The Easiest and Best Way to Quit Smoking
If you’re an author and have had your book or books listed on Amazon, it’s gratifying to have attracted some five-star reviews. What about one- or two-star reviews? There are quite a few five-star reviews of my Stop Smoking with the Symonds Method, thank you very much; but there is also a one-star review, remarkable for its brevity. It consists of only one word, ‘Useless’. What did this reviewer expect or hope? That merely by reading my book he would magically be transformed into a non-smoker? If so, he couldn’t have read it very carefully, if he read it at all.
Let’s also look at a one-star review of a book by Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. The reviewer tries to explain why he is still smoking in spite of reading the book (paraphrased):
Nicotine triggers the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brain, which in turn causes the release of dopamine, and the release of glucagon from the pancreas which raises your blood sugar. This is why I enjoy cigarettes much more than dislike the negatives of smoking. Allen Carr’s magic pill, ‘Just be happy you’re a non-smoker,’ isn’t going to work for me. I’d be shocked if it did actually work for the number of smokers he claims to have cured. The fact is that smoking a cigarette gives you a pleasurable biological response.
It seems what this reviewer has done is to search the internet to try to find justification, in terms of alleged effects of nicotine on the brain, for his inability to quit. It amounts to him saying he doesn’t want to give up the wonderful pleasure he gets from nicotine, but this is all nonsense. Do smokers say, when they’ve just stubbed out a cigarette, ‘By Golly, that was marvellous! I must do it again!’ They do not. If anything, they say to themselves, ‘I wish I hadn’t done that, and I’m not going to do it again.’ That is, until they do do it again – and again, and again, and again. This is the tragedy of smoking.
The unfortunate fact is that smokers don’t really want to quit – that’s why they smoke. Or, they may claim they want to quit, but are unconsciously looking for a method that will probably fail. Then they will have given themselves permission, as it were, to carry on smoking, albeit with a slightly better conscience. They can say, ‘I tried the X method, and – it didn’t work!’ It’s as if the smoker is saying, ‘Whatever you do, don’t cure me of my smoking addiction.’
What do smokers mean by saying they enjoy smoking? Does it give them some real pleasure? Do they experience an orgasmic-like sensation every time they suck poisonous tobacco fumes into their lungs? Like so much misunderstanding about smoking, this is an illusion. But there is no point in merely telling smokers this. What I set out to do in my books and face-to-face sessions, is to help smokers demonstrate to themselves why this and similar ideas are illusions.
The basic approach of the Symonds Method is that smokers, if they profess that they want to stop, need to take thought. They need to understand – very simple! – how they came to be in such a pickle in the first place, and why it seems so hard to quit. Then quitting smoking once and for all is simple to achieve, as about 90 per cent of my smoker patients have done.
What about the 10 per cent who have failed to quit with the Symonds Method? This is the wrong question. As with the orthodox approach to quitting – using nicotine so-called replacement and undergoing behavioural counselling, whatever that is – it puts the responsibility for quitting onto something outside the smoker. Successful quitting has to come from within. This does not mean waiting until you’re ready to stop. You’ll never be ready. Nor does it mean, if you ‘tried’ and failed to quit, that you didn’t try hard enough. Those who want to quit smoking, quit; those who try to quit, smoke.
Does this mean, then, that one needs a method of quitting that will help smokers become sufficiently motivated so that they want to be non-smokers again? Although they may deny it, all smokers know that smoking is hazardous to their health – it may even kill them. What more motivation could they need?
The fundamental problem of the apparent difficulty in quitting smoking is a matter of recognising that you don’t want to quit. Once you acknowledge this fact, returning to the happy state of being a non-smoker, with the right kind of support that the Symonds Method offers, is usually straightforward and achievable without willpower. After all, there should be no difficulty in refraining from something you don’t want to do anymore.
Text and photo © Gabriel Symonds