasure, my friend, my crutch. It never seems to occur to us that this side is also fear. It's not so much that we enjoy them, but that we tend to be miserable without them.
Think of heroin addicts deprived of their heroin: the abject misery they go through. Now picture their utter joy when they are allowed to plunge a needle into their veins and end that terrible craving. Try to imagine how anyone could actually believe they get pleasure from sticking a hypodermic syringe into a vein.
Non-heroin addicts don't suffer that panic feeling. Heroin doesn't relieve the feeling, on the contrary, it causes it. Non-smokers don't feel miserable if they are not allowed to smoke after a meal.
It's only smokers that suffer that feeling. Nicotine doesn't relieve it, on the contrary it causes it.
The fear of contracting lung cancer didn't make me quit because I believed it was rather like walking through a minefield. If you got away with it - fine. If you were unlucky you stepped on a mine.
You knew the risks you were taking and if you were prepared to take the risk, what had it to do with anyone else?
So if a non-smoker ever tried to make me aware of those risks, I would use the typical evasive tactics that all addicts invariably adopt.
'You have to die of something'.
Of course you do, but is that a logical reason for deliberately shortening your life?
Quality of life is more important than longevity'.
Exactly, but you are surely not suggesting that, the quality of life of an alcoholic or a heroin addict is greater than that of someone that isn't addicted to alcohol or heroin? Do you really believe that the quality of a smoker's life is better than a non-smoker's?
Surely the smoker loses on both counts his life is both shorter and more miserable.
‘My lungs probably suffer more damage from car exhausts than from smoking;
Even if that were true, is that a logical reason for punishing your lungs further? Can you possibly conceive of anyone being stupid enough to actually put their mouth over an exhaust pipe and deliberately inhale those fumes into their lungs?
THAT'S WHAT SMOKERS EFFECTIVELY DO!
I confess that the thought of contracting lung cancer terrified me, which is probably why I just blocked it from my mind. It's amazing how the fear of the horrendous health risks attached to smoking are overshadowed by the fear of stopping. It's not so much that the latter is a greater fear, but that if we quit today the fear is immediate, whereas the fear of contracting lung cancer is a fear of the future. Why look on the black side? Perhaps it won't happen. I'm bound to have quit by then anyway.
We tend to think of smoking as a tug-of-war. On one side fear: it's unhealthy, expensive, filthy and enslaving. On the other side the pluses: it's my pleasure, my friend, my crutch. It never seems to occur to us that this side is also fear. It's not so much that we enjoy them, but that we tend to be miserable without them.
Think of heroin addicts deprived of their heroin: the abject misery they go through. Now picture their utter joy when they are allowed to plunge a needle into their veins and end that terrible craving. Try to imagine how anyone could actually believe they get pleasure from sticking a hypodermic syringe into a vein.
Non-heroin addicts don't suffer that panic feeling. Heroin doesn't relieve the feeling, on the contrary, it causes it. Non-smokers don't feel miserable if they are not allowed to smoke after a meal.
It's only smokers that suffer that feeling. Nicotine doesn't relieve it, on the contrary it causes it.
The fear of contracting lung cancer didn't make me quit because I believed it was rather like walking through a minefield. If you got away with it - fine. If you were unlucky you stepped on a mine.
You knew the risks you were taking and if you were prepared to take the risk, what had it to do with anyone else?
So if a non-smoker ever tried to make me aware of those risks, I would use the typical evasive tactics that all addicts invariably adopt.
'You have to die of something'.
Of course you do, but is that a logical reason for deliberately shortening your life?
Quality of life is more important than longevity'.
Exactly, but you are surely not suggesting that, the quality of life of an alcoholic or a heroin addict is greater than that of someone that isn't addicted to alcohol or heroin? Do you really believe that the quality of a smoker's life is better than a non-smoker's?
Surely the smoker loses on both counts his life is both shorter and more miserable.
‘My lungs probably suffer more damage from car exhausts than from smoking;
Even if that were true, is that a logical reason for punishing your lungs further? Can you possibly conceive of anyone being stupid enough to actually put their mouth over an exhaust pipe and deliberately inhale those fumes into their lungs?
THAT'S WHAT SMOKERS EFFECTIVELY DO!
воскресенье, 25 октября 2009 г.
Health
This is the area where the brainwashing is the greatest. Smokers think they are aware of the health risks. They are not.
Even in my case, when I was expecting my head to explode any moment and honestly believed I was prepared to accept the consequences, I was still kidding myself, If in those days 1 had taken a cigarette out of the packet and a red bleeper started to sound, followed by a warning voice saying, 'OK, Allen, this is the one! Fortunately you do get a warning, and this is it. Up to now you have got away with it, hut if you smoke another cigarette your head will explode,' do you think I would have lit that cigarette?
If you are in doubt about the answer, just try walking up to a main road with busy traffic, stand on the kerb with your eyes closed and try to imagine you have the choice of either stopping smoking or walking blindfolded across the road before taking your next cigarette.
There is no doubt what your choice would be. I had been doing what every smoker does all his smoking life: closing my mind and keeping my head in the sand, hoping that I would wake up one morning and just not want to smoke any more. Smokers cannot allow themselves to think of the health risks. If they do, even the illusion of enjoying the 'habit' goes.
This explains why the shock treatment used by the media on National No-Smoking Days is so ineffective. It is only non-smokers who can bring themselves to watch. It also explains why smokers, recalling Uncle Fred who smoked forty a day and lived until he was eighty, will ignore the thousands of people who are brought down in their prime because of this poisonous weed.
About six times a week I have the following conversation with smokers (usually the younger ones):
MEL Why do you want to stop? SMOKER: I can't afford it.
ME: Aren't you worried about the health risks.
SMOKER: No, I could step under a bus tomorrow.
ME: Would you deliberately step under a bus Smoker: of course not.
ME: Do you not bother to look left and right when you cross the road? Smoker: Of course I do.
Exactly. The smoker goes to a lot of trouble not to step under a bus, and the odds are hundreds of thousands to one against it happening. Yet the smoker risks the near certainty of being crippled by the weed and appears to be completely oblivious to the risks. Such is the power of the brainwashing.
I remember one famous British golfer who wouldn't go on the American circuit because he was afraid of flying. Yet he would chain-smoke round the golf course. Isn't it strange that, if we felt there was the slightest fault in an airplane, we wouldn't go up in it, even though the risks are hundreds of thousands to one against death, yet we take a one-in- four certainty with the cigarette and are apparently oblivious to it. And what does the smoker get out of it?
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!
Another common myth about smoking is the smoker's cough. Many of the younger people who come to see me are not worried about their health because they do not cough. The true facts are just the reverse. A cough is one of nature's fail-safe methods of dispelling foreign matter from the lungs.
The cough itself is not a disease; it is just a symptom. When smokers cough it is because their lungs are trying to dispel cancer-triggering tars and poisons. When they do not cough those tars and poisons remain in their lungs, and that is when they cause cancer. Smokers tend to avoid exercise and get into the habit of shallow breathing in order not to cough. I used to believe that my permanent smokers' cough would kill me. By expelling much of the filth from my lungs, it possibly saved my life.
Just think of it this way. If you had a nice car and allowed it to rust without doing anything about it, that would be pretty stupid, as it would soon be a heap of rust and would not carry you about.
However, that would not be the end of the world; it is only a question of money and you could always buy a new one. Your body is the vehicle that carries you through life. We al! say that our health is our most valued asset. How true that is, as sick millionaires will tell you. Most of us can look back at some illness or accident in our lives when we prayed to get better. (HOW SOON WE FORGET.) By being a smoker you are not only letting rust get in and doing nothing about it; you are systematically destroying the vehicle you need to go through life, and you only get one.
Wise up. You don't have to do it, and remember: it is doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR YOU.
Just for a moment take your head out of the sand and ask yourself, if you knew for certain that the next cigarette would he the one to trigger off cancer in your body, whether you would actually smoke it. Forget the disease (it is difficult to imagine it), but imagine you have to go to the Royal Marsden to suffer those awful tests - radium treatment, etc. Now you are not planning the rest of your life. You are planning your death. What is going to happen to your family and loved ones, your plans and dreams?
I often see the people that it happens to. They didn't, think it would happen to them either, and the worst thing about it isn't the disease itself but the knowledge they have brought it on themselves. All our lives as smokers we are saying, ‘I’ll stop tomorrow.' Try to imagine how those people feel who 'hit the button'. For them the brainwashing is ended. They then see the 'habit' as it really is and spend the remainder of their lives thinking, 'Why did I kid myself I needed to smoke? If only I had the chance to go back!'
Stop kidding yourself. You have the chance. It's a chain reaction. If you smoke the next cigarette, it will lead to the next one and the next. It's already happening to you.
At the beginning of the book I promised you no shock treatment. If you have already decided you are going to stop smoking, this isn't shock treatment for you. If you are still in doubt, skip the remainder of this chapter and come back to it when you have read the rest of the book.
Volumes of statistics have already been written about the damage that cigarettes can cause to the smoker's health. The trouble is that until the smoker decides to stop he doesn't want to know. Even the government health warning is a waste of time because the smoker puts blinkers on, and if he inadvertently reads it, the first thing he does is light up a cigarette.
Smokers tend to think of the health hazard as a hit-and- miss affair, like stepping on a mine. Get it into your head: it is already happening, Every time you puff on a cigarette you are breathing cancertriggering tars into your lungs, and cancer is by no means the worst of the killer diseases that cigarettes cause or contribute to. They are also a powerful contributory cause of heart disease, arteriosclerosis, emphysema, angina, thrombosis, chronic bronchitis and asthma.
Even in my case, when I was expecting my head to explode any moment and honestly believed I was prepared to accept the consequences, I was still kidding myself, If in those days 1 had taken a cigarette out of the packet and a red bleeper started to sound, followed by a warning voice saying, 'OK, Allen, this is the one! Fortunately you do get a warning, and this is it. Up to now you have got away with it, hut if you smoke another cigarette your head will explode,' do you think I would have lit that cigarette?
If you are in doubt about the answer, just try walking up to a main road with busy traffic, stand on the kerb with your eyes closed and try to imagine you have the choice of either stopping smoking or walking blindfolded across the road before taking your next cigarette.
There is no doubt what your choice would be. I had been doing what every smoker does all his smoking life: closing my mind and keeping my head in the sand, hoping that I would wake up one morning and just not want to smoke any more. Smokers cannot allow themselves to think of the health risks. If they do, even the illusion of enjoying the 'habit' goes.
This explains why the shock treatment used by the media on National No-Smoking Days is so ineffective. It is only non-smokers who can bring themselves to watch. It also explains why smokers, recalling Uncle Fred who smoked forty a day and lived until he was eighty, will ignore the thousands of people who are brought down in their prime because of this poisonous weed.
About six times a week I have the following conversation with smokers (usually the younger ones):
MEL Why do you want to stop? SMOKER: I can't afford it.
ME: Aren't you worried about the health risks.
SMOKER: No, I could step under a bus tomorrow.
ME: Would you deliberately step under a bus Smoker: of course not.
ME: Do you not bother to look left and right when you cross the road? Smoker: Of course I do.
Exactly. The smoker goes to a lot of trouble not to step under a bus, and the odds are hundreds of thousands to one against it happening. Yet the smoker risks the near certainty of being crippled by the weed and appears to be completely oblivious to the risks. Such is the power of the brainwashing.
I remember one famous British golfer who wouldn't go on the American circuit because he was afraid of flying. Yet he would chain-smoke round the golf course. Isn't it strange that, if we felt there was the slightest fault in an airplane, we wouldn't go up in it, even though the risks are hundreds of thousands to one against death, yet we take a one-in- four certainty with the cigarette and are apparently oblivious to it. And what does the smoker get out of it?
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!
Another common myth about smoking is the smoker's cough. Many of the younger people who come to see me are not worried about their health because they do not cough. The true facts are just the reverse. A cough is one of nature's fail-safe methods of dispelling foreign matter from the lungs.
The cough itself is not a disease; it is just a symptom. When smokers cough it is because their lungs are trying to dispel cancer-triggering tars and poisons. When they do not cough those tars and poisons remain in their lungs, and that is when they cause cancer. Smokers tend to avoid exercise and get into the habit of shallow breathing in order not to cough. I used to believe that my permanent smokers' cough would kill me. By expelling much of the filth from my lungs, it possibly saved my life.
Just think of it this way. If you had a nice car and allowed it to rust without doing anything about it, that would be pretty stupid, as it would soon be a heap of rust and would not carry you about.
However, that would not be the end of the world; it is only a question of money and you could always buy a new one. Your body is the vehicle that carries you through life. We al! say that our health is our most valued asset. How true that is, as sick millionaires will tell you. Most of us can look back at some illness or accident in our lives when we prayed to get better. (HOW SOON WE FORGET.) By being a smoker you are not only letting rust get in and doing nothing about it; you are systematically destroying the vehicle you need to go through life, and you only get one.
Wise up. You don't have to do it, and remember: it is doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR YOU.
Just for a moment take your head out of the sand and ask yourself, if you knew for certain that the next cigarette would he the one to trigger off cancer in your body, whether you would actually smoke it. Forget the disease (it is difficult to imagine it), but imagine you have to go to the Royal Marsden to suffer those awful tests - radium treatment, etc. Now you are not planning the rest of your life. You are planning your death. What is going to happen to your family and loved ones, your plans and dreams?
I often see the people that it happens to. They didn't, think it would happen to them either, and the worst thing about it isn't the disease itself but the knowledge they have brought it on themselves. All our lives as smokers we are saying, ‘I’ll stop tomorrow.' Try to imagine how those people feel who 'hit the button'. For them the brainwashing is ended. They then see the 'habit' as it really is and spend the remainder of their lives thinking, 'Why did I kid myself I needed to smoke? If only I had the chance to go back!'
Stop kidding yourself. You have the chance. It's a chain reaction. If you smoke the next cigarette, it will lead to the next one and the next. It's already happening to you.
At the beginning of the book I promised you no shock treatment. If you have already decided you are going to stop smoking, this isn't shock treatment for you. If you are still in doubt, skip the remainder of this chapter and come back to it when you have read the rest of the book.
Volumes of statistics have already been written about the damage that cigarettes can cause to the smoker's health. The trouble is that until the smoker decides to stop he doesn't want to know. Even the government health warning is a waste of time because the smoker puts blinkers on, and if he inadvertently reads it, the first thing he does is light up a cigarette.
Smokers tend to think of the health hazard as a hit-and- miss affair, like stepping on a mine. Get it into your head: it is already happening, Every time you puff on a cigarette you are breathing cancertriggering tars into your lungs, and cancer is by no means the worst of the killer diseases that cigarettes cause or contribute to. They are also a powerful contributory cause of heart disease, arteriosclerosis, emphysema, angina, thrombosis, chronic bronchitis and asthma.
Confirmed Smoker
I cannot repeat too often that it is brainwashing that makes it difficult to stop smoking, and the more brainwashing we can dispel before we start, the easier you will find it to achieve your goal.
Occasionally I get into arguments with people whom I call confirmed smokers. By my definition a confirmed smoker is somebody who can afford it, doesn't believe it injures his health and isn't worried about the social stigma. (There are not many about nowadays.)
If he is a young man, I say to him,' I cannot believe you are not worried about the money you are spending.'
Usually his eyes light up. If I had attacked him on health grounds or on the social stigma, he would feel at a disadvantage, but on money -- ' Oh, I can afford it. It is only x per week and I think it is worth it. It is my only vice or pleasure,' etc.
If he is a twenty-per-day smoker I say to him, I still cannot believe you are not worried about the money. You are going to spend over 40,000 in your lifetime. What are you doing with that money?
You are not even setting light to it or throwing it away. You are actually using that money to ruin your physical health, to destroy your nerves and confidence, to suffer a lifetime of slavery, a lifetime of bad breath and stained teeth. Surely that must worry you?'
It is apparent at this point, particularly with young smokers, that they have never considered it a lifetime expense. 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.
However, because it is an argument the confirmed smoker will say, 'I can afford it. It is only so much a week.' He does an 'encyclopedia salesman' on himself, I then say, 'I will make you an offer you cannot refuse. You pay me ?1,000 now, and I will provide you with free cigarettes for the rest of your life'.
If I were offering to take over a 40,000 mortgage for ?1,000, the smoker would have my signature, on a piece of paper before I could move, and yet not one confirmed smoker (and please bear in mind 1 am not now talking to someone like yourself who plans to stop, I am talking to someone who has no intention of stopping) has ever taken me up on that offer. Why not?
Often at this point in my consultation, a smoker will say, 'Look, I am not really worried about the money aspect,' If you are thinking along these lines, ask yourself why you are not worried. Why in other aspects of life you will go to a great deal of trouble to save a few pounds here and there and yet spend thousands of pounds poisoning yourself and hang the expense?
The answer to these questions is this. Every other decision that you make in your life will be the result of an analytical process of weighing up the pros and cons and arriving at a rational answer. It may be the wrong answer, but at least it will be the result of rational deduction. Whenever any smoker weighs up the pros and cons of smoking, the answer is a dozen times over: 'STOP SMOKING! YOU ARE A MUG!' Therefore all smokers are smoking not because they want to or because they decided to but because they think they cannot stop. They have to brainwash themselves. They have to keep their heads in the sand.
The strange thing is smokers will arrange pacts among themselves, such as 'First one to give in pays the other 50', yet the thousands of pounds that they would save by stopping don't seem to affect them. This is because they are still thinking with the brainwashed mind of the smoker.
Just take the sand out of your eyes for a moment. Smoking is a chain reaction and a chain for life.
If you do not break that chain, you will remain a smoker for the rest of your life. Now estimate how much you think you will spend on smoking for the rest of your life. The amount will obviously vary with each individual, but for the purpose of this exercise let us assume it is 10,000.
You will shortly be making the decision to smoke your final cigarette (not yet, please - remember the initial instructions). 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 10,000.
If you think this is a trick way of looking at it, you are still kidding yourself. Just work out how much money you would have saved if you hadn't smoked your first cigarette.
If you see the argument as factual, ask yourself how you would feel if there were a cheque from Littlewood's Pools for $10,000 on your carpet tomorrow. You'd be dancing with delight! So start dancing! You are about to start receiving that bonus, and that's just one of the several marvelous gains you are about to receive.
During the withdrawal period you may be tempted to have just one final cigarette. It will help you to resist the temptation if you remind yourself it will cost you $10,000 (or whatever your estimate is)!
I've been making that offer on television and radio programmes for years. I still find it incredible that not one confirmed smoker has ever taken my offer up. There are members of my golf club whom I taunt every time I hear them complain about an increase in tobacco prices. In fact, ['m frightened that if I goad them too much, one of them will take me up on it. I'd lose a fortune if he did.
If you are in the company of happy, cheerful smokers who tell you how much they enjoy it, just tell them that you know an idiot who, if they pay him a years smoking money in advance, will provide them with free cigarettes for the rest of their lives. Perhaps you can find me someone who will take up the offer?
Occasionally I get into arguments with people whom I call confirmed smokers. By my definition a confirmed smoker is somebody who can afford it, doesn't believe it injures his health and isn't worried about the social stigma. (There are not many about nowadays.)
If he is a young man, I say to him,' I cannot believe you are not worried about the money you are spending.'
Usually his eyes light up. If I had attacked him on health grounds or on the social stigma, he would feel at a disadvantage, but on money -- ' Oh, I can afford it. It is only x per week and I think it is worth it. It is my only vice or pleasure,' etc.
If he is a twenty-per-day smoker I say to him, I still cannot believe you are not worried about the money. You are going to spend over 40,000 in your lifetime. What are you doing with that money?
You are not even setting light to it or throwing it away. You are actually using that money to ruin your physical health, to destroy your nerves and confidence, to suffer a lifetime of slavery, a lifetime of bad breath and stained teeth. Surely that must worry you?'
It is apparent at this point, particularly with young smokers, that they have never considered it a lifetime expense. 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.
However, because it is an argument the confirmed smoker will say, 'I can afford it. It is only so much a week.' He does an 'encyclopedia salesman' on himself, I then say, 'I will make you an offer you cannot refuse. You pay me ?1,000 now, and I will provide you with free cigarettes for the rest of your life'.
If I were offering to take over a 40,000 mortgage for ?1,000, the smoker would have my signature, on a piece of paper before I could move, and yet not one confirmed smoker (and please bear in mind 1 am not now talking to someone like yourself who plans to stop, I am talking to someone who has no intention of stopping) has ever taken me up on that offer. Why not?
Often at this point in my consultation, a smoker will say, 'Look, I am not really worried about the money aspect,' If you are thinking along these lines, ask yourself why you are not worried. Why in other aspects of life you will go to a great deal of trouble to save a few pounds here and there and yet spend thousands of pounds poisoning yourself and hang the expense?
The answer to these questions is this. Every other decision that you make in your life will be the result of an analytical process of weighing up the pros and cons and arriving at a rational answer. It may be the wrong answer, but at least it will be the result of rational deduction. Whenever any smoker weighs up the pros and cons of smoking, the answer is a dozen times over: 'STOP SMOKING! YOU ARE A MUG!' Therefore all smokers are smoking not because they want to or because they decided to but because they think they cannot stop. They have to brainwash themselves. They have to keep their heads in the sand.
The strange thing is smokers will arrange pacts among themselves, such as 'First one to give in pays the other 50', yet the thousands of pounds that they would save by stopping don't seem to affect them. This is because they are still thinking with the brainwashed mind of the smoker.
Just take the sand out of your eyes for a moment. Smoking is a chain reaction and a chain for life.
If you do not break that chain, you will remain a smoker for the rest of your life. Now estimate how much you think you will spend on smoking for the rest of your life. The amount will obviously vary with each individual, but for the purpose of this exercise let us assume it is 10,000.
You will shortly be making the decision to smoke your final cigarette (not yet, please - remember the initial instructions). 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 10,000.
If you think this is a trick way of looking at it, you are still kidding yourself. Just work out how much money you would have saved if you hadn't smoked your first cigarette.
If you see the argument as factual, ask yourself how you would feel if there were a cheque from Littlewood's Pools for $10,000 on your carpet tomorrow. You'd be dancing with delight! So start dancing! You are about to start receiving that bonus, and that's just one of the several marvelous gains you are about to receive.
During the withdrawal period you may be tempted to have just one final cigarette. It will help you to resist the temptation if you remind yourself it will cost you $10,000 (or whatever your estimate is)!
I've been making that offer on television and radio programmes for years. I still find it incredible that not one confirmed smoker has ever taken my offer up. There are members of my golf club whom I taunt every time I hear them complain about an increase in tobacco prices. In fact, ['m frightened that if I goad them too much, one of them will take me up on it. I'd lose a fortune if he did.
If you are in the company of happy, cheerful smokers who tell you how much they enjoy it, just tell them that you know an idiot who, if they pay him a years smoking money in advance, will provide them with free cigarettes for the rest of their lives. Perhaps you can find me someone who will take up the offer?
Self-imposed Slavery
Usually when smokers try to stop the main reasons are health, money, and social stigma. Part of the brainwashing of this awful drug is the sheer slavery.
Man fought hard in the last century to abolish slavery, and yet the smoker spends his life suffering self-imposed slavery. He seems to be oblivious to the fact that, when he is allowed to smoke, he wishes that he were a non-smoker. With most of the cigarettes we smoke in our lives, not only do we not enjoy them but we aren't even aware that we are smoking them. It is only after a period of abstinence that we actually suffer the delusion of enjoying a cigarette {e.g. the first in the morning, the one after a meal, etc.).
The only time that the cigarette becomes precious is when, we are trying to cut down or abstain, or when society tries to force us to (e.g. when attending churches, hospitals, supermarkets, theatres and so on).
The confirmed smoker should bear in mind that this trend will get worse and worse. Today it is Tube trains. Tomorrow it will be all public places.
Gone are the days when the smoker could enter a friend's or stranger's house and say, 'Do you mind if I smoke?' Nowadays the poor smoker, on entering a strange house, will search desperately for an ashtray and hope to find dogends in it. If there is no ashtray, he will generally try to last out, and if he cannot, he will ask for permission to smoke and is likely to be told: 'Smoke if you have to,' or 'Well, we would rather you didn't. The smell seems to linger on.'
The poor smoker, who was already feeling wretched, wants the ground to open up and swallow him.
I remember during my smoking days, every time I went to church, it was an ordeal. Even during my own daughter's wedding, when I should have been standing there a proud father, what was I doing? I was thinking, 'Let's get on with it, so that we can get outside and have a drag.'
It will help you to observe smokers on these occasions. They huddle together. There is never just one packet. There are twenty packets being thrust about, and the conversation is always the same.
'Do you smoke?'
'Yes, but have one of mine.'
'I will have one of yours later.'
They light up and take a deep drag, thinking, 'Aren't we lucky? We have got our little reward. The poor non-smoker hasn't got a reward.'
The 'poor' non-smoker doesn't need a reward. We were not designed to go through life systematically poisoning our own bodies. The pathetic thing is that even when smoking a cigarette, the smoker doesn't achieve the feeling of peace, confidence and tranquility that the non-smoker has experienced for the whole of his non-smoking life. The non-smoker isn't sitting in the church feeling agitated and wishing his life away. He can enjoy the whole of his life.
I can also remember playing indoor bowls in the winter and pretending to have a weak bladder in order to nip off for a puff. No, this wasn't a fourteen-year-old schoolboy but a forty-year-old chartered accountant. How pathetic. And even when I was back playing the game 1 wasn't enjoying it. I was looking forward to the finish so that I could smoke again, yet this was supposed to be my way of relaxing and enjoying my favorite hobby.
To me one of the tremendous joys of being a non-smoker is to be freed from that slavery, to be able to enjoy the whole of my life and not spend half of it craving for a cigarette and then, when I light up, wishing I didn't have to do it.
Smokers should bear in mind that when they are in the houses of non-smokers or even in the company of non-smokers, it is not the self-righteous non-smoker who is depriving them but the 'little monster'.
Man fought hard in the last century to abolish slavery, and yet the smoker spends his life suffering self-imposed slavery. He seems to be oblivious to the fact that, when he is allowed to smoke, he wishes that he were a non-smoker. With most of the cigarettes we smoke in our lives, not only do we not enjoy them but we aren't even aware that we are smoking them. It is only after a period of abstinence that we actually suffer the delusion of enjoying a cigarette {e.g. the first in the morning, the one after a meal, etc.).
The only time that the cigarette becomes precious is when, we are trying to cut down or abstain, or when society tries to force us to (e.g. when attending churches, hospitals, supermarkets, theatres and so on).
The confirmed smoker should bear in mind that this trend will get worse and worse. Today it is Tube trains. Tomorrow it will be all public places.
Gone are the days when the smoker could enter a friend's or stranger's house and say, 'Do you mind if I smoke?' Nowadays the poor smoker, on entering a strange house, will search desperately for an ashtray and hope to find dogends in it. If there is no ashtray, he will generally try to last out, and if he cannot, he will ask for permission to smoke and is likely to be told: 'Smoke if you have to,' or 'Well, we would rather you didn't. The smell seems to linger on.'
The poor smoker, who was already feeling wretched, wants the ground to open up and swallow him.
I remember during my smoking days, every time I went to church, it was an ordeal. Even during my own daughter's wedding, when I should have been standing there a proud father, what was I doing? I was thinking, 'Let's get on with it, so that we can get outside and have a drag.'
It will help you to observe smokers on these occasions. They huddle together. There is never just one packet. There are twenty packets being thrust about, and the conversation is always the same.
'Do you smoke?'
'Yes, but have one of mine.'
'I will have one of yours later.'
They light up and take a deep drag, thinking, 'Aren't we lucky? We have got our little reward. The poor non-smoker hasn't got a reward.'
The 'poor' non-smoker doesn't need a reward. We were not designed to go through life systematically poisoning our own bodies. The pathetic thing is that even when smoking a cigarette, the smoker doesn't achieve the feeling of peace, confidence and tranquility that the non-smoker has experienced for the whole of his non-smoking life. The non-smoker isn't sitting in the church feeling agitated and wishing his life away. He can enjoy the whole of his life.
I can also remember playing indoor bowls in the winter and pretending to have a weak bladder in order to nip off for a puff. No, this wasn't a fourteen-year-old schoolboy but a forty-year-old chartered accountant. How pathetic. And even when I was back playing the game 1 wasn't enjoying it. I was looking forward to the finish so that I could smoke again, yet this was supposed to be my way of relaxing and enjoying my favorite hobby.
To me one of the tremendous joys of being a non-smoker is to be freed from that slavery, to be able to enjoy the whole of my life and not spend half of it craving for a cigarette and then, when I light up, wishing I didn't have to do it.
Smokers should bear in mind that when they are in the houses of non-smokers or even in the company of non-smokers, it is not the self-righteous non-smoker who is depriving them but the 'little monster'.
среда, 14 октября 2009 г.
I'm not going to die
This was the magic that happened to me when I extinguished that final cigarette. Let me make one point quite clear in the analogy of the sore and the ointment. The sore isn't lung cancer, or arterial sclerosis, or emphysema, or angina, or chronic asthma, or bronchitis, or coronary heart disease. They are all in addition to the sore. It isn't the thousands of pounds that we burn, or the lifetime of bad breath and stained teeth, the lethargy, the wheezing and coughing, the years we spend choking ourselves and wishing we didn't, the times when we are being punished because we are not allowed to smoke. It isn't the lifetime of being despised by other people, or, worst of all, despising yourself. These are all in addition to the sore. The sore is what makes us close our minds to all these things. It's that panic feeling of "I want a cigarette". Non-smokers don't suffer from that feeling. The worst thing we ever suffer from is fear, and the greatest gain you will receive is to be rid of that fear.
It was as if a great mist had suddenly lifted from my mind. I could see so clearly that that panic feeling of wanting a cigarette wasn't some sort of weakness in me, or some magic quality in the cigarette. It was caused by the first cigarette; and each subsequent one, far from relieving the feeling, was causing it. At the same time I could see that all these other "happy" smokers were going through the same nightmare that I was. Not as bad as mine, but all putting up phoney arguments to try to justify their stupidity.
It was as if a great mist had suddenly lifted from my mind. I could see so clearly that that panic feeling of wanting a cigarette wasn't some sort of weakness in me, or some magic quality in the cigarette. It was caused by the first cigarette; and each subsequent one, far from relieving the feeling, was causing it. At the same time I could see that all these other "happy" smokers were going through the same nightmare that I was. Not as bad as mine, but all putting up phoney arguments to try to justify their stupidity.
Effects of cigarettes smoking
Cigarettes do not help social occasions; they destroy them. Having to hold a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, trying to dispose of the ash and the continual chain of dogends, trying not to breathe smoke and fumes into the face of the person you are conversing with, wondering whether they can smell your breath or see the stains on your teeth.
Not only is there nothing to give up, but there are marvelous positive gains. When smokers contemplate quitting smoking they tend to concentrate on health, money and social stigma. These are obviously valid and important issues, but I personally believe the greatest gains from stopping are psychological, and for varying reasons they include:
1 The return of your confidence and courage.
2 Freedom from the slavery.
3 Not to have to go through life suffering the awful black shadows at the back of your mind, knowing you are being despised by half of the population and, worst of all, despising yourself.
Not only is life better as a non-smoker but it is infinitely more enjoyable. I do not only mean you will be healthier and wealthier. I mean you will be happier and enjoy life far more.
The marvelous gains from being a non-smoker are discussed in the next few chapters.
Some smokers find it difficult to appreciate the concept of the 'void', and the following analogy may assist you.
Imagine having a cold sore on your face. I've got this marvelous ointment. I say to you, "Try this stuff". You rub the ointment on, and the sore disappears immediately. A week later it reappears. You ask, "Do you have any more of that ointment?" I say, "Keep the tube. You might need it again". You apply the ointment.
Hey presto, the sore disappears again. Every time the sore returns, it gets larger and more painful and the Interval gets shorter and shorter. Eventually the sore covers your whole face and is excruciatingly painful. It is now returning every half hour. You know that the ointment will remove it temporarily, but you are very worried. Will the sore eventually spread over your whole body? Will the interval disappear completely? You go to your doctor. He can't cure it. You try other things, but nothing helps except this marvelous ointment.
By now you are completely dependent on the ointment. You never go out without ensuring that you have a tube of the ointment with you. If you go abroad, you make sure that you take several tubes with you. Now, in addition to your worries about your health, I'm charging you 100 per tube. You have no choice but to pay.
You then read in the medical column of your newspaper that this isn't happening just to you; many other people have been suffering from the same problem. In fact, pharmacists have discovered that the ointment doesn't actually cure the sore. All that it does is to take the sore beneath the surface of the skin. It is the ointment that has caused the sore to grow. All you have to do to get rid of the sore is to stop using the ointment. The sore will eventually disappear in due course.
Not only is there nothing to give up, but there are marvelous positive gains. When smokers contemplate quitting smoking they tend to concentrate on health, money and social stigma. These are obviously valid and important issues, but I personally believe the greatest gains from stopping are psychological, and for varying reasons they include:
1 The return of your confidence and courage.
2 Freedom from the slavery.
3 Not to have to go through life suffering the awful black shadows at the back of your mind, knowing you are being despised by half of the population and, worst of all, despising yourself.
Not only is life better as a non-smoker but it is infinitely more enjoyable. I do not only mean you will be healthier and wealthier. I mean you will be happier and enjoy life far more.
The marvelous gains from being a non-smoker are discussed in the next few chapters.
Some smokers find it difficult to appreciate the concept of the 'void', and the following analogy may assist you.
Imagine having a cold sore on your face. I've got this marvelous ointment. I say to you, "Try this stuff". You rub the ointment on, and the sore disappears immediately. A week later it reappears. You ask, "Do you have any more of that ointment?" I say, "Keep the tube. You might need it again". You apply the ointment.
Hey presto, the sore disappears again. Every time the sore returns, it gets larger and more painful and the Interval gets shorter and shorter. Eventually the sore covers your whole face and is excruciatingly painful. It is now returning every half hour. You know that the ointment will remove it temporarily, but you are very worried. Will the sore eventually spread over your whole body? Will the interval disappear completely? You go to your doctor. He can't cure it. You try other things, but nothing helps except this marvelous ointment.
By now you are completely dependent on the ointment. You never go out without ensuring that you have a tube of the ointment with you. If you go abroad, you make sure that you take several tubes with you. Now, in addition to your worries about your health, I'm charging you 100 per tube. You have no choice but to pay.
You then read in the medical column of your newspaper that this isn't happening just to you; many other people have been suffering from the same problem. In fact, pharmacists have discovered that the ointment doesn't actually cure the sore. All that it does is to take the sore beneath the surface of the skin. It is the ointment that has caused the sore to grow. All you have to do to get rid of the sore is to stop using the ointment. The sore will eventually disappear in due course.
Gross stuff about smoking cigarettes
The thing that makes it difficult for us to give up is fear. The fear that we are being deprived of our pleasure or prop. The fear that certain pleasant situations will never be quite the same again. The fear of being unable to cope with stressful situations.
In other words, the effect of brainwashing is to delude us into believing that there is a weakness in us, or something inherent in the cigarette that we need, and that when we stop smoking there will be a void.
Get it clear in your mind: CIGARETTES DO NOT FILL A VOID. THEY CREATE IT!
These bodies of ours are the most sophisticated objects on this planet. Whether you believe in a creator, a process of natural selection or a combination of both, whatever being or system devised these bodies of ours, it is a thousand times more effective than man! Man cannot create the smallest living cell, let alone the miracle of eyesight, reproduction, our circulatory system or our brains. If the creator or process had intended us to smoke, we would have been provided with some filter device to keep the poisons out of our bodies and some sort of chimney.
Our bodies are, in fact, provided with failsafe warning devices in the form of the cough, dizziness, sickness, etc., and we ignore these at our peril.
The beautiful truth is - there is nothing to give up. Once you purge that little monster from your body and the brainwashing from your mind, you will neither want cigarettes nor need them.
Cigarettes do not improve meals. They ruin them. They destroy your sense of taste and smell.
Observe smokers in a restaurant, smoking between courses. It is not the meal that they are enjoying; they cannot wait for the meal to be over, as it is interfering with the cigarettes. Many of them do it in spite of the fact that they know it causes offence to non-smokers. It is not that smokers are generally inconsiderate people; it is just that they are miserable without the cigarette. They are between the devil and the deep blue sea. They either have to abstain and be miserable because they cannot smoke, or smoke and be miserable because they are offending other people, feel guilty and despise themselves for it.
Watch smokers at an official function where they have to wait for the loyal toast. Many of them develop weak bladders and have to sneak off for a crafty puff. That is when you see smoking for the true addiction that it is. Smokers do not smoke because they enjoy it. They do it because they are miserable without it.
Because many of us start smoking on social occasions when we are young and shy, we acquire the belief that we cannot enjoy social occasions without a cigarette. This is nonsense. Tobacco takes away your confidence. The greatest evidence of the fear that cigarettes instill in smokers is their effect on women. Practically all women are fastidious about their personal appearance. They wouldn't dream of appearing at a social func tion not immaculately turned out and smelling beautiful. Yet knowing that their breath smells like a stale ashtray does not seem to deter them in the least. I know that it bothers them greatly - many hate the smell of their own hair and clothes - yet it doesn't deter them. Such is the fear that this awful drug instills in the smoker.
In other words, the effect of brainwashing is to delude us into believing that there is a weakness in us, or something inherent in the cigarette that we need, and that when we stop smoking there will be a void.
Get it clear in your mind: CIGARETTES DO NOT FILL A VOID. THEY CREATE IT!
These bodies of ours are the most sophisticated objects on this planet. Whether you believe in a creator, a process of natural selection or a combination of both, whatever being or system devised these bodies of ours, it is a thousand times more effective than man! Man cannot create the smallest living cell, let alone the miracle of eyesight, reproduction, our circulatory system or our brains. If the creator or process had intended us to smoke, we would have been provided with some filter device to keep the poisons out of our bodies and some sort of chimney.
Our bodies are, in fact, provided with failsafe warning devices in the form of the cough, dizziness, sickness, etc., and we ignore these at our peril.
The beautiful truth is - there is nothing to give up. Once you purge that little monster from your body and the brainwashing from your mind, you will neither want cigarettes nor need them.
Cigarettes do not improve meals. They ruin them. They destroy your sense of taste and smell.
Observe smokers in a restaurant, smoking between courses. It is not the meal that they are enjoying; they cannot wait for the meal to be over, as it is interfering with the cigarettes. Many of them do it in spite of the fact that they know it causes offence to non-smokers. It is not that smokers are generally inconsiderate people; it is just that they are miserable without the cigarette. They are between the devil and the deep blue sea. They either have to abstain and be miserable because they cannot smoke, or smoke and be miserable because they are offending other people, feel guilty and despise themselves for it.
Watch smokers at an official function where they have to wait for the loyal toast. Many of them develop weak bladders and have to sneak off for a crafty puff. That is when you see smoking for the true addiction that it is. Smokers do not smoke because they enjoy it. They do it because they are miserable without it.
Because many of us start smoking on social occasions when we are young and shy, we acquire the belief that we cannot enjoy social occasions without a cigarette. This is nonsense. Tobacco takes away your confidence. The greatest evidence of the fear that cigarettes instill in smokers is their effect on women. Practically all women are fastidious about their personal appearance. They wouldn't dream of appearing at a social func tion not immaculately turned out and smelling beautiful. Yet knowing that their breath smells like a stale ashtray does not seem to deter them in the least. I know that it bothers them greatly - many hate the smell of their own hair and clothes - yet it doesn't deter them. Such is the fear that this awful drug instills in the smoker.
среда, 7 октября 2009 г.
Combination Cigarettes
No, a mosaic cigarette is not when you are smoking two or more at the unvaried time. When that happens, you Rather commence to wonder why you were smoking the primary one. I once burnt the promote of my hand trying to put a cigarette in my down in the dumps when there was already one there. Really, it is not quite as stupid as you come up with. As I have already said, in due course the cigarette ceases to disburden the withdrawal pangs, and level when you are smoking the cigarette there is notwithstanding something missing. This is the horrendous frustration of the chain smoker. Whenever you necessary the boost, you are already smoking, and this is why impenetrable smokers often accouter e come to drink or other drugs. But I digress.
A mixture cigarette is one occasioned by two or more of our established reasons for smoking, e.g. popular functions, parties, weddings, meals in restaurants. These are examples of occasions that are both stressful and relaxing. This puissance at first appear to be a contradiction, but it isn't. Any cultivate of socializing can be stressful, flatten with friends, and at the that having been said time you want to be enjoying yourself and be altogether relaxed.
There are situations where all four reasons are furnish at one and the same time. Driving can be one of these. If you are leaving a strained situation, like a afflict to the dentist or the doctor, you can now ease. At the same time driving each time involves an element of note. Your life is at define. You are also having to apply oneself. You may not be aware of the last two factors, but the act that they are collective unconscious doesn\'t mean they aren't there. And if you are stuck in a See trade jam, or have a long motorway dig, you may also be bored.
Another paragon example is a game of cards. If it's a unflinching like bridge or poker, you bear to concentrate. If you are losing more than you can supply, it is stressful. If you have lengthy periods of not getting a acceptable hand, it can be boring. And, while all this is current on, you are at leisure; you are supposed to be relaxing. During a high-spirited of cards, no matter how cold shoulder the withdrawal pangs are, all smokers wishes be chain-smoking, coextensive with otherwise casual smokers. The ashtrays desire fill and overflow in no then.
There'll be a true fall-out cloud primarily head height. If you were to tap any of the smokers on the pitch in and ask him if he was enjoying it, the answer would be "You take got to be joking." It is oft after nights like these, when we wake up with a throat like a cess pit that we conclusion to stop smoking.
These combine cigarettes are often express ones, the ones that we think about we\'ll miss most when we are contemplating stopping smoking. We dream up that life order never be quite as enjoyable again. In really, it is the same principle at available: these cigarettes unqualifiedly provide relief from withdrawal pangs, and at positive times we have greater indigence to relieve them than at others. Let us alter b transfer it quite clear. It is not the cigarette that is specialized; it is the occasion. Once we maintain removed the need for the cigarette, such occasions force become more enjoyable and the stressful situations less stressful. This make be explained in greater exhaustively in the next article.
A mixture cigarette is one occasioned by two or more of our established reasons for smoking, e.g. popular functions, parties, weddings, meals in restaurants. These are examples of occasions that are both stressful and relaxing. This puissance at first appear to be a contradiction, but it isn't. Any cultivate of socializing can be stressful, flatten with friends, and at the that having been said time you want to be enjoying yourself and be altogether relaxed.
There are situations where all four reasons are furnish at one and the same time. Driving can be one of these. If you are leaving a strained situation, like a afflict to the dentist or the doctor, you can now ease. At the same time driving each time involves an element of note. Your life is at define. You are also having to apply oneself. You may not be aware of the last two factors, but the act that they are collective unconscious doesn\'t mean they aren't there. And if you are stuck in a See trade jam, or have a long motorway dig, you may also be bored.
Another paragon example is a game of cards. If it's a unflinching like bridge or poker, you bear to concentrate. If you are losing more than you can supply, it is stressful. If you have lengthy periods of not getting a acceptable hand, it can be boring. And, while all this is current on, you are at leisure; you are supposed to be relaxing. During a high-spirited of cards, no matter how cold shoulder the withdrawal pangs are, all smokers wishes be chain-smoking, coextensive with otherwise casual smokers. The ashtrays desire fill and overflow in no then.
There'll be a true fall-out cloud primarily head height. If you were to tap any of the smokers on the pitch in and ask him if he was enjoying it, the answer would be "You take got to be joking." It is oft after nights like these, when we wake up with a throat like a cess pit that we conclusion to stop smoking.
These combine cigarettes are often express ones, the ones that we think about we\'ll miss most when we are contemplating stopping smoking. We dream up that life order never be quite as enjoyable again. In really, it is the same principle at available: these cigarettes unqualifiedly provide relief from withdrawal pangs, and at positive times we have greater indigence to relieve them than at others. Let us alter b transfer it quite clear. It is not the cigarette that is specialized; it is the occasion. Once we maintain removed the need for the cigarette, such occasions force become more enjoyable and the stressful situations less stressful. This make be explained in greater exhaustively in the next article.
воскресенье, 16 августа 2009 г.
Watching smokers
Remember seeing, say, Steve Davis and Hurricane Higgins on television? Notice the difference?
Which of the two was more relaxed? Start watching smokers, particularly when they are not allowed to smoke. You' ll find that they have their hands near their mouths, or they are twiddling their thumbs, or tapping their feet, or fiddling with their hair, or clenching their jaw, Smokers aren't relaxed. They've forgotten what it feels like to be completely relaxed. That's one of the many joys you have to come.
The whole business of smoking can be likened to a fly being caught in a pitcher plant. To begin with, the fly is eating the nectar. At some imperceptible stage the plant begins to eat the fly.
Isn't it time you climbed out of that plant?
Which of the two was more relaxed? Start watching smokers, particularly when they are not allowed to smoke. You' ll find that they have their hands near their mouths, or they are twiddling their thumbs, or tapping their feet, or fiddling with their hair, or clenching their jaw, Smokers aren't relaxed. They've forgotten what it feels like to be completely relaxed. That's one of the many joys you have to come.
The whole business of smoking can be likened to a fly being caught in a pitcher plant. To begin with, the fly is eating the nectar. At some imperceptible stage the plant begins to eat the fly.
Isn't it time you climbed out of that plant?
Relaxations
Most smokers think that a cigarette helps to relax them. The truth is that nicotine is a chemical stimulant. If you take your pulse and then smoke two consecutive cigarettes, there will be a marked increase in your pulse rate.
One of the favorite cigarettes for most smokers is the one after a meal. A meal is a time of day when we stop working; we sit down and relax, relieve our hunger and thirst and are then completely satisfied. However, the poor smoker cannot relax, as he has another hunger to satisfy. He thinks of the cigarette as the icing on the cake, but it is the little monster that needs feeding.
The truth is that the nicotine addict can never be completely relaxed, and as you go through life it gets worse.
The most unrelaxed people on this planet aren't non-smokers but fifty-year-old business executives who chain-smoke, are permanently coughing and spluttering, have high blood pressure and are constantly irritable. At this point cigarettes cease to relieve even partially the symptoms that they have created.
I can remember when I was a young accountant, bringing up a family. One of my children would do something wrong and I would lose my temper to an extent that was out of all proportion to what he had done. I really believed that I had an evil demon in my make-up. I now know that I had, however it wasn't some inherent flaw in my character, but the little nicotine monster that was creating the problem. During those times I thought I had all the problems in the world, hut 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. The one thing that controlled me was the cigarette. The sad thing is that even today I can't convince my children that it was the smoking that caused me to be so irritable. Every time they hear a smoker trying to justify his addiction, the message is ' Oh, they calm me. They help me to relax.'
A couple of years ago, the adoption authorities threatened to prevent smokers from adopting children. A man rang up, irate. He said, 'You are completely wrong. I can remember when I was a child, if 1 had a contentious matter to raise with my mother, I would wait until she lit a cigarette because she was more relaxed then.' Why couldn't he talk to his mother when she wasn't smoking a cigarette? Why are smokers so unrelaxed when they are not smoking, even after a meal at a restaurant? Why are non-smokers completely relaxed then? Why are smokers not able to relax without a cigarette? The next time you are in a supermarket and you see a young housewife screaming at a child, just watch her leave. The first thing she will do is to light a cigarette.
One of the favorite cigarettes for most smokers is the one after a meal. A meal is a time of day when we stop working; we sit down and relax, relieve our hunger and thirst and are then completely satisfied. However, the poor smoker cannot relax, as he has another hunger to satisfy. He thinks of the cigarette as the icing on the cake, but it is the little monster that needs feeding.
The truth is that the nicotine addict can never be completely relaxed, and as you go through life it gets worse.
The most unrelaxed people on this planet aren't non-smokers but fifty-year-old business executives who chain-smoke, are permanently coughing and spluttering, have high blood pressure and are constantly irritable. At this point cigarettes cease to relieve even partially the symptoms that they have created.
I can remember when I was a young accountant, bringing up a family. One of my children would do something wrong and I would lose my temper to an extent that was out of all proportion to what he had done. I really believed that I had an evil demon in my make-up. I now know that I had, however it wasn't some inherent flaw in my character, but the little nicotine monster that was creating the problem. During those times I thought I had all the problems in the world, hut 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. The one thing that controlled me was the cigarette. The sad thing is that even today I can't convince my children that it was the smoking that caused me to be so irritable. Every time they hear a smoker trying to justify his addiction, the message is ' Oh, they calm me. They help me to relax.'
A couple of years ago, the adoption authorities threatened to prevent smokers from adopting children. A man rang up, irate. He said, 'You are completely wrong. I can remember when I was a child, if 1 had a contentious matter to raise with my mother, I would wait until she lit a cigarette because she was more relaxed then.' Why couldn't he talk to his mother when she wasn't smoking a cigarette? Why are smokers so unrelaxed when they are not smoking, even after a meal at a restaurant? Why are non-smokers completely relaxed then? Why are smokers not able to relax without a cigarette? The next time you are in a supermarket and you see a young housewife screaming at a child, just watch her leave. The first thing she will do is to light a cigarette.
воскресенье, 9 августа 2009 г.
Concentration
Cigarettes do not help concentration. That is just another illusion.
When you are trying to concentrate, you automatically try to avoid distractions like feeling cold or hot. The smoker is already suffering: that little monster wants his fix. So when he wants to concentrate he doesn't even have to think about it. He automatically lights up, partially ending the craving, gets on with the matter in hand and has already forgotten that he is smoking.
Cigarettes do not help concentration. They help to ruin it because after a while, even while smoking a cigarette, the smoker's withdrawal pangs cease to be completely relieved. The smoker then increases his intake, and the problem then increases.
Concentration is also affected adversely for another reason. The progressive blocking up of the arteries and veins with poisons starves the brain of oxygen. In fact, your concentration and inspiration will be greatly improved as this process is reversed.
It was the concentration aspect that prevented me from succeeding when using the willpower method. I could put up with the irritability and bad temper, but when I really needed to concentrate on something difficult, I had to have that cigarette. I can well remember the panic I felt when I discovered that I was not allowed to smoke during my accountancy exams, I was already a chainsmoker and convinced that 1 would not be able to concentrate for three hours without a cigarette.
But I passed the exams, and I can't even remember thinking about smoking at the time, so, when it came to the crunch, it obviously didn't bother me.
The loss of concentration that smokers suffer when they try to stop smoking is not, in fact, due to the physical withdrawal from nicotine. When you are a smoker, you have mental blocks. When you have one, what do you do? If you are not already smoking one, you light a cigarette. That doesn't cure the mental block, so then what do you do? You do what you have to do: you get on with it, just as nonsmokers do. 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.
If you believe that smoking is a genuine aid to concentration, then worrying about it will guarantee that you won't be able to concentrate. 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.
When I extinguished my last cigarette I went overnight from a hundred a day to zero without any apparent loss of concentration.
When you are trying to concentrate, you automatically try to avoid distractions like feeling cold or hot. The smoker is already suffering: that little monster wants his fix. So when he wants to concentrate he doesn't even have to think about it. He automatically lights up, partially ending the craving, gets on with the matter in hand and has already forgotten that he is smoking.
Cigarettes do not help concentration. They help to ruin it because after a while, even while smoking a cigarette, the smoker's withdrawal pangs cease to be completely relieved. The smoker then increases his intake, and the problem then increases.
Concentration is also affected adversely for another reason. The progressive blocking up of the arteries and veins with poisons starves the brain of oxygen. In fact, your concentration and inspiration will be greatly improved as this process is reversed.
It was the concentration aspect that prevented me from succeeding when using the willpower method. I could put up with the irritability and bad temper, but when I really needed to concentrate on something difficult, I had to have that cigarette. I can well remember the panic I felt when I discovered that I was not allowed to smoke during my accountancy exams, I was already a chainsmoker and convinced that 1 would not be able to concentrate for three hours without a cigarette.
But I passed the exams, and I can't even remember thinking about smoking at the time, so, when it came to the crunch, it obviously didn't bother me.
The loss of concentration that smokers suffer when they try to stop smoking is not, in fact, due to the physical withdrawal from nicotine. When you are a smoker, you have mental blocks. When you have one, what do you do? If you are not already smoking one, you light a cigarette. That doesn't cure the mental block, so then what do you do? You do what you have to do: you get on with it, just as nonsmokers do. 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.
If you believe that smoking is a genuine aid to concentration, then worrying about it will guarantee that you won't be able to concentrate. 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.
When I extinguished my last cigarette I went overnight from a hundred a day to zero without any apparent loss of concentration.
Boredom
If you are already smoking at this moment, you will probably have already forgotten about it until I reminded you.
Another fallacy about smoking is that cigarettes relieve boredom. Boredom is a frame of mind.
When you smoke a cigarette your mind isn't saying, 'I'm smoking a cigarette. I'm smoking a cigarette.'
The only time that happens is when you have been deprived for a long time or are trying to cut down, or during those first few cigarettes after a failed attempt to stop.
The true situation is this: when you are addicted to nicotine and are not smoking, there is something missing. If you have something to occupy your mind that isn't stressful, you can go for long periods without being bothered by the absence of the drug. However, when you are bored there's nothing to take your mind off it. so you feed the monster. When you are indulging yourself (i.e. not trying to stop or cut down), even lighting up becomes subconscious. Even pipe smokers and roll-your-own smokers can perform this ritual automatically. If any smoker tries to remember the cigarettes he has smoked during the day, he can only remember a small proportion of them - e.g. the first of the day or the one after a meal.
The truth is that cigarettes tend to increase boredom indirectly because they make you feel lethargic, and instead of undertaking some energetic activity smokers tend to lounge around, bored, relieving their withdrawal pangs.
This is why countering the brainwashing is so important. Because it's a fact that smokers tend to smoke when they are bored and that we've been told since birth that smoking relieves boredom, it doesn't occur to us to question the fact. We've also been brainwashed into believing that chewing gum aids relaxation. It is a fact that when under stress people tend to grind their teeth. All chewing gum does is to give you a logical reason to grind your teeth. Next time you watch someone chewing gum, observe them closely and ask yourself whether they looked relaxed or tense. Observe smokers who are smoking because they are bored. They still looked bored. The cigarette doesn't relieve the boredom.
As an ex-chain-smoker I can assure you that there are no more boring activities in life than lighting up one filthy cigarette after another, day in day out, year in year out.
Another fallacy about smoking is that cigarettes relieve boredom. Boredom is a frame of mind.
When you smoke a cigarette your mind isn't saying, 'I'm smoking a cigarette. I'm smoking a cigarette.'
The only time that happens is when you have been deprived for a long time or are trying to cut down, or during those first few cigarettes after a failed attempt to stop.
The true situation is this: when you are addicted to nicotine and are not smoking, there is something missing. If you have something to occupy your mind that isn't stressful, you can go for long periods without being bothered by the absence of the drug. However, when you are bored there's nothing to take your mind off it. so you feed the monster. When you are indulging yourself (i.e. not trying to stop or cut down), even lighting up becomes subconscious. Even pipe smokers and roll-your-own smokers can perform this ritual automatically. If any smoker tries to remember the cigarettes he has smoked during the day, he can only remember a small proportion of them - e.g. the first of the day or the one after a meal.
The truth is that cigarettes tend to increase boredom indirectly because they make you feel lethargic, and instead of undertaking some energetic activity smokers tend to lounge around, bored, relieving their withdrawal pangs.
This is why countering the brainwashing is so important. Because it's a fact that smokers tend to smoke when they are bored and that we've been told since birth that smoking relieves boredom, it doesn't occur to us to question the fact. We've also been brainwashed into believing that chewing gum aids relaxation. It is a fact that when under stress people tend to grind their teeth. All chewing gum does is to give you a logical reason to grind your teeth. Next time you watch someone chewing gum, observe them closely and ask yourself whether they looked relaxed or tense. Observe smokers who are smoking because they are bored. They still looked bored. The cigarette doesn't relieve the boredom.
As an ex-chain-smoker I can assure you that there are no more boring activities in life than lighting up one filthy cigarette after another, day in day out, year in year out.
воскресенье, 2 августа 2009 г.
Stress during stop smoking
I am referring not only to the great tragedies of life but also to the minor stresses, the socializing, the telephone call, the anxieties of the housewife with no isy young children and so on.
Let us use the telephone conversation as an example. For most people the telephone is slightly stressful, particularly for the business man. Most calls aren't from satisfied customers or your boss congratulating you. There's usually some sort of aggro - something going wrong or somebody making demands. At that time the smoker, if he isn't already doing so, will light up a cigarette. He doesn't know why he does this, but he does know that for some reason it appears to help.
What has actually happened is this. Without being conscious of it, he has already been suffering aggravation (i.e. the withdrawal pangs). By partially relieving that aggravation at the same time as normal stress, the total stress is reduced and the smoker gets a boost. At this point the boost is not, in fact, an illusion. The smoker will feel better than before he lit the cigarette. However, even when smoking that cigarette the smoker is more tense than if he were a non-smoker because the more you go into the drug, the more it knocks you down and the less it restores you when you smoke.
I promised no shock treatment. In the example I am about to give, I am not trying to shock you, I am merely emphasizing that cigarettes destroy your nerves rather than relax them.
Try to imagine getting to the stage where a doctor tells you that unless you stop smoking he is going to have to remove your legs. Just for a moment pause and try to visualize life without your legs. Try to imagine the frame of mind of a man who, issued with that warning, actually continues smoking and then has his legs removed.
I used to hear stories like that and dismissed them as cranky. In fact, I used to wish a doctor would tell me that: then I would have stopped. Yet I was already fully expecting any day to have a brain hemorrhage and lose not only my legs but my life, I didn't think of myself as a crank, just a heavy smoker.
Such stories are not cranky. That is what this awful drug does to you. As you go through life it systematically takes away your nerve and courage. The more it takes your courage away, the more you are deluded into believing the cigarette is doing the opposite. We have all heard of the panic that overtakes smokers when they are out late at night and in fear of running out of cigarettes. Nonsmokers do not suffer from it. The cigarette causes that feeling. At the same time, as you go through life the cigarette not only destroys your nerves but is a powerful poison, progressively destroying your physical health. By the time the smoker reaches the stage at which it is killing him, he believes the cigarette is his courage and cannot face life without it.
Get it clear in your head that the cigarette is not relieving your nerves; it is slowly but steadily destroying them. One of the great gains of breaking the habit is the return of your confidence and self-assurance.
Let us use the telephone conversation as an example. For most people the telephone is slightly stressful, particularly for the business man. Most calls aren't from satisfied customers or your boss congratulating you. There's usually some sort of aggro - something going wrong or somebody making demands. At that time the smoker, if he isn't already doing so, will light up a cigarette. He doesn't know why he does this, but he does know that for some reason it appears to help.
What has actually happened is this. Without being conscious of it, he has already been suffering aggravation (i.e. the withdrawal pangs). By partially relieving that aggravation at the same time as normal stress, the total stress is reduced and the smoker gets a boost. At this point the boost is not, in fact, an illusion. The smoker will feel better than before he lit the cigarette. However, even when smoking that cigarette the smoker is more tense than if he were a non-smoker because the more you go into the drug, the more it knocks you down and the less it restores you when you smoke.
I promised no shock treatment. In the example I am about to give, I am not trying to shock you, I am merely emphasizing that cigarettes destroy your nerves rather than relax them.
Try to imagine getting to the stage where a doctor tells you that unless you stop smoking he is going to have to remove your legs. Just for a moment pause and try to visualize life without your legs. Try to imagine the frame of mind of a man who, issued with that warning, actually continues smoking and then has his legs removed.
I used to hear stories like that and dismissed them as cranky. In fact, I used to wish a doctor would tell me that: then I would have stopped. Yet I was already fully expecting any day to have a brain hemorrhage and lose not only my legs but my life, I didn't think of myself as a crank, just a heavy smoker.
Such stories are not cranky. That is what this awful drug does to you. As you go through life it systematically takes away your nerve and courage. The more it takes your courage away, the more you are deluded into believing the cigarette is doing the opposite. We have all heard of the panic that overtakes smokers when they are out late at night and in fear of running out of cigarettes. Nonsmokers do not suffer from it. The cigarette causes that feeling. At the same time, as you go through life the cigarette not only destroys your nerves but is a powerful poison, progressively destroying your physical health. By the time the smoker reaches the stage at which it is killing him, he believes the cigarette is his courage and cannot face life without it.
Get it clear in your head that the cigarette is not relieving your nerves; it is slowly but steadily destroying them. One of the great gains of breaking the habit is the return of your confidence and self-assurance.
No smoke for enjoyment
As I explained earlier, smokers think they smoke for enjoyment, relaxation or some sort of boost. In fact, this an illusion. The actual reason is the relief of withdrawal pangs.
In the early days we use the cigarette as a social prop. We can take it or leave it. However, the subtle chain has started. Our subconscious mind begins to learn that a cigarette taken at certain times tends to be pleasurable.
The more we become hooked on the drug, the greater the need to relieve the withdrawal pangs and the further the cigarette drags you down, the more you are fooled into believing it is doing the opposite. It all happens so slowly, so gradually, you are not even aware of it. Each day you feel no different from the day before. Most smokers don't even realize they are hooked until they actually try to stop, and even then many won't admit to it, A few stalwarts just keep then- heads in the sand all their lives, trying to convince themselves and other people that they enjoy it.
I have had the following conversation with hundreds of teenagers.
ME: You realize that nicotine is a drug and that the only reason why you are smoking is that you cannot stop.
T: Nonsense! I enjoy it. If I didn't, I would stop. ME: Just stop for a week to prove to me you can if you want to.
T: No need. I enjoy it. If I wanted to stop, I would. ME: Just stop for a week to prove to yourself you are not hooked.
T: What's the point? I enjoy it.
As already stated, smokers tend to relieve their withdrawal pangs at times of stress, boredom, concentration, relaxation or a combination of these. This point is explained in greater detail in thenext few chapters.
In the early days we use the cigarette as a social prop. We can take it or leave it. However, the subtle chain has started. Our subconscious mind begins to learn that a cigarette taken at certain times tends to be pleasurable.
The more we become hooked on the drug, the greater the need to relieve the withdrawal pangs and the further the cigarette drags you down, the more you are fooled into believing it is doing the opposite. It all happens so slowly, so gradually, you are not even aware of it. Each day you feel no different from the day before. Most smokers don't even realize they are hooked until they actually try to stop, and even then many won't admit to it, A few stalwarts just keep then- heads in the sand all their lives, trying to convince themselves and other people that they enjoy it.
I have had the following conversation with hundreds of teenagers.
ME: You realize that nicotine is a drug and that the only reason why you are smoking is that you cannot stop.
T: Nonsense! I enjoy it. If I didn't, I would stop. ME: Just stop for a week to prove to me you can if you want to.
T: No need. I enjoy it. If I wanted to stop, I would. ME: Just stop for a week to prove to yourself you are not hooked.
T: What's the point? I enjoy it.
As already stated, smokers tend to relieve their withdrawal pangs at times of stress, boredom, concentration, relaxation or a combination of these. This point is explained in greater detail in thenext few chapters.
понедельник, 29 июня 2009 г.
Tips on stopping smoking
How or why do we start smoking in the first place? To understand this fully you need to examine the powerful effect of the subconscious mind or, as I call it, the 'sleeping partner'.
We all tend to think we are intelligent, dominant human beings determining our paths through life. In fact, 99 per cent of our make- up is moulded. We are a product of the society that we are brought up in -the sort of clothes we wear, the houses we live in, our basic life patterns, even those matters on which we tend to differ, e.g. Labor or Conservative governments. It is no coincidence that Labor supporters tend to come from the working classes and Conservatives from the middle and upper classes. The subconscious is an extremely powerful influence in our lives, and even in matters of fact rather than opinion millions of people can be deluded. Before Columbus sailed round the world the majority of people knew it to be flat. Today we know it is round. If I wrote a dozen books trying to persuade you that it was fiat, I could not do it, yet how many of us have been into space to see the ball? Even if you have flown or sailed round the world, how do you know that you were not traveling in a circle above a flat surface?
Advertising men know well the power of suggestion over the subconscious mind, hence the large posters the smoker is hit with as he drives around, the adverts in every magazine. You think they are a waste of money? That they do not persuade you to buy cigarettes? You are wrong! 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 marvelous warm glow of a brandy.' You will find that even people who dislike brandy will join you.
From our earliest years our subconscious minds are bombarded daily with inform at ion telling us that cigarettes relax us and give us confidence and courage and that the most precious thing on this earth is a cigarette. You think I exaggerate? Whenever you see a cartoon or film or play in which people are about to be executed or shot, what is their last request? That's right, a cigarette. The impact of this does not register on our conscious minds, but the sleeping partner has time to absorb it. What the message is really saying is, 'The most precious thing on this earth, my last thought and action, will be the smoking of a cigarette.' In every war film the injured man is given a cigarette. You think that things have changed recently? No. our children are still being bombarded by large hoardings and magazine adverts. Cigarette advertising is supposed to be banned on television nowadays, yet during peak viewing hours the world's top snooker players and darts players are seen constantly puffing away. The progra mmes are usually sponsored by the tobacco giants, and this is the most sinister trend of all in today's advertising: the link with sporting occasions and the jet set. Grand Prix racing cars modeled and even named after cigarette brand names or is it the other way round?
There are even plugs on television nowadays depicting a naked couple sharing a cigarette in bed after having sex. The implications are obvious. How my admiration goes out to the advertisers of the small cigar, not for their motives but for the brilliance of their campaign, whereby a man is about to face death or disaster his balloon is on fire and about to crash, or the sidecar of his motorbike is about to crash into a river, or he is Columbus and his ship is about to go over the edge of the world. Not a word is spoken. Soft music plays. He lights up a cigar; a look of sheer bliss covers his face. The conscious mind may not realize that the smoker is even watching the advert, but the 'sleeping partner' is patiently digesting the obvious implications.
True, there is pub licity the other way - the cancer scares, the legs being amputated, the badbreath campaigns - but these do not actually stop people smoking. Logically they should, but the fact is they do not. They do not even prevent youngsters from starting. All the years that 1 remained a smoker I honestly believed that, had I known of the links between lung cancer and cigarette smoking, I would never have become a smoker. The truth is that it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference.
The trap is the same today as when Sir Walter Raleigh fell into it. All the anti-smoking campaigns just help to add to the confusion. Even the products themselves, those lovely shining packets that lure you into trying their contents, contain a deadly warning on their sides. What smoker ever reads it, let alone brings himself to face the implications of it?
I believe that a leading cigarette manufacturer is actually using the Government Health Warning to sell its products. Many of the scenes include frightening features such as spiders, dragonflies and the Venus flytrap. The health warning is now so large and bold that the smoker cannot avoid it, however hard he tries. The pang of fear that the smoker suffers prompts an association of ideas with the glossy gold packet.
Ironically, the most powerful force in this brainwashing is the smoker himself. It is a fallacy that smokers are weak-willed and physically weak specimens. You have to be physically strong in order to cope with the poison.
This is one of the reasons why smokers refuse to accept the overwhelming statistics that prove that smoking cripples your health. Everyone knows of an Uncle Fred who smoked forty a day, never had a day's illness in his life, and lived to eighty. They refuse even to consider the hundreds of other smokers who are cut down in their prime or the fact that Uncle Fred might still be alive if he hadn't been a smoker.
If you do a small survey among your friends and colleagues, you will find that most smokers are, in fact, strong-willed people. They tend to be self-employed, business executives or in certain specialized professions, such as doctors, lawyers, policemen, teachers, salesmen, nurses, secretaries, housewives with children, etc. - in other words, anybody leading a stressful existence. The main delusion of smokers is that smoking relieves stress and tends to be associated with the dominant type, the type that takes on responsibility and stress, and, of course, that is the type that we admire and therefore tend to copy. Another group that tends to get hooked are people in monotonous jobs because the other main reason for smoking is boredom. However, the idea that smoking relieves boredom is also an illusion, I am afraid.
The extent of the brainwashing is quite incredible. As a society we get all uptight about glue-sniffing, heroin addiction, etc. Actual deaths from glue-sniffing do not amount to ten per annum, and deaths from heroin are less than a hundred a year in this country.
There is another drug, nicotine, on which over 60 per cent of us become hooked at some time in our lives and the majority spend the rest of their lives paying for it through the nose. Most of their spare money goes on cigarettes and hundreds of thousands of people have their lives ruined every year because they became hooked. It is the No. I killer in society, including road accidents, fires, etc. Why is it that we regard glue-sniffing and heroin addiction as such great evils, while the drug that we spend most of our money on and is actually killing us we used to regard a few years ago as a perfectly acceptable social habit? In recent years it has been considered a slightly unsociable habit that may injure our health but is legal and on sale in glossy packets in every newsagent, pub, club, garage and restaurant. The biggest vested interest is our own government. It makes 8,000,000,000 per year out of smokers, and the tobacco companies spend over 100,000,000 per year in promotion alone.
You need to start building resistance to this brainwashing, just as if you were buying a car from a secondhand dealer. You would be nodding politely hut you would not believe a word the man was saying.
Start looking behind these glossy packets at the filth and poison beneath. Do not be fooled by the cut-glass ashtrays or the gold lighter or the millions who have been conned. Start asking yourself:
Why am I doing it?
Do I really need to?
NO, OF COURSE YOU DON'T.
1 find this brainwashing aspect the most difficult of all to explain. Why is it that an otherwise rational, intelligent human being becomes a complete imbecile about his own addiction? It pains me to confess that out of the thousands of people that I have assisted in kicking the habit, I was the biggest idiot of all.
Not only did I reach a hundred a day myself, but my father was a heavy smoker. He was a strong man, cut down in his prime due to smoking. I can remember watching him when I was a boy; he would be coughing and spluttering in the mornings. I could see he wasn't enjoying it and it was so obvious to me that something evil had got possession of him. I can remember saying to my mother, 'Don't ever let me become a smoker'.
At the age of fifteen I was a physical- fitness fanatic. Sport was my life and 1 was full of courage and confidence. If anybody had said to me in those days that I would end up smoking a hundred cigarettes a day, I would have gambled my lifetime's earnings that it would not happen, and I would have given any odds that had been asked.
At the age of forty I was a physical and mental cigarette junky. I had reached the stage where I couldn't carry out the most mundane physical or mental act without first lighting up. With most smokers the triggers are the normal stresses of life, like answering the telephone or socializing. I couldn't even change a television programme or a light bulb without lighting up.
I knew it was killing me. There was no way I could kid myself otherwise. But why I couldn't see what it was doing to me mentally 1 cannot understand. It was almost jumping up and biting me on the nose. The ridiculous thing is that most smokers suffer the delusion at some time in their life that they enjoy a cigarette. I never suffered that delusion, I smoked because 1 thought it helped me to concentrate and because it helped my nerves. Now I am a non-smoker, the most difficult part is trying to believe that those days actually happened. It's like awakening from a nightmare, and that is about the size of it. Nicotine is a drug, and your senses are drugged - your taste buds, your sense of smell. The worst aspect of smoking isn't the injury to your health or pocket, it is the warping of the mind. You search for any plausible excuse to go on smoking.
I remember at one stage switching to a pipe, after a failed attempt to kick cigarettes, in the belief that it was less harmful and would cut down my intake.
Some of those pipe tobaccos are absolutely foul. The aroma can be pleasant but, to start with, they are awful to smoke. I can remember that for about three months the tip of my tongue was as sore as a boil. A liquid brown goo collects in the bottom of the bowl of the pipe. Occasionally you unwittingly bring the bowl above the horizontal and before you realize it you have swallowed a mouthful of the filthy stuff. The result is usually to throw up immediately, no matter what company you are in.
It took me three months to learn to cope with the pipe, hut what 1 cannot understand is why I didn't sit down sometime during that three months and ask myself why I was subjecting myself to the torture.
Of course, once they learn to cope with the pipe, no one appears more contented than pipe smokers. Most of them are convinced that they smoke because they enjoy the pipe. But why did they have to work so hard to learn to like it when they were perfectly happy without it?
The answer is that once you have become addicted to nicotine, the brainwashing is increased. Your subconscious mind knows that the little monster has to be fed, and you block everything else from your mind. As I have already stated, it is fear that keeps people smoking, the fear of that empty, insecure feeling that you get when you stop supplying the nicotine. Because you are not aware of it doesn't moan it isn't there. You don't have to understand it any more than a cat needs to understand where the under-floor hot-water pipes are. It just knows that if it sits in a certain place it gets the feeling of warmth.
It is the brainwashing that is the main difficulty in giving up smoking. The brainwashing of our upbringing in society reinforced with the brainwashing from our own addiction and, most powerful of all, the brainwashing of our friends, relatives and colleagues.
Did you notice that up to now I've frequently referred to 'giving up' smoking, I used the expression at the beginning of the previous paragraph. This is a classic example of the brainwashing. The expression implies a genuine sacrifice. The beautiful truth is that there is absolutely nothing to give up. On the contrary, you will be freeing yourself from a terrible disease and achieving marvelous positive gains. We are going to start removing this brainwashing now. From this point on, no longer will we refer to 'giving up', but to stopping, quitting or the true position: ESCAPING!
The only thing that persuades us to smoke in the first place is all the other people doing it. We feel we are missing out. We work so hard to become hooked, yet nobody ever finds out what they have been missing. But every time we see another smoker he reassures us that there must be something in it, otherwise he wouldn't be doing it. Even when he has kicked the habit, the ex-smoker feels he is being deprived when a smoker lights up at a party or other social function. He feels safe. He can have just one. And, before he knows it, he is hooked again.
This brainwashing is very powerful and you need to be aware of its effects. Many older smokers will remember the Paul Temple detective series that was a very popular radio programme after the war. One of the series was dealing with addiction to marijuana, commonly known as 'pot' or 'grass'.
Unbeknown to the smoker, wicked men were selling cigarettes that contained 'pot'. There were no harmful effects. People merely became addicted and had to go on buying the cigarettes. (During my consultations literally hundreds of smokers have admitted to trying 'pot'. None of them said they became hooked on it.) I was about seven years old when I listened to the programme. It was my first knowledge of drug addiction. The concept of addiction, being compelled to go on taking the drug, filled me with horror, and even to this day, in spite of the fact that I am fairly convinced that 'pot' is not addictive. I would not dare take one puff of marijuana. How ironic that I should have ended up a junky on the world's No. 1 addictive drug. If only Paul Temple had warned me about the cigarette itself. How ironic too that over forty years later mankind spends thousands of pounds on cancer research, yet millions are spent persuading healthy teenagers to become hooked on the filthy weed, our own government having the largest vested interest.
We are about to remove the brainwashing. It is not the non-smoker who is being deprived but the poor smoker who is forfeiting a lifetime of:
HEALTH
ENERGY
WEALTH
PEACE OF MIND
CONFIDENCE
COURAGE
SELF-RESPECT
HAPPINESS
FREEDOM.
And what does he gain from these considerable sacrifices?
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING-except the illusion of trying to get back to the state of peace, tranquility and confidence that the non-smoker enjoys all the time.
We all tend to think we are intelligent, dominant human beings determining our paths through life. In fact, 99 per cent of our make- up is moulded. We are a product of the society that we are brought up in -the sort of clothes we wear, the houses we live in, our basic life patterns, even those matters on which we tend to differ, e.g. Labor or Conservative governments. It is no coincidence that Labor supporters tend to come from the working classes and Conservatives from the middle and upper classes. The subconscious is an extremely powerful influence in our lives, and even in matters of fact rather than opinion millions of people can be deluded. Before Columbus sailed round the world the majority of people knew it to be flat. Today we know it is round. If I wrote a dozen books trying to persuade you that it was fiat, I could not do it, yet how many of us have been into space to see the ball? Even if you have flown or sailed round the world, how do you know that you were not traveling in a circle above a flat surface?
Advertising men know well the power of suggestion over the subconscious mind, hence the large posters the smoker is hit with as he drives around, the adverts in every magazine. You think they are a waste of money? That they do not persuade you to buy cigarettes? You are wrong! 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 marvelous warm glow of a brandy.' You will find that even people who dislike brandy will join you.
From our earliest years our subconscious minds are bombarded daily with inform at ion telling us that cigarettes relax us and give us confidence and courage and that the most precious thing on this earth is a cigarette. You think I exaggerate? Whenever you see a cartoon or film or play in which people are about to be executed or shot, what is their last request? That's right, a cigarette. The impact of this does not register on our conscious minds, but the sleeping partner has time to absorb it. What the message is really saying is, 'The most precious thing on this earth, my last thought and action, will be the smoking of a cigarette.' In every war film the injured man is given a cigarette. You think that things have changed recently? No. our children are still being bombarded by large hoardings and magazine adverts. Cigarette advertising is supposed to be banned on television nowadays, yet during peak viewing hours the world's top snooker players and darts players are seen constantly puffing away. The progra mmes are usually sponsored by the tobacco giants, and this is the most sinister trend of all in today's advertising: the link with sporting occasions and the jet set. Grand Prix racing cars modeled and even named after cigarette brand names or is it the other way round?
There are even plugs on television nowadays depicting a naked couple sharing a cigarette in bed after having sex. The implications are obvious. How my admiration goes out to the advertisers of the small cigar, not for their motives but for the brilliance of their campaign, whereby a man is about to face death or disaster his balloon is on fire and about to crash, or the sidecar of his motorbike is about to crash into a river, or he is Columbus and his ship is about to go over the edge of the world. Not a word is spoken. Soft music plays. He lights up a cigar; a look of sheer bliss covers his face. The conscious mind may not realize that the smoker is even watching the advert, but the 'sleeping partner' is patiently digesting the obvious implications.
True, there is pub licity the other way - the cancer scares, the legs being amputated, the badbreath campaigns - but these do not actually stop people smoking. Logically they should, but the fact is they do not. They do not even prevent youngsters from starting. All the years that 1 remained a smoker I honestly believed that, had I known of the links between lung cancer and cigarette smoking, I would never have become a smoker. The truth is that it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference.
The trap is the same today as when Sir Walter Raleigh fell into it. All the anti-smoking campaigns just help to add to the confusion. Even the products themselves, those lovely shining packets that lure you into trying their contents, contain a deadly warning on their sides. What smoker ever reads it, let alone brings himself to face the implications of it?
I believe that a leading cigarette manufacturer is actually using the Government Health Warning to sell its products. Many of the scenes include frightening features such as spiders, dragonflies and the Venus flytrap. The health warning is now so large and bold that the smoker cannot avoid it, however hard he tries. The pang of fear that the smoker suffers prompts an association of ideas with the glossy gold packet.
Ironically, the most powerful force in this brainwashing is the smoker himself. It is a fallacy that smokers are weak-willed and physically weak specimens. You have to be physically strong in order to cope with the poison.
This is one of the reasons why smokers refuse to accept the overwhelming statistics that prove that smoking cripples your health. Everyone knows of an Uncle Fred who smoked forty a day, never had a day's illness in his life, and lived to eighty. They refuse even to consider the hundreds of other smokers who are cut down in their prime or the fact that Uncle Fred might still be alive if he hadn't been a smoker.
If you do a small survey among your friends and colleagues, you will find that most smokers are, in fact, strong-willed people. They tend to be self-employed, business executives or in certain specialized professions, such as doctors, lawyers, policemen, teachers, salesmen, nurses, secretaries, housewives with children, etc. - in other words, anybody leading a stressful existence. The main delusion of smokers is that smoking relieves stress and tends to be associated with the dominant type, the type that takes on responsibility and stress, and, of course, that is the type that we admire and therefore tend to copy. Another group that tends to get hooked are people in monotonous jobs because the other main reason for smoking is boredom. However, the idea that smoking relieves boredom is also an illusion, I am afraid.
The extent of the brainwashing is quite incredible. As a society we get all uptight about glue-sniffing, heroin addiction, etc. Actual deaths from glue-sniffing do not amount to ten per annum, and deaths from heroin are less than a hundred a year in this country.
There is another drug, nicotine, on which over 60 per cent of us become hooked at some time in our lives and the majority spend the rest of their lives paying for it through the nose. Most of their spare money goes on cigarettes and hundreds of thousands of people have their lives ruined every year because they became hooked. It is the No. I killer in society, including road accidents, fires, etc. Why is it that we regard glue-sniffing and heroin addiction as such great evils, while the drug that we spend most of our money on and is actually killing us we used to regard a few years ago as a perfectly acceptable social habit? In recent years it has been considered a slightly unsociable habit that may injure our health but is legal and on sale in glossy packets in every newsagent, pub, club, garage and restaurant. The biggest vested interest is our own government. It makes 8,000,000,000 per year out of smokers, and the tobacco companies spend over 100,000,000 per year in promotion alone.
You need to start building resistance to this brainwashing, just as if you were buying a car from a secondhand dealer. You would be nodding politely hut you would not believe a word the man was saying.
Start looking behind these glossy packets at the filth and poison beneath. Do not be fooled by the cut-glass ashtrays or the gold lighter or the millions who have been conned. Start asking yourself:
Why am I doing it?
Do I really need to?
NO, OF COURSE YOU DON'T.
1 find this brainwashing aspect the most difficult of all to explain. Why is it that an otherwise rational, intelligent human being becomes a complete imbecile about his own addiction? It pains me to confess that out of the thousands of people that I have assisted in kicking the habit, I was the biggest idiot of all.
Not only did I reach a hundred a day myself, but my father was a heavy smoker. He was a strong man, cut down in his prime due to smoking. I can remember watching him when I was a boy; he would be coughing and spluttering in the mornings. I could see he wasn't enjoying it and it was so obvious to me that something evil had got possession of him. I can remember saying to my mother, 'Don't ever let me become a smoker'.
At the age of fifteen I was a physical- fitness fanatic. Sport was my life and 1 was full of courage and confidence. If anybody had said to me in those days that I would end up smoking a hundred cigarettes a day, I would have gambled my lifetime's earnings that it would not happen, and I would have given any odds that had been asked.
At the age of forty I was a physical and mental cigarette junky. I had reached the stage where I couldn't carry out the most mundane physical or mental act without first lighting up. With most smokers the triggers are the normal stresses of life, like answering the telephone or socializing. I couldn't even change a television programme or a light bulb without lighting up.
I knew it was killing me. There was no way I could kid myself otherwise. But why I couldn't see what it was doing to me mentally 1 cannot understand. It was almost jumping up and biting me on the nose. The ridiculous thing is that most smokers suffer the delusion at some time in their life that they enjoy a cigarette. I never suffered that delusion, I smoked because 1 thought it helped me to concentrate and because it helped my nerves. Now I am a non-smoker, the most difficult part is trying to believe that those days actually happened. It's like awakening from a nightmare, and that is about the size of it. Nicotine is a drug, and your senses are drugged - your taste buds, your sense of smell. The worst aspect of smoking isn't the injury to your health or pocket, it is the warping of the mind. You search for any plausible excuse to go on smoking.
I remember at one stage switching to a pipe, after a failed attempt to kick cigarettes, in the belief that it was less harmful and would cut down my intake.
Some of those pipe tobaccos are absolutely foul. The aroma can be pleasant but, to start with, they are awful to smoke. I can remember that for about three months the tip of my tongue was as sore as a boil. A liquid brown goo collects in the bottom of the bowl of the pipe. Occasionally you unwittingly bring the bowl above the horizontal and before you realize it you have swallowed a mouthful of the filthy stuff. The result is usually to throw up immediately, no matter what company you are in.
It took me three months to learn to cope with the pipe, hut what 1 cannot understand is why I didn't sit down sometime during that three months and ask myself why I was subjecting myself to the torture.
Of course, once they learn to cope with the pipe, no one appears more contented than pipe smokers. Most of them are convinced that they smoke because they enjoy the pipe. But why did they have to work so hard to learn to like it when they were perfectly happy without it?
The answer is that once you have become addicted to nicotine, the brainwashing is increased. Your subconscious mind knows that the little monster has to be fed, and you block everything else from your mind. As I have already stated, it is fear that keeps people smoking, the fear of that empty, insecure feeling that you get when you stop supplying the nicotine. Because you are not aware of it doesn't moan it isn't there. You don't have to understand it any more than a cat needs to understand where the under-floor hot-water pipes are. It just knows that if it sits in a certain place it gets the feeling of warmth.
It is the brainwashing that is the main difficulty in giving up smoking. The brainwashing of our upbringing in society reinforced with the brainwashing from our own addiction and, most powerful of all, the brainwashing of our friends, relatives and colleagues.
Did you notice that up to now I've frequently referred to 'giving up' smoking, I used the expression at the beginning of the previous paragraph. This is a classic example of the brainwashing. The expression implies a genuine sacrifice. The beautiful truth is that there is absolutely nothing to give up. On the contrary, you will be freeing yourself from a terrible disease and achieving marvelous positive gains. We are going to start removing this brainwashing now. From this point on, no longer will we refer to 'giving up', but to stopping, quitting or the true position: ESCAPING!
The only thing that persuades us to smoke in the first place is all the other people doing it. We feel we are missing out. We work so hard to become hooked, yet nobody ever finds out what they have been missing. But every time we see another smoker he reassures us that there must be something in it, otherwise he wouldn't be doing it. Even when he has kicked the habit, the ex-smoker feels he is being deprived when a smoker lights up at a party or other social function. He feels safe. He can have just one. And, before he knows it, he is hooked again.
This brainwashing is very powerful and you need to be aware of its effects. Many older smokers will remember the Paul Temple detective series that was a very popular radio programme after the war. One of the series was dealing with addiction to marijuana, commonly known as 'pot' or 'grass'.
Unbeknown to the smoker, wicked men were selling cigarettes that contained 'pot'. There were no harmful effects. People merely became addicted and had to go on buying the cigarettes. (During my consultations literally hundreds of smokers have admitted to trying 'pot'. None of them said they became hooked on it.) I was about seven years old when I listened to the programme. It was my first knowledge of drug addiction. The concept of addiction, being compelled to go on taking the drug, filled me with horror, and even to this day, in spite of the fact that I am fairly convinced that 'pot' is not addictive. I would not dare take one puff of marijuana. How ironic that I should have ended up a junky on the world's No. 1 addictive drug. If only Paul Temple had warned me about the cigarette itself. How ironic too that over forty years later mankind spends thousands of pounds on cancer research, yet millions are spent persuading healthy teenagers to become hooked on the filthy weed, our own government having the largest vested interest.
We are about to remove the brainwashing. It is not the non-smoker who is being deprived but the poor smoker who is forfeiting a lifetime of:
HEALTH
ENERGY
WEALTH
PEACE OF MIND
CONFIDENCE
COURAGE
SELF-RESPECT
HAPPINESS
FREEDOM.
And what does he gain from these considerable sacrifices?
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING-except the illusion of trying to get back to the state of peace, tranquility and confidence that the non-smoker enjoys all the time.
суббота, 6 июня 2009 г.
Nicotine Addiction
Nicotine, a colorless, oily compound, is the drug contained in tobacco that addicts the smoker. It is the fastest addictive drug known to mankind, and it can take just one cigarette to become hooked.
Every puff on a cigarette delivers, via the lungs to the brain, a small dose of nicotine that acts more rapidly than the dose of heroin the addict injects into his veins.
If there are twenty puffs for you in a cigarette, you receive twenty doses of the drug with just one cigarette.
Nicotine is a quick-acting drug, and levels in the bloodstream fall quickly to about half within thirty minutes of smoking a cigarette and to a quarter within an hour of finishing a cigarette. This explains why most smokers average about twenty per day.
As soon as the smoker extinguishes the cigarette, the nicotine rapidly starts to leave the body and the smoker begins to suffer withdrawal pangs.
I must at this point dispel a common illusion that smokers have about withdrawal pangs. Smokers think that withdrawal pangs are the terrible trauma they suffer when they try or are forced to stop smoking. These are, in fact, mainly mental; the smoker is feeling deprived of his pleasure or prop. I will explain more about this later.
The actual pangs of withdrawal from nicotine are so subtle that most smokers have lived and died without even realizing they are drug addicts. When we use the term 'nicotine addict' we think we just 'got into the habit'. Most smokers have a horror of drugs, yet that's exactly what they are - drug addicts. Fortunately it is an easy drug to kick, but you need first to accept that you are addicted.
There is no physical pain in the withdrawal from nicotine. It is merely an empty, restless feeling, the feeling of something missing, which is why many smokers think it is something to do with their hands. If it is prolonged, the smoker becomes nervous, insecure, agitated, lacking in confidence and irritable. It is like hunger - for a poison, NICOTINE, Within seven seconds of lighting a cigarette fresh nicotine is supplied and the craving ends, resulting in the feeling of relaxation and confidence that the cigarette gives to the smoker. In the early days, when we first start smoking, the withdrawal pangs and their relief are so slight that we are not even aware that they exist. When we begin to smoke regularly we think it is because we've either come to enjoy them or got into the 'habit'. The truth is we're already hooked; we do not realize it, but that little nicotine monster is already inside our stomach and every now and again we have to feed it. All smokers start smoking for stupid reasons. Nobody has to.
The only reason why anybody
continues smoking, whether they be a casual or a heavy smoker, is to feed that little monster. The whole business of smoking is a series of conundrums. All smokers know at heart that they are mugs and have been trapped by something evil. However, I think the most pathetic aspect about smoking is that the enjoyment that the smoker gets from a cigarette is the pleasure of trying to get back to the state of peace, tranquility and confidence that his body had before he became hooked in the first place.
You know that feeling when a neighbor’s burglar alarm has been ringing all day, or there has been some other minor, persistent aggrava tion. Then the noise suddenly stops - that marvelous feeling of peace and tranquility is experienced. It is not really peace but the ending of the aggravation.
Before we start the nicotine chain, our bodies are complete. We then force nicotine into the body, and when we put that cigarette out and the nicotine starts to leave, we suffer withdrawal pangs - not physical pain, just an empty feeling. We are not even aware that it exists, but it is like a dripping tap inside our bodies. Our rational minds do not understand it. They do not need to. All we know is that we want a cigarette, and when we light it the craving goes, and for the moment we are content and confident again just as we were before we became addicted. However, the satisfaction is only temporary because, in order to relieve the craving, you have to put more nicotine into the body. As soon as you extinguish that cigarette the craving starts again, and so the chain goes on. It is a chain for life - UNLESS YOU BREAK IT.
The whole business of smoking is like wearing tight shoes just to obtain the pleasure you feel when you take them off. There are three main reasons why smokers cannot see things that way.
1 From birth we have been subjected to massive brainwashing telling us that smokers receive immense pleasure and/or a crutch from smoking. Why should we not believe them? Why else would they waste all that money and take such horrendous risks?
2 Because the physical withdrawal from nicotine involves no actual pain but is merely an empty, insecure feeling, inseparable from hunger or normal stress, and because those are the very times that we tend to light up. we tend to regard the feeling as normal.
3 However the main reason that smokers fail to see smoking in its true light, is because it works back to front. 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.
It is this reverse process that makes all drugs difficult to kick. Picture the panic state of a heroin addict who has no heroin. Now picture the utter joy when that addict can finally plunge a hypodermic needle into his vein. Can you visualize someone actually getting pleasure by injecting themselves, or does the mere thought fill you with horror? Non-heroin addicts don't suffer that panic feeling. The heroin doesn't relieve it. On the contrary, it causes it. Non-smokers don't suffer the empty feeling of needing a cigarette or start to panic when the supply runs out. Non-smokers cannot understand how smokers can possibly obtain pleasure from sticking those filthy things in their mouths, setting light to them and actually inhaling the filth into their lungs. And do you know something? Smokers cannot understand why they do it either.
We talk about smoking being relaxing or giving satisfaction. But how can you be satisfied unless you were dissatisfied in the first place? Why don't non-smokers suffer from this dissatisfied state and why, after a meal, when non-smokers are completely relaxed, are smokers completely unrelaxed until they have satisfied that little nicotine monster?
Forgive me if I dwell on this subject for a moment. The main reason that smokers find it difficult to quit is that they believe that they are giving up a genuine pleasure or crutch. It is absolutely essential to understand that you are giving up nothing whatsoever.
The best way to understand the subtleties of the nicotine trap is to compare it with eating. If we are in the habit of eating regular meals, we are not aware of being hungry between meals. Only if the meal is delayed are we aware of being hungry, and even then, there is no physical pain, just an empty, insecure feeling which we know as: 'I need to eat.' And the process of satisfying our hunger is a very pleasant pastime.
Smoking appears to be almost identical. The empty, insecure feeling which we know as: 'wanting or needing a cigarette' is identical to a hunger for food, although one will not satisfy the other. Like hunger, there is no physical pain and the feeling is so imperceptible that we are not even aware of it between cigarettes. It's only if we want to light up and aren't allowed to do so that we become aware of any discomfort. But when we do light up we feel satisfied.
It is this similarity to eating which helps to fool smokers into believing that they receive some genuine pleasure. Some smokers find it very difficult to grasp that there is no pleasure or crutch, whatsoever to smoking. Some argue: 'How can you say there is no crutch? You tell me when I light up that I'll feel less nervous than before.'
Although eating and smoking appear to be very similar. In fact they are exact opposites:
1 You eat to survive and to prolong your life, whereas smoking shortens your life.
2 Food does genuinely taste good, and eating is a genuinely pleasant experience that we can enjoy throughout our lives, whereas smoking involves breathing foul and poisonous fumes into your lungs.
3 Eating doesn't create hunger and genuinely relieves it, whereas the first cigarette starts the craving for nicotine and each subsequent one, far from relieving it, ensures that you suffer it for the rest of life.
This is an opportune moment to dispel another common myth about smoking - that smoking is a habit. Is eating a habit? If you think so, try breaking it completely. No, to describe eating as a habit would be the same as describing breathing as a habit. Both are essential for survival. It is true that different people are in the habit of satisfying their hunger at different times and with varying types of food. But eating itself is not a habit. Neither is smoking. The only reason any smoker lights a cigarette is to try to end the empty, insecure feeling that the previous cigarette created. It is true that different smokers are in the habit of trying to relieve their withdrawal pangs at different times, but smoking itself is not a habit.
Society frequently refers to the smoking habit and in this book, for convenience, I also refer to the 'habit'. However, be constantly aware that smoking is not habit, on the contrary it is no more nor less than DRUG ADDICTION!
When we start to smoke we have to force ourselves to learn to cope with it. Before we know it, we are not only buying them regularly but we have to have them. If we don't, panic sets in, and as we go through life we tend to smoke more and more.
This is because, as with any other drug, the body tends to become immune to the effects of nicotine and our intake tends to increase. After quite a short period of smoking the cigarette ceases to relieve completely the withdrawal pangs that it creates, so that when you light up a cigarette you feel better than you did a moment before, but you are in fact more nervous and less relaxed than you would be as a non-smoker, even when you are actually smoking the cigarette. The practice is even more ridiculous than wearing tight shoes because as you go through life an increasing amount of the discomfort remains even when the shoes are removed.
The position is even worse because, once the cigarette is extinguished, the nicotine rapidly begins to leave the body, which explains why, in stressful situations, the smoker tends to chain smoke.
As I said, the 'habit' doesn't exist. The real reason why every smoker goes on smoking is because of that little monster inside his stomach. Every now and again he has to feed it. The smoker himself will decide when he does that, and it tends to he on four types of occasion or a combination of them.
They are:
BOREDOM/CONCENTRATION - two complete opposites! STRESS/RELAXATION-two complete opposites!
What magic drug can suddenly reverse the very effect it had twenty minutes before? If you think about it, what other types of occasion are there in our lives; apart from sleep? The truth is that smoking neither relieves boredom and stress nor promotes concentration and relaxation. It is all just illusion.
Apart from being a drug, nicotine is also a powerful poison and is used in insecticides (look it up in your dictionary). The nicotine content of just one cigarette, if injected directly into a vein, would kill you. In fact, tobacco contains many poisons, including carbon monoxide, and the tobacco plant is the same genus as 'deadly nightshade'.
In case you have visions of switching to a pipe or to cigars, I should make it quite clear that the content of this book applies to all tobacco and any substance that contains nicotine, including gum, patches, nasal sprays and inhalators.
The human body is the most sophisticated object on our planet . No species, even the lowest amoeba or worm, can survive without knowing the difference between food and poison.
Through a process of natural selection over thousand of years, our minds and bodies have developed techniques for distinguishing between food and poison and fail- safe methods for ejecting the latter.
All human beings are averse to the smell and taste of tobacco until they become hooked. If you blow diluted tobacco into the face of any animal or child before it becomes hooked, it will cough and splutter.
When we smoked that first cigarette, inhaling resulted in a coughing fit, or if we smoked too many the first time, we experienced a dizzy feeling or actual physical sickness. It was our body telling us, 'YOU ARE FEEDING ME POISON. STOP DOING IT: This is the stage that often decides whether we become smokers or not. It is a fallacy that physically weak and mentally weak- willed people become smokers. The lucky ones are those who find that first cigarette repulsive; physic ally their lungs cannot cope with it, and they are cured for life, Or, alternatively, they are not mentally prepared to go through the severe learning process of trying to inhale without coughing. To me this is the most tragic part of this whole business. How hard we worked to become hooked, and 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.
Why do they not learn from us? Then again, why did we no t learn from our parents?
Many smokers believe they enjoy the taste and smell of the tobacco. It is an illusion. What we are actually doing when we learn to smoke is teaching our bodies to become immune to the bad smell and taste in order to get our fix, like heroin addicts who think that they enjoy injecting themselves. The withdrawal pangs from heroin are relatively severe, and all they are really enjoying is the ritual of relieving those pangs.
The smoker teaches himself to shut his mind to the bad taste and smell to get his 'fix'. Ask a smoker who believes he smokes only because he enjoys the taste and smell of tobacco, 'If you cannot get your normal brand of cigarette and can only obtain a brand you find dis tasteful, do you stop smoking?' No way. A smo ker will smoke old rope rather than abstain, and it doesn't matter if you switch to roll - ups, mentholated cigarettes, cigars or a pipe; to begin with they taste awful but if you persevere you will learn to like them. Smokers will even try to keep smoking during colds, flu, sore throats, bronchitis and emphysema.
Enjoyment has nothing to do with it. If it did, no one would smoke more than one cigarette. There are even thousands of ex-smokers hooked on that filthy nicotine chewing gum that doctors prescribe, and many of them are still smoking.
During my consultations some smokers find it alarming to realize they are drug addicts and think it will make it even more difficult to stop. In fact, it is all good news for two important reasons:
1 The reason why most of us carry on smoking is because, although we know the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, we believe that there is something in the cigarette that we actually enjoy or that it is some sort of prop. We feel that after we stop smoking there will he a void, that certain situations in our life will never be quite the same. This is an illusion. The fact is the cigarette gives nothing; it only takes away and then partially restores to create the illusion. I will explain this in more detail in a later chapter.
2 Although it is the world's most powerful drug because of the speed with which you become hooked, you are never badly hooked. Because it is a quick-acting drug it takes only three weeks for 99 per cent of the nicotine to leave your body, and the actual withdrawal pangs are so mild that most smokers have lived and died without ever realizing that they have suffered them.
You will quite rightly ask why it is that many smokers find it so difficult to stop, go through months of torture and spend the rest of their lives pining for a cigarette at odd times. The answer is the second reason why we smoke - the brainwashing. The chemical addiction is easy to cope with. Most smokers go all night without a cigarette. The withdrawal pangs do not even wake them up.
Many smokers will actually leave the bedroom before they light that first cigarette; many will have breakfast first; many will wait until they arrive at work. They can suffer ten hours' withdrawal pangs, and it doesn't bother them, but if they went ten hours during the day without a cigarette, they'd be tearing their hair out.
Many smokers will buy a new car nowadays and refrain from smoking in it. Many will visit theatres, supermarkets, churches, etc., and not being able to smoke doesn't bother them. Even on the tube trains there have been no riots. Smokers are almost pleased for someone or something to force them to stop smoking.
Nowadays many smokers will automatically refrain from smoking in the home of, or merely in the company of non-smokers with little discomfort to themselves. In fact, most smokers have extended periods during which they abstain without effort. Even in my case I would quite happily relax all evening without a cigarette. In the later years as a smoker I actually used to look forward to the evenings when I could stop choking myself (what a ridiculous 'habit').
The chemical addiction is easy to cope with, even when you are still addicted, and there are thousands of smokers who remain casual smokers all their lives. They are just as heavily addicted as the heavy smoker. There are even heavy smokers who have kicked the 'habit' but will have an occasional cigar, and that keeps them addicted.
As I say, the actual nicotine addiction is not the main problem. It just acts like a catalyst to keep our minds confused over the real problem: the brainwashing,
It may be of consolation to lifelong and heavy smokers to know that it is just as easy for them to stop as casual smokers. In a peculiar way. it is easier. The further you go along with the 'habit', the more it drags you down and the greater the gain when you stop.
It, may be of further consolation for you to know that the rumors that occasionally circulate (e.g. 'It takes seven years for the "gunge" to leave your body' or 'Every cigarette you smoke takes five minutes off your life') are untrue.
Do not think the bad effects of smoking are exaggerated. If anything, they are sadly understated, but the truth is the 'five minutes' rule is obviously an estimation and applies only if you contract one of the killer diseases or just 'gunge' yourself to a standstill.
In fact, the 'gunge' never leaves your body completely. If there are smokers about, it is in the atmosphere, and even non-smokers acquire a small percentage. However, these bodies of ours are incredible machines and have enormous powers of recovery, providing you haven't already triggered off one of the irreversible diseases. If you stop now, your body will recover within a matter of a few weeks, almost as if you had never been a smoker.
As I have said, it is never too late to stop. I have helped to cure many smokers in their fifties and sixties and even a few in their seventies and eighties. 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.
The further it drags you down, the greater the relief. When I finally stopped I went straight from a hundred a day to ZERO, and didn't have one bad pang. In fact, it was actually enjoyable, even during the withdrawal period. But we must remove the brainwashing.
Every puff on a cigarette delivers, via the lungs to the brain, a small dose of nicotine that acts more rapidly than the dose of heroin the addict injects into his veins.
If there are twenty puffs for you in a cigarette, you receive twenty doses of the drug with just one cigarette.
Nicotine is a quick-acting drug, and levels in the bloodstream fall quickly to about half within thirty minutes of smoking a cigarette and to a quarter within an hour of finishing a cigarette. This explains why most smokers average about twenty per day.
As soon as the smoker extinguishes the cigarette, the nicotine rapidly starts to leave the body and the smoker begins to suffer withdrawal pangs.
I must at this point dispel a common illusion that smokers have about withdrawal pangs. Smokers think that withdrawal pangs are the terrible trauma they suffer when they try or are forced to stop smoking. These are, in fact, mainly mental; the smoker is feeling deprived of his pleasure or prop. I will explain more about this later.
The actual pangs of withdrawal from nicotine are so subtle that most smokers have lived and died without even realizing they are drug addicts. When we use the term 'nicotine addict' we think we just 'got into the habit'. Most smokers have a horror of drugs, yet that's exactly what they are - drug addicts. Fortunately it is an easy drug to kick, but you need first to accept that you are addicted.
There is no physical pain in the withdrawal from nicotine. It is merely an empty, restless feeling, the feeling of something missing, which is why many smokers think it is something to do with their hands. If it is prolonged, the smoker becomes nervous, insecure, agitated, lacking in confidence and irritable. It is like hunger - for a poison, NICOTINE, Within seven seconds of lighting a cigarette fresh nicotine is supplied and the craving ends, resulting in the feeling of relaxation and confidence that the cigarette gives to the smoker. In the early days, when we first start smoking, the withdrawal pangs and their relief are so slight that we are not even aware that they exist. When we begin to smoke regularly we think it is because we've either come to enjoy them or got into the 'habit'. The truth is we're already hooked; we do not realize it, but that little nicotine monster is already inside our stomach and every now and again we have to feed it. All smokers start smoking for stupid reasons. Nobody has to.
The only reason why anybody
continues smoking, whether they be a casual or a heavy smoker, is to feed that little monster. The whole business of smoking is a series of conundrums. All smokers know at heart that they are mugs and have been trapped by something evil. However, I think the most pathetic aspect about smoking is that the enjoyment that the smoker gets from a cigarette is the pleasure of trying to get back to the state of peace, tranquility and confidence that his body had before he became hooked in the first place.
You know that feeling when a neighbor’s burglar alarm has been ringing all day, or there has been some other minor, persistent aggrava tion. Then the noise suddenly stops - that marvelous feeling of peace and tranquility is experienced. It is not really peace but the ending of the aggravation.
Before we start the nicotine chain, our bodies are complete. We then force nicotine into the body, and when we put that cigarette out and the nicotine starts to leave, we suffer withdrawal pangs - not physical pain, just an empty feeling. We are not even aware that it exists, but it is like a dripping tap inside our bodies. Our rational minds do not understand it. They do not need to. All we know is that we want a cigarette, and when we light it the craving goes, and for the moment we are content and confident again just as we were before we became addicted. However, the satisfaction is only temporary because, in order to relieve the craving, you have to put more nicotine into the body. As soon as you extinguish that cigarette the craving starts again, and so the chain goes on. It is a chain for life - UNLESS YOU BREAK IT.
The whole business of smoking is like wearing tight shoes just to obtain the pleasure you feel when you take them off. There are three main reasons why smokers cannot see things that way.
1 From birth we have been subjected to massive brainwashing telling us that smokers receive immense pleasure and/or a crutch from smoking. Why should we not believe them? Why else would they waste all that money and take such horrendous risks?
2 Because the physical withdrawal from nicotine involves no actual pain but is merely an empty, insecure feeling, inseparable from hunger or normal stress, and because those are the very times that we tend to light up. we tend to regard the feeling as normal.
3 However the main reason that smokers fail to see smoking in its true light, is because it works back to front. 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.
It is this reverse process that makes all drugs difficult to kick. Picture the panic state of a heroin addict who has no heroin. Now picture the utter joy when that addict can finally plunge a hypodermic needle into his vein. Can you visualize someone actually getting pleasure by injecting themselves, or does the mere thought fill you with horror? Non-heroin addicts don't suffer that panic feeling. The heroin doesn't relieve it. On the contrary, it causes it. Non-smokers don't suffer the empty feeling of needing a cigarette or start to panic when the supply runs out. Non-smokers cannot understand how smokers can possibly obtain pleasure from sticking those filthy things in their mouths, setting light to them and actually inhaling the filth into their lungs. And do you know something? Smokers cannot understand why they do it either.
We talk about smoking being relaxing or giving satisfaction. But how can you be satisfied unless you were dissatisfied in the first place? Why don't non-smokers suffer from this dissatisfied state and why, after a meal, when non-smokers are completely relaxed, are smokers completely unrelaxed until they have satisfied that little nicotine monster?
Forgive me if I dwell on this subject for a moment. The main reason that smokers find it difficult to quit is that they believe that they are giving up a genuine pleasure or crutch. It is absolutely essential to understand that you are giving up nothing whatsoever.
The best way to understand the subtleties of the nicotine trap is to compare it with eating. If we are in the habit of eating regular meals, we are not aware of being hungry between meals. Only if the meal is delayed are we aware of being hungry, and even then, there is no physical pain, just an empty, insecure feeling which we know as: 'I need to eat.' And the process of satisfying our hunger is a very pleasant pastime.
Smoking appears to be almost identical. The empty, insecure feeling which we know as: 'wanting or needing a cigarette' is identical to a hunger for food, although one will not satisfy the other. Like hunger, there is no physical pain and the feeling is so imperceptible that we are not even aware of it between cigarettes. It's only if we want to light up and aren't allowed to do so that we become aware of any discomfort. But when we do light up we feel satisfied.
It is this similarity to eating which helps to fool smokers into believing that they receive some genuine pleasure. Some smokers find it very difficult to grasp that there is no pleasure or crutch, whatsoever to smoking. Some argue: 'How can you say there is no crutch? You tell me when I light up that I'll feel less nervous than before.'
Although eating and smoking appear to be very similar. In fact they are exact opposites:
1 You eat to survive and to prolong your life, whereas smoking shortens your life.
2 Food does genuinely taste good, and eating is a genuinely pleasant experience that we can enjoy throughout our lives, whereas smoking involves breathing foul and poisonous fumes into your lungs.
3 Eating doesn't create hunger and genuinely relieves it, whereas the first cigarette starts the craving for nicotine and each subsequent one, far from relieving it, ensures that you suffer it for the rest of life.
This is an opportune moment to dispel another common myth about smoking - that smoking is a habit. Is eating a habit? If you think so, try breaking it completely. No, to describe eating as a habit would be the same as describing breathing as a habit. Both are essential for survival. It is true that different people are in the habit of satisfying their hunger at different times and with varying types of food. But eating itself is not a habit. Neither is smoking. The only reason any smoker lights a cigarette is to try to end the empty, insecure feeling that the previous cigarette created. It is true that different smokers are in the habit of trying to relieve their withdrawal pangs at different times, but smoking itself is not a habit.
Society frequently refers to the smoking habit and in this book, for convenience, I also refer to the 'habit'. However, be constantly aware that smoking is not habit, on the contrary it is no more nor less than DRUG ADDICTION!
When we start to smoke we have to force ourselves to learn to cope with it. Before we know it, we are not only buying them regularly but we have to have them. If we don't, panic sets in, and as we go through life we tend to smoke more and more.
This is because, as with any other drug, the body tends to become immune to the effects of nicotine and our intake tends to increase. After quite a short period of smoking the cigarette ceases to relieve completely the withdrawal pangs that it creates, so that when you light up a cigarette you feel better than you did a moment before, but you are in fact more nervous and less relaxed than you would be as a non-smoker, even when you are actually smoking the cigarette. The practice is even more ridiculous than wearing tight shoes because as you go through life an increasing amount of the discomfort remains even when the shoes are removed.
The position is even worse because, once the cigarette is extinguished, the nicotine rapidly begins to leave the body, which explains why, in stressful situations, the smoker tends to chain smoke.
As I said, the 'habit' doesn't exist. The real reason why every smoker goes on smoking is because of that little monster inside his stomach. Every now and again he has to feed it. The smoker himself will decide when he does that, and it tends to he on four types of occasion or a combination of them.
They are:
BOREDOM/CONCENTRATION - two complete opposites! STRESS/RELAXATION-two complete opposites!
What magic drug can suddenly reverse the very effect it had twenty minutes before? If you think about it, what other types of occasion are there in our lives; apart from sleep? The truth is that smoking neither relieves boredom and stress nor promotes concentration and relaxation. It is all just illusion.
Apart from being a drug, nicotine is also a powerful poison and is used in insecticides (look it up in your dictionary). The nicotine content of just one cigarette, if injected directly into a vein, would kill you. In fact, tobacco contains many poisons, including carbon monoxide, and the tobacco plant is the same genus as 'deadly nightshade'.
In case you have visions of switching to a pipe or to cigars, I should make it quite clear that the content of this book applies to all tobacco and any substance that contains nicotine, including gum, patches, nasal sprays and inhalators.
The human body is the most sophisticated object on our planet . No species, even the lowest amoeba or worm, can survive without knowing the difference between food and poison.
Through a process of natural selection over thousand of years, our minds and bodies have developed techniques for distinguishing between food and poison and fail- safe methods for ejecting the latter.
All human beings are averse to the smell and taste of tobacco until they become hooked. If you blow diluted tobacco into the face of any animal or child before it becomes hooked, it will cough and splutter.
When we smoked that first cigarette, inhaling resulted in a coughing fit, or if we smoked too many the first time, we experienced a dizzy feeling or actual physical sickness. It was our body telling us, 'YOU ARE FEEDING ME POISON. STOP DOING IT: This is the stage that often decides whether we become smokers or not. It is a fallacy that physically weak and mentally weak- willed people become smokers. The lucky ones are those who find that first cigarette repulsive; physic ally their lungs cannot cope with it, and they are cured for life, Or, alternatively, they are not mentally prepared to go through the severe learning process of trying to inhale without coughing. To me this is the most tragic part of this whole business. How hard we worked to become hooked, and 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.
Why do they not learn from us? Then again, why did we no t learn from our parents?
Many smokers believe they enjoy the taste and smell of the tobacco. It is an illusion. What we are actually doing when we learn to smoke is teaching our bodies to become immune to the bad smell and taste in order to get our fix, like heroin addicts who think that they enjoy injecting themselves. The withdrawal pangs from heroin are relatively severe, and all they are really enjoying is the ritual of relieving those pangs.
The smoker teaches himself to shut his mind to the bad taste and smell to get his 'fix'. Ask a smoker who believes he smokes only because he enjoys the taste and smell of tobacco, 'If you cannot get your normal brand of cigarette and can only obtain a brand you find dis tasteful, do you stop smoking?' No way. A smo ker will smoke old rope rather than abstain, and it doesn't matter if you switch to roll - ups, mentholated cigarettes, cigars or a pipe; to begin with they taste awful but if you persevere you will learn to like them. Smokers will even try to keep smoking during colds, flu, sore throats, bronchitis and emphysema.
Enjoyment has nothing to do with it. If it did, no one would smoke more than one cigarette. There are even thousands of ex-smokers hooked on that filthy nicotine chewing gum that doctors prescribe, and many of them are still smoking.
During my consultations some smokers find it alarming to realize they are drug addicts and think it will make it even more difficult to stop. In fact, it is all good news for two important reasons:
1 The reason why most of us carry on smoking is because, although we know the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, we believe that there is something in the cigarette that we actually enjoy or that it is some sort of prop. We feel that after we stop smoking there will he a void, that certain situations in our life will never be quite the same. This is an illusion. The fact is the cigarette gives nothing; it only takes away and then partially restores to create the illusion. I will explain this in more detail in a later chapter.
2 Although it is the world's most powerful drug because of the speed with which you become hooked, you are never badly hooked. Because it is a quick-acting drug it takes only three weeks for 99 per cent of the nicotine to leave your body, and the actual withdrawal pangs are so mild that most smokers have lived and died without ever realizing that they have suffered them.
You will quite rightly ask why it is that many smokers find it so difficult to stop, go through months of torture and spend the rest of their lives pining for a cigarette at odd times. The answer is the second reason why we smoke - the brainwashing. The chemical addiction is easy to cope with. Most smokers go all night without a cigarette. The withdrawal pangs do not even wake them up.
Many smokers will actually leave the bedroom before they light that first cigarette; many will have breakfast first; many will wait until they arrive at work. They can suffer ten hours' withdrawal pangs, and it doesn't bother them, but if they went ten hours during the day without a cigarette, they'd be tearing their hair out.
Many smokers will buy a new car nowadays and refrain from smoking in it. Many will visit theatres, supermarkets, churches, etc., and not being able to smoke doesn't bother them. Even on the tube trains there have been no riots. Smokers are almost pleased for someone or something to force them to stop smoking.
Nowadays many smokers will automatically refrain from smoking in the home of, or merely in the company of non-smokers with little discomfort to themselves. In fact, most smokers have extended periods during which they abstain without effort. Even in my case I would quite happily relax all evening without a cigarette. In the later years as a smoker I actually used to look forward to the evenings when I could stop choking myself (what a ridiculous 'habit').
The chemical addiction is easy to cope with, even when you are still addicted, and there are thousands of smokers who remain casual smokers all their lives. They are just as heavily addicted as the heavy smoker. There are even heavy smokers who have kicked the 'habit' but will have an occasional cigar, and that keeps them addicted.
As I say, the actual nicotine addiction is not the main problem. It just acts like a catalyst to keep our minds confused over the real problem: the brainwashing,
It may be of consolation to lifelong and heavy smokers to know that it is just as easy for them to stop as casual smokers. In a peculiar way. it is easier. The further you go along with the 'habit', the more it drags you down and the greater the gain when you stop.
It, may be of further consolation for you to know that the rumors that occasionally circulate (e.g. 'It takes seven years for the "gunge" to leave your body' or 'Every cigarette you smoke takes five minutes off your life') are untrue.
Do not think the bad effects of smoking are exaggerated. If anything, they are sadly understated, but the truth is the 'five minutes' rule is obviously an estimation and applies only if you contract one of the killer diseases or just 'gunge' yourself to a standstill.
In fact, the 'gunge' never leaves your body completely. If there are smokers about, it is in the atmosphere, and even non-smokers acquire a small percentage. However, these bodies of ours are incredible machines and have enormous powers of recovery, providing you haven't already triggered off one of the irreversible diseases. If you stop now, your body will recover within a matter of a few weeks, almost as if you had never been a smoker.
As I have said, it is never too late to stop. I have helped to cure many smokers in their fifties and sixties and even a few in their seventies and eighties. 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.
The further it drags you down, the greater the relief. When I finally stopped I went straight from a hundred a day to ZERO, and didn't have one bad pang. In fact, it was actually enjoyable, even during the withdrawal period. But we must remove the brainwashing.
воскресенье, 17 мая 2009 г.
Why do we smoking?
We all start smoking for stupid reasons, usually social pressures or social occasions, but, once we feel we are becoming hooked, why do we carry on smoking?
No regular smoker knows why he or she smokes. If smokers knew the true reason, they would stop doing it. I have asked the question of thousands of smokers during my consultations. The true answer is the same for all smokers, hut the variety of replies is infinite, I find this part of the consultation the most amusing and at the same time the most pathetic.
All smokers know in their heart of hearts that they are mugs. They know that they had no need to smoke before they became hooked. Most of them can remember that their first cigarette tasted awful and that they had to work hard in order to become hooked. The most annoying part is that they sense that non-smokers are not missing anything and that they are laughing at them (it is difficult not to on Budget Day).
However, smokers are intelligent, rational human beings. They know that they are taking enormous health risks and that they spend a fortune on cigarettes in their lifetime. Therefore it is necessary for them to have a rational explanation to justify their habit.
The actual reason why smokers continue to smoke is a subtle combination of the factors that I will elaborate in the next two chapters. They are:
1 NICOTINE ADDICTION
2 BRAINWASHING
No regular smoker knows why he or she smokes. If smokers knew the true reason, they would stop doing it. I have asked the question of thousands of smokers during my consultations. The true answer is the same for all smokers, hut the variety of replies is infinite, I find this part of the consultation the most amusing and at the same time the most pathetic.
All smokers know in their heart of hearts that they are mugs. They know that they had no need to smoke before they became hooked. Most of them can remember that their first cigarette tasted awful and that they had to work hard in order to become hooked. The most annoying part is that they sense that non-smokers are not missing anything and that they are laughing at them (it is difficult not to on Budget Day).
However, smokers are intelligent, rational human beings. They know that they are taking enormous health risks and that they spend a fortune on cigarettes in their lifetime. Therefore it is necessary for them to have a rational explanation to justify their habit.
The actual reason why smokers continue to smoke is a subtle combination of the factors that I will elaborate in the next two chapters. They are:
1 NICOTINE ADDICTION
2 BRAINWASHING
Cigarette smoking effects
Smoking is the most subtle, sinister trap that man and nature have combined to devise. What gets us into it in the first place? The thousands of adults who are already doing it. They even warn us that it's a filthy, disgusting habit that will eventually destroy us and cost us a fortune, but we cannot believe that they are not enjoying it. One of the many pathetic aspects of smoking is how hard we have to work in order to become hooked.
It is the only trap in nature which has no lure, no piece of cheese. The thing that springs the trap is not that cigarettes taste so marvelous; it's that they taste so awful. If that first cigarette tasted marvelous, alarm hells would ring and, as intelligent human beings, we could then understand why half the adult population was systematically paying through the nose to poison itself. But because that first cigarette tastes awful, our young minds are reassured that we will never become hooked, and we think that because we are not enjoying them we can stop whenever we want to.
It is the only drug in nature that prevents you from achieving your aim. Boys usually start because they want to appear tough - it is the Humphrey Bogart/Clint Eastwood image. The last thing you feel with the first cigarette is tough. You dare not inhale, and if you ha ve too many, you start to feel dizzy, then sick. All you want to do is get away from the other boys and throw the filthy things away.
With women, the aim is to be the sophisticated modern young lady. We have all seen them taking little puffs on a cigarette, looking absolutely ridiculous. By the time the boys have learnt to look tough and the girls have learnt to look sophisticated, they wish they had never started in the first place. I wonder whether women ever look sophisticated when they smoke, or whether this is a figment of our imaginations created by cigarette adverts. It seems to me that there is no intermediary stage between the obvious learner and 'Fag-ash Lil'.
We then spend the rest of our lives trying to explain to ourselves why we do it, telling our children not to get caught and, at odd times, trying to escape ourselves.
The trap is so designed that we try to stop only when we have stress in our lives, whether it be health, shortage of money or just plain being made to feel like a leper.
As soon as we stop, we have more stress (the fearful withdrawal pangs of nicotine) and the thing that we rely on to relieve stress (our old prop, the cigarette) we now must do without.
After a few days of torture we decide that we have picked the wrong time. We must wait for a period without stress, and as soon as that arrives the reason for stopping vanishes. Of course, that period will never arrive because, in the first place, we think that our lives tend to become more and more stressful. As we leave the protection of our parents, the natural process is setting up home, mortgages, babies, more responsible jobs, etc., etc. This is also an illusion. The truth is that the most stressful periods for any creature are early childhood and adolescence. We tend to confuse responsibility with stress.
Smokers' lives automatically become more stressful because tobacco does not relax you or relieve stress, as society tries to make you believe. Just the reverse: it actually causes you to become more nervous and stressed.
Even those smokers who kick the habit (most do, one or more times during their lives) can lead perfectly happy lives yet suddenly become hooked again.
The whole business of smoking is like wandering into a giant maze. As soon as we enter the maze our minds become misted and clouded, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to escape. Many of us eventually do, only to find that we get trapped again at a later date.
I spent thirty-three years trying to escape from that maze. Like all smokers, I couldn't understand it. However, due to a combination of unusual circumstances, none of which reflect any credit on me, I wanted to know why previously it had been so desperately difficult to stop and yet, when I finally did, it was not only easy but enjoyable.
Since stopping smoking my hobby and, later, my profession has been to resolve the many conundrums associated with smoking. It is a complex and fascinating puzzle and, like the Rubik Cube, practically impossible to solve. However, like all complicated puzzles, if you know the solution, it is easy! I have the solution to stopping smoking easily. I will lead you out of the maze and ensure that you never wander into it again. All you have to do is follow the instructions. If you take a wrong turn, the rest of the instructio ns will be pointless.
Let me emphasize that anybody can find it easy to stop smoking, but first we need to establish the facts. No, I do not mean the scare facts. I know you are already aware of them. There is already enough information on the evils of smoking. If that was going to stop you, you would already have stopped. I mean, why do we find it difficult to stop? In order to answer this question we need to know the real reason why we are still smoking.
It is the only trap in nature which has no lure, no piece of cheese. The thing that springs the trap is not that cigarettes taste so marvelous; it's that they taste so awful. If that first cigarette tasted marvelous, alarm hells would ring and, as intelligent human beings, we could then understand why half the adult population was systematically paying through the nose to poison itself. But because that first cigarette tastes awful, our young minds are reassured that we will never become hooked, and we think that because we are not enjoying them we can stop whenever we want to.
It is the only drug in nature that prevents you from achieving your aim. Boys usually start because they want to appear tough - it is the Humphrey Bogart/Clint Eastwood image. The last thing you feel with the first cigarette is tough. You dare not inhale, and if you ha ve too many, you start to feel dizzy, then sick. All you want to do is get away from the other boys and throw the filthy things away.
With women, the aim is to be the sophisticated modern young lady. We have all seen them taking little puffs on a cigarette, looking absolutely ridiculous. By the time the boys have learnt to look tough and the girls have learnt to look sophisticated, they wish they had never started in the first place. I wonder whether women ever look sophisticated when they smoke, or whether this is a figment of our imaginations created by cigarette adverts. It seems to me that there is no intermediary stage between the obvious learner and 'Fag-ash Lil'.
We then spend the rest of our lives trying to explain to ourselves why we do it, telling our children not to get caught and, at odd times, trying to escape ourselves.
The trap is so designed that we try to stop only when we have stress in our lives, whether it be health, shortage of money or just plain being made to feel like a leper.
As soon as we stop, we have more stress (the fearful withdrawal pangs of nicotine) and the thing that we rely on to relieve stress (our old prop, the cigarette) we now must do without.
After a few days of torture we decide that we have picked the wrong time. We must wait for a period without stress, and as soon as that arrives the reason for stopping vanishes. Of course, that period will never arrive because, in the first place, we think that our lives tend to become more and more stressful. As we leave the protection of our parents, the natural process is setting up home, mortgages, babies, more responsible jobs, etc., etc. This is also an illusion. The truth is that the most stressful periods for any creature are early childhood and adolescence. We tend to confuse responsibility with stress.
Smokers' lives automatically become more stressful because tobacco does not relax you or relieve stress, as society tries to make you believe. Just the reverse: it actually causes you to become more nervous and stressed.
Even those smokers who kick the habit (most do, one or more times during their lives) can lead perfectly happy lives yet suddenly become hooked again.
The whole business of smoking is like wandering into a giant maze. As soon as we enter the maze our minds become misted and clouded, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to escape. Many of us eventually do, only to find that we get trapped again at a later date.
I spent thirty-three years trying to escape from that maze. Like all smokers, I couldn't understand it. However, due to a combination of unusual circumstances, none of which reflect any credit on me, I wanted to know why previously it had been so desperately difficult to stop and yet, when I finally did, it was not only easy but enjoyable.
Since stopping smoking my hobby and, later, my profession has been to resolve the many conundrums associated with smoking. It is a complex and fascinating puzzle and, like the Rubik Cube, practically impossible to solve. However, like all complicated puzzles, if you know the solution, it is easy! I have the solution to stopping smoking easily. I will lead you out of the maze and ensure that you never wander into it again. All you have to do is follow the instructions. If you take a wrong turn, the rest of the instructio ns will be pointless.
Let me emphasize that anybody can find it easy to stop smoking, but first we need to establish the facts. No, I do not mean the scare facts. I know you are already aware of them. There is already enough information on the evils of smoking. If that was going to stop you, you would already have stopped. I mean, why do we find it difficult to stop? In order to answer this question we need to know the real reason why we are still smoking.
понедельник, 11 мая 2009 г.
The Easy Method
The object of this book is to get you into the frame of mind in which, instead of the normal method of stopping whereby you start off with the feeling that you are climbing Mount Everest and spend the next few weeks craving a cigarette and envying other smokers, you start right away with a feeling of elation, as if you had been cured of a terrible disease. From then on, the further you go through life the more you will look at cigarettes and wonder how you ever smoked them in the first place. You will look at smokers with pity as opposed to envy.
Provided that you are not a non-smoker or an ex-smoker, it is essential to keep smoking until you have finished the book completely. This may appear to be a contradiction. Later I shall be explaining that cigarettes do absolutely nothing for you at all. In fact, one of the many conundrums about smoking is that when we are actually smoking a cigarette, we look at it and wonder why we are doing it. It is only when we have been deprived that the cigarette becomes precious. However, let us accept that, whether you like it or not, you believe you are hooked. When you believe you are hooked, you can never be completely relaxed or concentrate properly unless you are smoking. So do not attempt to stop smoking before you have finished the whole book. As you read further your desire to smoke will gradually be reduced. Do not go off half-cocked; this could be fatal. Remember, all you have to do is to follow the instructions.
With the benefit of twelve years' feedback since the book's original publication, apart from chapter 28, 'Timing', this instruction to continue to smoke until you have completed the book has caused me more frustration than any other. When I first stopped smoking, many of my relatives and friends stopped, purely because I had done it. They thought, 'If he can do it, anybody can.' Over the years, by dropping little hints I managed to persuade the ones that hadn't stopped to realize just how nice it is to be free! When the book was first printed I gave copies to the hard core who were still puffing away. I worked on the basis that, even if it were the most boring book ever written, they would still read it, if only because it had been written by a friend. I was surprised and hurt to learn that, months later, they hadn't bothered to finish the book. I even discovered that the original copy I had signed and given to someone who was then my closest friend had not only been ignored but actually given away. I was hurt at the time, but 1 had overlooked the dreadful fear that slavery to the weed instills in the smoker.
It can transcend friendship. I nearly provoked a divorce because of it. 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.Т IТm ashamed to admit it, but I believe she was right, such is the fear that smoking creates. I now realize that many smokers don't finish the book because they feel they have got to stop smoking when they do. Some deliberately read only one line a day in order to postpone the evil day. Now I am fully aware that many readers are having their arms twisted, by people that love them, to read the book. Look at it this way: what have you got to lose? If you don't stop at the end of the book, you are no worse off than you are now. YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO LOSE AND SO MUCH TO GAIN! Incidentally, if you have not smoked for a few days or weeks but are not sure whether you are a smoker, an ex-smoker or a non-smoker, then don't smoke while you read. In fact, you are already a non-smoker. All we've now got to do is to let your brain catch up with your body. By the end of the book you'll be a happy non-smoker.
Basically my method is the complete opposite of the normal method of trying to stop. The normal method is to list the considerable disadvantages of smoking and say, 'If only I can go long enough without, a cigarette, eventually the desire to smoke will go. I can then enjoy life again, free of slavery to the weed.'
This is the logical way to go about it, and thousands of smokers are stopping every day using variations of this method. However, it is very difficult to succeed using this method for the following reasons:
1 Stopping smoking is not the real problem. Every time you put a cigarette out you stop smoking. You may have powerful reasons on day one to say, 'I do not want to smoke any more' - all smokers have, every day of their lives, and the reasons are more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
The real problem is day two, day ten or day ten thousand, when in a weak moment, an inebriated moment or even a strong moment you have one cigarette, and because it is partly drug addiction you then want another, and suddenly you are a smoker again.
2 The health scares should stop us. Our rational minds say, '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. There are more dogends outside the Royal Marsden Hospital, the country's foremost cancer treatment establishment, than any other hospital in the country.
3 All reasons for stopping actually make it harder for two other reasons. First, they create a sense of sacrifice. We are always being forced to give up our little friend or prop or vice or pleasure,
whichever way the smoker sees it. Secondly, they create a 'blind'. We do not smoke for the reasons we should stop. The real question is 'Why do we want or need to do it?' The Easy Method is basically this: initially to forget the reasons we'd like to stop, to face the cigarette problem and to ask ourselves the following questions:
1 What is it doing for me?
2 Do I actually enjoy it?
3 Do I really need to go through life paying through the nose just to stick these things in my mouth and suffocate myself?
The beautiful truth is that it does absolutely nothing for you at all. Let me make it quite clear, I do not mean that the disadvantages of being a smoker outweigh the advantages; all smokers know that all their lives. 1 mean there are not any advantages from smoking. The only advantage it ever had was the social 'plus'; nowadays even smokers themselves regard it as an antisocial habit.
Most smokers find it necessary to rationalize why they smoke, hut the reasons are all fallacies and illusions.
The first thing we are going to do is to remove these fallacies and illusions. In fact, you will realize that there is nothing to give up. Not only is there nothing to give up but there are marvelous, positive gains from being a non-smoker, and health and money are only two of these gains. Once the illusion that life will never be quite as enjoyable without the cigarette is removed, once you realize that not only is life just as enjoyable without it but infinitely more so, once the feeling of being deprived or of missing out are eradicated, then we can go back to reconsider the health and money - and the dozens of other reasons for stopping smoking. These realizations will become positive additional aids to help you achieve what you really desire to enjoy the whole of your life free from the slavery of the weed.
Why stop smoking shot available?
As I explained earlier, I got interested in this subject because of my own addiction. When I finally stopped it was like magic. When I had previously tried to stop there were weeks of black depression. There would be odd days when I was comparatively cheerful but the next day back with the depression. It was like clawing your way out of a slippery pit, you feel you are near the top, you see the sunshine and then find yourself sliding down again. Eventually you light that cigarette, it tastes awful and you try to work out why you have to do it.
One of the questions I always ask smokers prior to my consultations is 'Do you want to stop smoking?' In a way it is a stupid question. All smokers (including members of FOREST) would love to stop smoking. If you say to the most confirmed smoker, 'If you could go back to the time before you became hooked, with the knowledge you have now, would you have started smoking?', 'NO WAY' is the reply.
Say to the most confirmed smoker - someone who doesn't think that it injures his health, who is not worried about the social stigma and who can afford it (there are not many about these days) - 'Do you encourage your children to smoke?', 'NO WAY' is the reply. All smokers feel that something evil has got possession of them. In the early days it is a question of 'I am going to stop, not today but tomorrow.' Eventually we get to the stage where we think either that we haven't got the willpower or that there is something inherent in the cigarette that wu must have in order to enjoy life.
As I said previously, the proble m is not explaining why it is easy to stop; it is explaining why it is difficult. In fact, the real problem is explaining why anybody does it in the first place or why, at one tune, over 60 per cent of the population were smoking.
The whole business of smoking is an extraordinary enigma. The only reason we get on to it is because of the thousands of people already doing it. Yet every one of them wishes he or she had not started in the first place, telling us that it is a waste of time and money. We cannot quite believe they are not enjoying it. We associate it with being grown up and work hard to become hooked ourselves. We then spend the rest of our lives telling our own children not to do it and trying to kick the habit ourselves.
We also spend the rest of our lives paying through the nose. The average twenty-a-day smoker spends 50.000 in his or her lifetime on cigarettes. What do we do with that money? (It wouldn't be so bad if we threw it down the drain.) We actually use it systematically to congest our lungs with cancerous tars, progressively to clutter up and poison our blood vessels. Each day we are increasingly starving every muscle and organ of our bodies of oxygen, so that each day we become more lethargic. We sentence ourselves to a lifetime of filth, bad breath, stained teeth, burnt clothes, filthy ashtrays and the foul smell of stale tobacco. It is a lifetime of slavery. We spend half our lives in situations in which society forbids us to smoke (churches, hospitals, schools, tube trains, theatres, etc.) or, when we are trying to cut down or stop, feeling deprived. The rest of our smoking lives is spent in situations where we are allowed to smoke but wish we didn't have to. What sort of hobby is it that when you are doing it you wish you weren't, and when you are not doing it you crave a cigarette? It's a lifetime of being treated by half of society like some sort of leper and, worst of all, a lifetime of an otherwise intelligent, rational human being going through life in contempt. The smoker despises himself, every Budget Day. every National Non-Smoking Day, every time he inadvertently reads the government health warning or there is a cancer scare or a bad-breath campaign, every time he gets congested or has a pain in the chest, every time he is the lone smoker in company with non-smokers. Having to go through life with these awful black shadows at the back of his mind, what does he get out of it? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Pleasure? Enjoyment? Relaxation? A prop? A boost? All illusions, unless you consider the wearing of tight shoes to enjoy the removal of them as some sort of pleasure!
As 1 have said, the real problem is trying to explain not only why smokers find it difficult to stop but why anybody does it at all.
You are probably saying, 'That's all very well. I know this, but once you are hooked on these things it is very difficult to stop.' But why is it so difficult, and why do we have to do it? Smokers search for the answer to these questions all of their lives.
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.
Some say cigarettes are very enjoyable. They aren't. They are filthy, disgusting objects. Ask any smoker who thinks he smokes only because he enjoys a cigarette if, when he hasn't got his own brand and can only obtain a brand he finds distasteful, he stops smoking? Smokers would rather smoke old rope than not smoke at all. Enjoyment has nothing to do with it. I enjoy lobster but I never got to the stage where I had to have twenty lobsters hanging round my neck. With other things in life we enjoy them whilst we are doing them but we don't sit feeling deprived when we are not.
Some search for deep psychological reasons, the 'Freudian syndrome', 'the child at the mother's breast'. Really it is just the reverse. The usual reason why we start smoking is to show we are grown up and mature. If we had to suck a dummy in public, we would die of embarrassment.
Some think it is the reverse, the macho effect of breathing smoke or fire down your nostrils. Again this argument has no substance. A burning cigarette in the ear would appear ridiculous. How much more ridiculous to breathe cancer-triggering tars into your lungs.
Some say, 'It is something to do with my hands!' So, why light it?
'It is oral satisfaction,' So, why light it?
'It is the feeling of the smoke going into my lungs.' An awful feeling -it is called suffocation.
Many believe smoking relieves boredom. This is also a fallacy. Boredom is a frame of mind. There is nothing interesting about a cigarette.
For thirty-three years my reason was that it relaxed me, gave me confidence and courage. I also knew it was killing me and costing me a fortune. Why didn't I go to my doctor and ask him for an alternative to relax me and give me courage and confidence? I didn't go because I knew he would suggest an alternative. It wasn't my reason; it was my excuse.
Some say they only do it because their friends do it. Are you really that stupid? If so, just pray that your friends do not start cutting their heads off to cure a headache!
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. Arc 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 States, we immediately break that, habit with hardly any aggravation whatsoever. It is clearly a fallacy that habits are hard to break. The fact is that we make and break habits every day of our lives.
So why do we find it difficult to break a habit that tastes awful, that kills us, that costs us a fortune,
that is filthy and disgusting and that we would love to break anyway, when all we have to do is to stop doing it? The answer is that smoking is not habit: IT IS NICOTINE ADDICTION! That is why it appears to be so difficult to 'give up'. Perhaps you feel this explanation explains why it is difficult to 'give up'? It does explain why most smokers find it difficult to 'give up'. That is because they do not understand drug addiction. The main reason is that smokers are convinced that they get some genuine pleasure and/or crutch from smoking and believe that they are making a genuine sacrifice if they quit.
The beautiful truth is that once you understand nicotine addiction and the true reasons why you smoke, you will stop doing it just like that - and within three weeks the only mystery will be why you found it necessary to smoke as long as you have, and why you cannot persuade other smokers HOW NICE IT IS TO BE A NON-SMOKER!
Provided that you are not a non-smoker or an ex-smoker, it is essential to keep smoking until you have finished the book completely. This may appear to be a contradiction. Later I shall be explaining that cigarettes do absolutely nothing for you at all. In fact, one of the many conundrums about smoking is that when we are actually smoking a cigarette, we look at it and wonder why we are doing it. It is only when we have been deprived that the cigarette becomes precious. However, let us accept that, whether you like it or not, you believe you are hooked. When you believe you are hooked, you can never be completely relaxed or concentrate properly unless you are smoking. So do not attempt to stop smoking before you have finished the whole book. As you read further your desire to smoke will gradually be reduced. Do not go off half-cocked; this could be fatal. Remember, all you have to do is to follow the instructions.
With the benefit of twelve years' feedback since the book's original publication, apart from chapter 28, 'Timing', this instruction to continue to smoke until you have completed the book has caused me more frustration than any other. When I first stopped smoking, many of my relatives and friends stopped, purely because I had done it. They thought, 'If he can do it, anybody can.' Over the years, by dropping little hints I managed to persuade the ones that hadn't stopped to realize just how nice it is to be free! When the book was first printed I gave copies to the hard core who were still puffing away. I worked on the basis that, even if it were the most boring book ever written, they would still read it, if only because it had been written by a friend. I was surprised and hurt to learn that, months later, they hadn't bothered to finish the book. I even discovered that the original copy I had signed and given to someone who was then my closest friend had not only been ignored but actually given away. I was hurt at the time, but 1 had overlooked the dreadful fear that slavery to the weed instills in the smoker.
It can transcend friendship. I nearly provoked a divorce because of it. 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.Т IТm ashamed to admit it, but I believe she was right, such is the fear that smoking creates. I now realize that many smokers don't finish the book because they feel they have got to stop smoking when they do. Some deliberately read only one line a day in order to postpone the evil day. Now I am fully aware that many readers are having their arms twisted, by people that love them, to read the book. Look at it this way: what have you got to lose? If you don't stop at the end of the book, you are no worse off than you are now. YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO LOSE AND SO MUCH TO GAIN! Incidentally, if you have not smoked for a few days or weeks but are not sure whether you are a smoker, an ex-smoker or a non-smoker, then don't smoke while you read. In fact, you are already a non-smoker. All we've now got to do is to let your brain catch up with your body. By the end of the book you'll be a happy non-smoker.
Basically my method is the complete opposite of the normal method of trying to stop. The normal method is to list the considerable disadvantages of smoking and say, 'If only I can go long enough without, a cigarette, eventually the desire to smoke will go. I can then enjoy life again, free of slavery to the weed.'
This is the logical way to go about it, and thousands of smokers are stopping every day using variations of this method. However, it is very difficult to succeed using this method for the following reasons:
1 Stopping smoking is not the real problem. Every time you put a cigarette out you stop smoking. You may have powerful reasons on day one to say, 'I do not want to smoke any more' - all smokers have, every day of their lives, and the reasons are more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
The real problem is day two, day ten or day ten thousand, when in a weak moment, an inebriated moment or even a strong moment you have one cigarette, and because it is partly drug addiction you then want another, and suddenly you are a smoker again.
2 The health scares should stop us. Our rational minds say, '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. There are more dogends outside the Royal Marsden Hospital, the country's foremost cancer treatment establishment, than any other hospital in the country.
3 All reasons for stopping actually make it harder for two other reasons. First, they create a sense of sacrifice. We are always being forced to give up our little friend or prop or vice or pleasure,
whichever way the smoker sees it. Secondly, they create a 'blind'. We do not smoke for the reasons we should stop. The real question is 'Why do we want or need to do it?' The Easy Method is basically this: initially to forget the reasons we'd like to stop, to face the cigarette problem and to ask ourselves the following questions:
1 What is it doing for me?
2 Do I actually enjoy it?
3 Do I really need to go through life paying through the nose just to stick these things in my mouth and suffocate myself?
The beautiful truth is that it does absolutely nothing for you at all. Let me make it quite clear, I do not mean that the disadvantages of being a smoker outweigh the advantages; all smokers know that all their lives. 1 mean there are not any advantages from smoking. The only advantage it ever had was the social 'plus'; nowadays even smokers themselves regard it as an antisocial habit.
Most smokers find it necessary to rationalize why they smoke, hut the reasons are all fallacies and illusions.
The first thing we are going to do is to remove these fallacies and illusions. In fact, you will realize that there is nothing to give up. Not only is there nothing to give up but there are marvelous, positive gains from being a non-smoker, and health and money are only two of these gains. Once the illusion that life will never be quite as enjoyable without the cigarette is removed, once you realize that not only is life just as enjoyable without it but infinitely more so, once the feeling of being deprived or of missing out are eradicated, then we can go back to reconsider the health and money - and the dozens of other reasons for stopping smoking. These realizations will become positive additional aids to help you achieve what you really desire to enjoy the whole of your life free from the slavery of the weed.
Why stop smoking shot available?
As I explained earlier, I got interested in this subject because of my own addiction. When I finally stopped it was like magic. When I had previously tried to stop there were weeks of black depression. There would be odd days when I was comparatively cheerful but the next day back with the depression. It was like clawing your way out of a slippery pit, you feel you are near the top, you see the sunshine and then find yourself sliding down again. Eventually you light that cigarette, it tastes awful and you try to work out why you have to do it.
One of the questions I always ask smokers prior to my consultations is 'Do you want to stop smoking?' In a way it is a stupid question. All smokers (including members of FOREST) would love to stop smoking. If you say to the most confirmed smoker, 'If you could go back to the time before you became hooked, with the knowledge you have now, would you have started smoking?', 'NO WAY' is the reply.
Say to the most confirmed smoker - someone who doesn't think that it injures his health, who is not worried about the social stigma and who can afford it (there are not many about these days) - 'Do you encourage your children to smoke?', 'NO WAY' is the reply. All smokers feel that something evil has got possession of them. In the early days it is a question of 'I am going to stop, not today but tomorrow.' Eventually we get to the stage where we think either that we haven't got the willpower or that there is something inherent in the cigarette that wu must have in order to enjoy life.
As I said previously, the proble m is not explaining why it is easy to stop; it is explaining why it is difficult. In fact, the real problem is explaining why anybody does it in the first place or why, at one tune, over 60 per cent of the population were smoking.
The whole business of smoking is an extraordinary enigma. The only reason we get on to it is because of the thousands of people already doing it. Yet every one of them wishes he or she had not started in the first place, telling us that it is a waste of time and money. We cannot quite believe they are not enjoying it. We associate it with being grown up and work hard to become hooked ourselves. We then spend the rest of our lives telling our own children not to do it and trying to kick the habit ourselves.
We also spend the rest of our lives paying through the nose. The average twenty-a-day smoker spends 50.000 in his or her lifetime on cigarettes. What do we do with that money? (It wouldn't be so bad if we threw it down the drain.) We actually use it systematically to congest our lungs with cancerous tars, progressively to clutter up and poison our blood vessels. Each day we are increasingly starving every muscle and organ of our bodies of oxygen, so that each day we become more lethargic. We sentence ourselves to a lifetime of filth, bad breath, stained teeth, burnt clothes, filthy ashtrays and the foul smell of stale tobacco. It is a lifetime of slavery. We spend half our lives in situations in which society forbids us to smoke (churches, hospitals, schools, tube trains, theatres, etc.) or, when we are trying to cut down or stop, feeling deprived. The rest of our smoking lives is spent in situations where we are allowed to smoke but wish we didn't have to. What sort of hobby is it that when you are doing it you wish you weren't, and when you are not doing it you crave a cigarette? It's a lifetime of being treated by half of society like some sort of leper and, worst of all, a lifetime of an otherwise intelligent, rational human being going through life in contempt. The smoker despises himself, every Budget Day. every National Non-Smoking Day, every time he inadvertently reads the government health warning or there is a cancer scare or a bad-breath campaign, every time he gets congested or has a pain in the chest, every time he is the lone smoker in company with non-smokers. Having to go through life with these awful black shadows at the back of his mind, what does he get out of it? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Pleasure? Enjoyment? Relaxation? A prop? A boost? All illusions, unless you consider the wearing of tight shoes to enjoy the removal of them as some sort of pleasure!
As 1 have said, the real problem is trying to explain not only why smokers find it difficult to stop but why anybody does it at all.
You are probably saying, 'That's all very well. I know this, but once you are hooked on these things it is very difficult to stop.' But why is it so difficult, and why do we have to do it? Smokers search for the answer to these questions all of their lives.
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.
Some say cigarettes are very enjoyable. They aren't. They are filthy, disgusting objects. Ask any smoker who thinks he smokes only because he enjoys a cigarette if, when he hasn't got his own brand and can only obtain a brand he finds distasteful, he stops smoking? Smokers would rather smoke old rope than not smoke at all. Enjoyment has nothing to do with it. I enjoy lobster but I never got to the stage where I had to have twenty lobsters hanging round my neck. With other things in life we enjoy them whilst we are doing them but we don't sit feeling deprived when we are not.
Some search for deep psychological reasons, the 'Freudian syndrome', 'the child at the mother's breast'. Really it is just the reverse. The usual reason why we start smoking is to show we are grown up and mature. If we had to suck a dummy in public, we would die of embarrassment.
Some think it is the reverse, the macho effect of breathing smoke or fire down your nostrils. Again this argument has no substance. A burning cigarette in the ear would appear ridiculous. How much more ridiculous to breathe cancer-triggering tars into your lungs.
Some say, 'It is something to do with my hands!' So, why light it?
'It is oral satisfaction,' So, why light it?
'It is the feeling of the smoke going into my lungs.' An awful feeling -it is called suffocation.
Many believe smoking relieves boredom. This is also a fallacy. Boredom is a frame of mind. There is nothing interesting about a cigarette.
For thirty-three years my reason was that it relaxed me, gave me confidence and courage. I also knew it was killing me and costing me a fortune. Why didn't I go to my doctor and ask him for an alternative to relax me and give me courage and confidence? I didn't go because I knew he would suggest an alternative. It wasn't my reason; it was my excuse.
Some say they only do it because their friends do it. Are you really that stupid? If so, just pray that your friends do not start cutting their heads off to cure a headache!
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. Arc 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 States, we immediately break that, habit with hardly any aggravation whatsoever. It is clearly a fallacy that habits are hard to break. The fact is that we make and break habits every day of our lives.
So why do we find it difficult to break a habit that tastes awful, that kills us, that costs us a fortune,
that is filthy and disgusting and that we would love to break anyway, when all we have to do is to stop doing it? The answer is that smoking is not habit: IT IS NICOTINE ADDICTION! That is why it appears to be so difficult to 'give up'. Perhaps you feel this explanation explains why it is difficult to 'give up'? It does explain why most smokers find it difficult to 'give up'. That is because they do not understand drug addiction. The main reason is that smokers are convinced that they get some genuine pleasure and/or crutch from smoking and believe that they are making a genuine sacrifice if they quit.
The beautiful truth is that once you understand nicotine addiction and the true reasons why you smoke, you will stop doing it just like that - and within three weeks the only mystery will be why you found it necessary to smoke as long as you have, and why you cannot persuade other smokers HOW NICE IT IS TO BE A NON-SMOKER!
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