Jinn of Quality and Risk

I've been smoking for about 20 years, with multiple episodic, willful suspensions, some as long as two years. When I was a child, I would watch my mother smoke and tell her I would never do it. Whenever I wanted to stop smoking, it felt like a battle of will and habit. Sometimes I wanted to be more measured in my smoking, so I would consciously diminish the frequency, and helplessly increase the intensity (20 cigarettes in the evening and one in the day). Neither approach was a success. The simple reason is that cigarettes are a delivery mechanism for nicotine, which is a highly addictive drug; in other words, it's not a habit. Each cigarette renews and increases the addiction. I started to grasp that when I saw the movie (with crowe, a few years ago, the scientist who loses everything while denouncing the tobacco industry he worked for) but I didn't make the full connection at that time. Today, I have a more elaborate understanding of what my smoking problem is, and how to solve it, thanks to a small book called Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking. Note: unfortunately, I found the book repetitive, unstructured, and generally not very well written; I feel like writing my own pamphlet about the subject.

The essence of Carr's identification is that: nicotine is an addictive drug; each cigarette creates a nicotine high followed by a low, thus generating a craving for yet more nicotine; smokers wish they had never started smoking; non-smokers do not envy smokers; smoking is filthy and doesn't taste good; smoking does not relax, nor help to concentrate, nor give courage, nor relieve of boredom; people wrongly believe that that to stop smoking is to make a sacrifice; there are no advantages to smoking; the smoking trap is on the one hand the nicotine addiction, and on the other hand brainwashing. To stop smoking is easy, once one recognizes these facts and one resolves to break the addiction — now and forever. The trick is not to eventually forget smoking, nor to find a substitute, nor to somehow repress the "desire" to smoke. The trick is to explicitly identify the nature of nicotine, cigarettes, and the craving they generate and perpetuate, to keep that identification in mind, and to act accordingly.

Today I smoked my last cigarette ever. It didn't taste good, didn't give me any pleasure, and didn't solve anything. To smoke another cigarette would be tantamount to choosing to hurt myself for the rest of my life while spending £50,000 for the delivery of a drug that provides strictly no benefit. I'm consciously aware of the trap, and firmly resolved to not fall into it again. This is a great day!