If you enjoy reading or listening to audio books, or perhaps even if you don’t, we suggest that you read or listen to The Easy Way To Stop Smoking by Allen Carr: book (most recent version, we think), audio (CD). Here’s a short summary video. Why do we recommend this book? Because it addresses many of the topics we talk about too around why people smoke — only we haven’t written a book yet, otherwise we’d recommend ours.  🙂

What are some of these issues? That nicotine is addictive (which is why our treatment focuses on helping to diminish the withdrawal symptoms of the nicotine leaving your system). That you think smoking relaxes you while it’s really what’s creating and adding to your stress. Studies show that smokers are more relaxed when they stop smoking. That you think smoking helps you with your boredom when in reality it’s actually adding to your boredom. Smokers find when they get into the groove of being nonsmokers, they realize that they’re no longer tethered to their cigarettes and they find they do more things.

We also talk about how our laser treatment, while it helps to diminish and sometimes even completely eliminate withdrawal symptoms, it doesn’t take away the memory that you were a smoker. It’s easy to romanticize smoking whether it’s a week out of your quit or 10 years out. The book has the potential to help you shift how you view smoking and addresses the issues that are the ones that often lead to relapse — stress, anger, boredom, and celebration.

We talk about how smoking doesn’t help with any of these things, including celebration. You can celebrate without the smoking. It’s just that you used to smoke when you were happy, sad, mad, and glad. You created associations with smoking and because of biology, it can be hard to break the associations. To break the association, you need to stop the behavior that keeps tying them together. The behavior is the smoking.

We appreciate this book because it helps to ingrain the fact that when you quit smoking, you’re not giving anything up. You’re not sacrificing anything. When you think you are, you feel deprived. You think you need to drive through not smoking with the fuel of willpower. That can be exhausting and willpower isn’t finite. It gets depleted when relied on too heavily. We want you to remember that when you stop smoking and become smokefree, you’re not giving up anything. You’re gaining everything.

In our coaching sessions we delve deeper into stress and boredom and celebration and the other feelings that you think smoking helps you avoid. BUT, if you’re avoiding those feelings, that informs us. It’s telling us, and more importantly you, that what you do desire — perhaps even yearn for — is relaxation and relief and stimulation and excitement and freedom and fun and (the list can go on and is specific to you) in your life that you’re not getting. We explore this with you so that you don’t find yourself psychologically fighting with yourself and also so you don’t substitute another non-life serving habit/addiction when you stop smoking.

If you have access to the Libby or Hoopla apps through your local library, sometimes you can find the book and/or audio there.