Stopping smoking

Most people who smoke have already tried to stop, often several times, and each attempt taught them the same discouraging lesson: that going without is miserable, and that they lasted a while and then gave in. That lesson is the problem. It is not quite true, and believing it makes the next attempt harder than the last.

The relief you feel when you light one is real. What it is relief from is the thing worth looking at, because it is not your job, your children, your commute or your life. It is the small withdrawal that the previous cigarette set running about half an hour ago. Smoking creates a discomfort and then removes it, and the removal feels so much like calm that the whole arrangement passes for stress relief. Take the cigarettes away and the discomfort stops being created at all.

The same goes for the rest of it. The thinking break is a break, and you can have a break without smoking in it. The people outside the back door are good company, and they would still be good company. The weight is a real risk and not an inevitable one, and the book says so plainly rather than pretending otherwise.

This is not a willpower method, and it is not a lecture about your lungs, which you have heard. It is an argument about what the cigarette is actually doing for you, made carefully enough that you can check it against your own experience — and if patches, gum or a prescription help you act on it, the book is firmly in favour.