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To Justine and Leah, Enjoy your night - Ian X
Read My Amazing NEW Theory
Introduction
My name is Ian Clark. I was a career smoker for 22 years. I used smoking as my safety net for all of those 22 years. When I smoked I could never imagine my life without cigarettes. It was who I was. It was part of me and the personality I had created to mask my true feelings. It wasn't until I quit that I had to deal with the actual feelings in their rawest state. I had nothing to hide behind and it was very scary. So, for the first time in my adult life I had to find out who I was. In fact, I never liked the person I was when I smoked. How could I? To be a smoker I had to be devious, dishonest and calculating. I was devious in the way I lied to myself. The excuses I gave were not to justify my smoking to other people, but to myself. It had to be to myself otherwise what point was there in smoking for 22 years. I was dishonest to myself and to others. I told my parents many times that I had quit. I told myself many times I had quit knowing full well I would pick one up about an hour later. I was calculating my friends and family. When they came to visit all I could think about was when are you leaving so I can sit here alone and smoke. I never heard their words. I just plotted to get them out of the door as soon as I could.
But something came out of this confusion. I realised that cigarettes were not 'magical' in fact they didn't 'do' anything. Only what I wanted them to. Someone told me to take three deep relaxing breaths before I lit a cigarette. At first I thought they were barking mad. But I tried it and lit the cigarette and do you know? I felt nothing! Not that the breathing didn't work but that the cigarette did nothing, there was no kick, no 'Aghhhh', nothing. It was like smoking fresh air. It was at that point I realised it wasn't the cigarette that made me feel better, but my perception of smoking.
I think that many people struggle to quit at first because they think quitting is just a case of out willing the part of you that wants to smoke. In other words it is purely a matter of trying to muster enough willpower to resist smoking. I have a different approach and theory to what may be required. There are two things you have to achieve before quitting. One is to change your perception about what a cigarette can actually do for you. The second is to gain the permission of your inner self, (your subconscious mind), to let go of smoking as a safety net.
Perception.
Perception - an intuitive judgement based on personal experience, heuristics and available information.
As you can see from this definition it does not mention facts. Perception is based on the information you have been given. With smoking this is very little. In fact ask yourself this. Who told me what smoking was? The answer is simple. No-one. It is what you have made it.
I had many attempts to quit before I finally quit for the last time. I know it is the last time because something changed inside me. It was what some people may call a revelation. A bolt from the blue! A bang on the head! Whatever you want to call it, it was an awakening experience. It started after someone asked me a question. Why do you smoke? A simple, innocent question that had me reaching for the answers I always gave, I am addicted to nicotine, it is a habit, I enjoy it. But on this occasion I said nothing. I just stared into space and thought. What is it about these dried leaves that have me so miserable? I don't enjoy smoking, I tolerate it. It is not a habit it is a security measure against anxiety and if I am only addicted to nicotine then every smoker should be able to stop with NRT. For the first time since I started smoking at 11 years old, I asked myself the question.
"What do cigarettes ACTUALLY do?"
Not what do I THINK cigarettes do but what do the really, actually do?
The answer, I have since discovered, is absolutely nothing. Oh, apart form one thing. They actually give you anxiety. That may sound strange to people who smoke, as the one thing every smoker believes is that smoking relieves their anxiety. What I had to do was go back to well before I smoked my first cigarette. Most people will perhaps only look as far back as their first. But for me it all happened long before then. I saw most of my family smoke. My mum, brother, aunties and uncles all smoked. They would tell me time and again, dont ever let me catch you smoking, it will kill you! Followed by them turning around and lighting one up. So the clear message to me was, Wow, they know cigarettes will kill them yet they still do it. Smoking must be fantastic. Then there were the many films and TV programmes that showed beautiful, successful, tough, rebellious, and often rich people smoking their heads off. At that age I wanted to be like that. So by the time it came to eleven and that first cigarette was put in my hand, I was already a smoker. In my head I had a vision, a concept, and a perception of what I thought smoking was. So when I did finally light that first cigarette and it made me sick and dizzy, afraid and excited, I was sure I had done something wrong. As the chemicals and additives in the cigarette started to react with various hormones in my body it made me feel something that should have been reserved for the moments in my life that are very rare. The chemicals in the tobacco had triggered the primal reaction called the Fight or Flight response. It is a thing that should only be activated in extreme danger. It is there to make sure you can stand and defend yourself, or run away to ensure survival. But here I was in the midst of full-blown fear with no way of switching it off. Normally when the threat has gone the body will naturally react by secreting what is known as the 'all clear' hormone into the body. However, I could not see what I was afraid of. I didnt know what the danger was. At that point I convinced myself that I had smoked the cigarette wrongly. Surely this was not why millions of people risk their lives to feel like this. So I light another. Now this is where the real problems start. I was in the full throws of the fight or flight response and could see no way out.
I mentioned a hormone above known as the 'All clear' hormone. It is this I was trying to get to. That calm state again as I was before I lit that first cigarette. That hormone is called DHEA (it has a very long chemical name but it is most commonly known as DHEA) Nicotine has been found to stimulate DHEA. So by lighting the cigarette I was giving myself the impression that the cigarette had just made me safe. However, what I did not do was link the two things together. The fact is the first cigarette was the cause of these extreme feelings in the first place. All I now remember is that smoking a cigarette made it all go away. That is until the levels of the good hormone (DHEA) start to fall again and the levels of the bad hormone (cortisol) start to trigger the same fear response again. So what I now had was a distorted memory for what a cigarette actually did. I forgot about the anxiety and fear it created and focused on the relief it appeared to give. All this was at an age when I was changing from a child to a young adult. And the thing I know now is that the main difference between a child and an adult is your ability to cope with stress and anxiety. What I did by smoking is give all of the responsibility over to a cigarette. I never developed my own coping strategies or techniques. Why would I when I could just light a cigarette and it seemed to vanish?
The second part of the quitting process for me was the ending of smoking. I had to link the two events together. The smoking of the previous cigarette and the feelings I got when I wanted another - the reaction described above. I always thought that to quit smoking I had to want to not smoke more that I wanted to smoke. Which is true but if you force this issue too much you will struggle. I used to fight like a dog not to give in and have a cigarette but the more I fought the more tired I became until, in a moment of weakness and vulnerability I succumbed. But this time I realised something. Willpower is not an external fight; I was not fighting anyone or anything outside me. It was the internal fight between my conscious mind and my subconscious mind. The conscious mind is the part that says I want to quit, I do not like smoking. Whereas your subconscious mind cannot decide what is right and wrong, good and bad. It is like the operating system in your computer. It will do the same routines over and over again until the program is changed. What you are doing by just saying you are going to quit is like asking your computer to change is routine without permission. If you do not have permission or more importantly you do not show it or give it a new program it will just carry on doing the same thing. You have to convince your subconscious mind that it is not cigarettes that are making you feel better. Then there will be no conflict. The conscious and subconscious mind will agree and you will not have to fight anymore. Your perception and permission are there and you will see that smoking does nothing for you. Only then will you be sure that you will never smoke again.
The Ian Clark Way
At this point I would like to say that this is a different way to quit and I want you to carry on smoking (if you have not stopped yet) until the end of this process. You will feel different as you read it and there is only a short section on the actual quit process I prefer to share. This is because the majority of the work will be completed before you come to actually stop. Basically what you are doing is quitting whilst still smoking. You are changing your perception and feelings about smoking as you smoke and this takes the pressure off you while you absorb the information in this book. You may feel that you still enjoy smoking, but I promise you by the end you will not enjoy anything about smoking. You will not envy other smokers as you may have done in the past and you will not feel any of the negative feelings that have hindered your progress in other attempts. What you must understand though is that this process will not have the same effect or impact on you if you continue to go back to smoking after reading it. If you do still want to smoke then re-read it. It will click and you will get it, but there are some obstacles that will be put in your way. I am confident you will quit. You have to be too. This process will contain things you may not agree with, and then there will be things that jump off the page, slap you around the head and have your ears ringing. But throughout it all remember this one fact. Nobody else can make you smoke. There may be situations that make you want to smoke, but the ultimate decision to light that cigarette is yours. What you have just read about smoking is so far from what you believe right now that you will almost have dismissed it, it may not have even registered. The reason for this is it doesnt fit in with your belief system as it is now. This will be your starting point. We are going to question your belief system. Not an easy task because this means looking at everything you take for granted and seeing past it. Looking at all possibilities before deciding what is right. This goes for smoking, quitting, nicotine, cigarettes, why you smoke, why you think you can't stop, why you feel the way you do when you try and stop, why you can't stop even though you know what it is doing to you inside and out and finally and probably the biggest belief, why you still want cigarettes long after a quit.
