Hello and welcome to another episode of “Sarah’s thirst for knowledge leads her to make surprising reading choices,” with the upfront disclaimer that I have never smoked in my life and never intend to! :)

I’m definitely glad I checked this out; I found this book to be fascinating and absolutely applicable to other bad habits/stuck thought patterns beyond nicotine addiction! Carr does a brilliant thing psychologically here by not focusing on why smoking is bad for you—something all smokers already know—but instead systematically destroying the notion that smoking is pleasurable at all. He likens the relief a cigarette provides to the relief one would get from stopping bashing their head against the wall or taking off too-tight shoes—smoking simply allows the smoker to temporarily feel like a non-smoker.

It’s such a smart, insightful method that beautifully leverages human psychology! If your brain is framing quitting in terms of loss, your loss-averse brain will be your greatest enemy, but reframing quitting as a joy and opportunity with no associated loss neatly sidesteps so much of the psychological impetus to stay addicted. I’m really interested to see how I can extend this framing to other areas of life!

EDIT: 2024: Heading into my 12th smoke-free year!


EDIT: 2016 - 4 years on and I still haven't touched a cigarette - more importantly, I haven't WANTED a cigarette. I have had weird dreams where I smoke and I wake up feeling so disgusted with myself, the relief when I wake up and realise I'm still smoke-free is unreal! But yes - this book definitely worked for me.


I don't give many books a 5* rating - but I read this in 2012 and haven't picked a cigarette up since. More importantly - I haven't had the desire to. I've recommended this book to several people. If you read it, and take the information in, it works. I don't know how, but it does.

Training for the New York City marathon last fall didn't magically stop me from smoking, but maybe watching a beloved client die abruptly and excruciatingly of lung cancer last week will do the trick? In case that's not enough, I've got Allen Carr's annoying self-help book to back me up!

I love fucking smoking. I love, love, love, LOVE it. Except, Allen Carr's going to tell me, I actually don't. I can't possibly love smoking because smoking's disgusting! All the loving I think I'm doing is actually just the insidious mendacity of addiction that is warping my mind and encouraging me to flood my otherwise gorgeous long-distance runner's lungs with carcinogens and emphysema and all other kinds of gnarly. I totally believe this, he's obviously right, and I know what Carr's gonna say because I've read this before. And it totally worked the first time -- but of course, quitting smoking's easy, it's the staying quit that's a drag.

I don't relate to a lot of quit smoking stuff, because my smoking occurs under pretty specific conditions. I'm not the kind of smoker who smokes every day, but nor am I really a true social smoker who has one or two on special occasions. I smoke when I drink, and when I do then I binge. I can go weeks without touching them, but once I get started, I'll smoke a pack -- sometimes more -- in a night without batting an eye. Drinking gets me every time, as do smoker friends. Also driving. Rock shows. Writing papers. Etc.... Why do I do this? Because I love smoking!!! No, Allen Carr tells me: that is not why. I do it because I'm addicted, and I tell myself all these crazy lies about cigarettes, like that they're fun and make me happy, and that I enjoy smoking them. God, but I believe that. I believe that I love them. I hope he talks me out of that.... it's a tall order!

I do feel pretty ready for Carr to convince me. I'm thirty years old, and I know smoking's gross. I've had two friends my own age undergo intensely difficult, painful battles against cancer, and i've spent these past few weeks watching a man I really cared about suffer in agony, knowing he wasn't going to get all the years he deserved, probably because of this addiction he'd had since age nine. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer about a month ago, he told me he couldn't wait to get out of the hospital so he could have a cigarette. He even laughed about it, and said that he just couldn't imagine his life without cigarettes. He did get discharged, with referrals to radiology, and I'm sure he smoked his face off once he got home.... only he didn't have much time to enjoy that because he was rushed back to the hospital right away, when it turned out the leg pain he'd been complaining of was metastasized cancer. He died just a couple brutal weeks later without getting to smoke again or even go outside for fresh air. One of the many very, very sad things about it all is that I'd watched this man successfully fight addictions to other things that are a lot more serious in terms of their immediate effects on a person's life. Smoking cigarettes doesn't make you homeless (though with NYC's $10 pack, that could change) or exacerbate mental illness (according to some sources, it can actually soothe symptoms), and cigarettes don't estrange you from family and friends and the rest of society. But in the final analysis, smoking cigarettes can obviously have a way bigger impact than any of those other substances, because terminal illness makes all the rest of that stuff completely irrelevant. Homeless people can find housing, schizophrenics can manage their psychiatric symptoms, and people who've lost touch their families can reunite with their loved ones -- I saw this guy accomplish all those things recently, after seeing him struggle so much in the past. But he didn't ever get to enjoy what he worked so hard to regain, because he died of fucking lung cancer right when he'd finally -- and heroically -- gotten his life together.

I guess it's not so shocking that as I get older, I understand all the moralistic hysteria about kids smoking way more than I used to. I'm from a generation for whom there was no mystery or obfuscation about the health risks of smoking, and I was fully aware while choking down my first Marlboro when I was twelve that this was a horrifically unhealthy and addictive substance that almost inevitably caused lethal diseases. I mean, as a little kid I was terrified of cigarettes! They spent so much time at school screaming at us about lung cancer that I was distraught for days after walking in on a parent smoking at late night, convinced I'd be orphaned by what I, in my innocence, had assumed was a cigarette....

But I digress. No, what I was going to say is that -- as we all know -- kids start smoking because they know it's bad, and kids love bad things, and they absolutely don't believe for one second that they'll ever get older, let alone die. They really just don't. It's documented fact. See, but now I've gotten on a bit in years so I'm starting to get that if I don't figure something out soon, someday I will die. The older I get, and the more people I see get really sick and/or die, it does get a lot harder to deny that it could happen to me. That.... well, it will happen to me.

Part of me thinks that's why I love smoking -- there's some adolescent nihilism there that I'm really attached to, some big "fuck you" to the horror of mortality when you light that bitch up and suck in a big drag -- GOD, I love that feeling! But what Allen Carr would say, and what he's going to remind me, is that that's total bullshit. That feeling's just some half-assed, asinine, transparently juvenile rationalization for a dull and simple addiction I've been senselessly feeding for close to two decades. Allen Carr's annoying self-help book is going to remind me that all that romance and glamour, all the emotional and intellectual pyrotechnics I associate with my smoking, are just more sophisticated versions of a drug addict's most pathetic excuses. All those reasons aren't true. I don't really love smoking.

Anyway, even if some of that stuff is true, it's way past time to stop. I'm too old for nihilism, and that's not how I want to go, in horrible pain and all fucked-up on morphine. If I want to make some statement, I should jump off a building.

This weekend I hung out with a friend of mine who just went through the unbelievably awful experience of breast cancer treatment, and she was talking about how when someone gets sick, everyone wants to blame them for it. I'm sure you've noticed this too, that whenever something bad happens to someone, other people just go nuts coming up with explanations of how the sick/murdered/hit-by-a-car person's brought the misfortune on themselves. Susan Sontag talks a lot about this in Illness as Metaphor, and one thing I thought was weird but that I also kind of liked was that she shoved "smoking" in with "unresolved grief" and "pent-up rage" as ridiculous factors that people use to blame other people for getting cancer. It's true that lung cancer is one of the last acceptably stigmatized illnesses -- people can happily pass judgment on smokers who get it in a way that they're just dying to but can't for anyone else who gets sick. And I will be DAMNED if I ultimately give any smug asshole that satisfaction! When I have a terminal illness -- and unless I have some kind of terrible accident, chances are that at some point in the future I most likely will -- I hope it'll be one people can't blame me for giving myself. Or, much more importantly, that I can't blame myself for getting. Because that's not a fun thought.

Anyway, I'm planning to read this thing by the weekend. If I can make it through the Fourth of July without smoking, that'll surely be cause for a huge celebration. And if I can't.... well, then it'll probably mean that I'll have to stop drinking.

And that, my friend, is another can of worms.

I wanted to wait until a decent amount of time had passed before I wrote a review of this book, just to prove that it does work! And it does. Yep, that’s right, I’ve been cigarette free for 6 whole months now and feel great!

I stopped smoking for 5 years once, then I went back to smoking the thin cigars every now and then at a party. Over the months, my addiction went up to the level it was before when I was smoking, and pretty soon I was on about 20 a day! In the past when I stopped smoking I used the Nicorette nicotine inhaler, and that did work for me then, but this time I tried everything – inhaler, patches, willpower, electric cigarette – and I still couldn’t break the addiction. So for 2 years I was trying to stop and not getting anywhere, until a friend told me to read this book. She said several people she knew had stopped smokinh using it, and the book reported to have a really high success rate. I was sceptical. I mean, how could a book help you stop smoking? But I’m so glad I read it, and if you want to give up, I’d recommend it to anyone.

I’ve been telling everyone I meet about the book and how high the success rate is, and they all ask the same thing. “Does it talk about all the really disgusting things smoking does to you?”; “Does it bombard you with horrible facts and figures and pictures?” Well, no. Anyone who knows a smoker’s mind (and Allen Carr obviously does), will know that would be like encouraging them to smoke more. Any smoker can recognize the mind-set of being bombarded with adverts for smoking and them justifying it by saying, “Well, you have to die of something,” or “I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, I might as well enjoy myself”, and then reaching for a cigarette and lighting up! The interesting thing about the book is that it doesn’t preach most of those things to you. Smokers already know the risks. What it does do is makes you think differently about smoking and cigarettes. It makes you change the way you feel about them and your relationship with them. Instead of looking at cigarettes as something you have to “give up” (which implies it’s something good), it makes you look at them in a totally new light. In a way, it’s like self-hypnosis. And because of the way it’s done, it makes the process of stopping smoking so much less painful than any other method I’ve ever tried. OK, yes, I did get a bit grumpy for the first couple of weeks (hubby will probably say more than a bit!), but it wasn’t painful like it had been in the past.

One of the things that struck me while reading was the way smokers are manipulated. We’re bombarded with adverts for products to help us “GIVE UP” smoking, but the term giving up implies that it’s something pleasurable – something that is good for us. Not something that’s slowly poisoning us to death. I mean, drug addicts aren’t told by healthcare professionals that they’re “GIVING UP CRACK”, are they? The governments pay lip service to getting people to stop smoking by adding health warnings to cigarette packets, however, if they really wanted to do something, they could force the tobacco companies to produce cigarettes without nicotine in them. Nicotine is the only reason smokers are addicted to cigarettes, without it, it would be easy for all the millions of smokers around the world to quit. But, of course, they won’t because there are millions of pounds to be made from people’s ill-health and suffering resulting from smoking. In the 60s, apparently, a tobacco company did produce a cigarette without nicotine and it was buried so deep it would never see the light of day. Shocking that this is going on in the 21st Century, isn’t it? I mean, could you imagine if chocolate producers added an addictive substance to chocolate, or dairy farmers added an addictive substance to milk. Imagine the outcry!

It says you can still smoke while reading this book, but when you get to the end you won’t want to smoke any longer. People who aren’t ready to give up will put the book down then, but hopefully they’ll come back to it later when they are ready. I read it during a four hour flight so I couldn’t smoke, anyway, which was good for me. When I closed the book, I said to hubby, “Right, that’s it. I’m not smoking anymore.” He said, “Oh, yeah!” as he’d heard it too many times to count! But it’s been over six months and I haven’t smoked at all.

So if you want to stop smoking the easy way, you have to read this book. It does exactly what it says on the tin!

I will revisit this rating in 12 months.

You don't get five stars, no matter how convincing you are, when the first three chapters are an ode to your own awesome nature before you even said anything...

The book's "solution" is really just a semantic re-gloss of the "Will Power Method" of quitting; however, what is quitting smoking if not a psychological word game? Atrociously written, patronizingly delivered, and shticky as heck, for all its faults, this book is informative and, much as I hate to admit it, inspiring.

It worked on the 1st try and never looked back.
I am smoke free since 10 years now.

جناب آلن کار اوایل کتاب میگه من هرکاری میکردم نمیتونستم سیگارو ترک کنم و کلا ناامید شده بودم تا اینکه همسرم منو برد پیش یک روان درمانگر وهیپنوتیزمم کرد واز اون به بعد سیگار نکشیدم

I cannot give this book enough stars. I started smoking when I was 19 and was a pack a day smoker when I made the decision to quit and began to read this book. It really is the BEST way to quit smoking - I finished reading this book, threw out my cigarettes and never smoked again. I have suffered no withdrawal or pangs of desire ... I tried quitting several times before reading this book, either using the patch, the gum or cold turkey, and every time I tried, I was so miserable that I always started smoking again. Now, not only am I a non-smoker, I am overjoyed to be a non-smoker and I have no desire to ever smoke again, even when surrounded by other smokers! I recommend this book to any smoker who says they want to quit ... sadly, many of my smoking friends are too scared to quit. Once they decide that they do really want to quit, this book will do it for them. If you are a smoker and you want to quit, I'll bet you've tried all the gimmicks, and they don't work, right? They didn't work for me! This book ISN'T a gimmick - it works!!! I have been smoke-free for almost 2 years at this writing (I finished reading the Easy Way to Quit Smoking on 05/11/2007 and haven't had a puff since), and I feel great. I can't say enough about this book.

Bin jetzt Endlich Nichtraucher! ;)

Einfache Psychologie wird hier benutzt, um eine große Änderung im Verhalten des Rauchers hervorzuheben.

Ich finde es sehr interessant, dass der Autor sogar selber sagt, dass man nicht mit dem Rauchen aufhören soll, bis man das Buch bis zum Ende gelesen hat. Ich persönlich habe das Buch erst angefangen zu lesen, nachdem ich mich bereits dazu entschlossen hatte, aufzuhören. Ich denke das war der Grund, warum das Buch in den letzten Kapiteln für mich etwas wiederholend und langweilig wurde, weil ich das von ihm verlangte, bereits durchgesetzt hatte.

Nichtsdestotrotz eine große Hilfestellung gewesen!

Für mich unerwarteter Moment beim Lesen war, als der Autor versprach, im nächsten Kapitel die Vorteile des Rauchens aufzuzählen. Als ich leicht verwundert und neugierig weiter blätterte, starrte ich auf zwei komplett leere Seiten und musste dann zu gegebener Weise auch lachen (obwohl es nicht einmal so lustig war, aber halt unerwartet).

This book is incredibly effective. I always felt that my addiction took place on a level of my mind where conscious thoughts and arguments couldn't reach. Well, this book reached me. I was mostly done with the book when I realized that I was no longer a smoker; I've only come back to finish it for the sake of completion. I haven't had a cigarette in 60+ days and I feel amazing.

Paradigm-shifting

This book has completely changed my perspective both on smoking and on quitting. So happy to have found such a gem.