Easy Way to Stop Smoking

The Hundred-a-Day Accountant

There was a moment, on the fifteenth of July nineteen eighty-three, when a British accountant named Allen Carr stubbed out a cigarette in his home in Raynes Park, south-west London, and somehow knew it would be his last. He was forty-eight years old. He had been smoking for more than thirty years. On a bad day, the number was a hundred. On a good day, it was sixty. He had a vein that throbbed in his forehead from decades of chain-smoking, and he had genuinely begun to fear a brain haemorrhage. He had tried to stop countless times. Once, using willpower alone, he had lasted six months and still cried like a baby when he gave in. He hated the taste. He hated the smell. He did not understand why he could not stop.

What he discovered that summer day did not come from any government health campaign, or any patch, or any pill. It came from a casual visit to a hypnotherapist his wife Joyce had sent him to, almost as a joke. The hypnotherapy itself did not work. There was no trance, no swinging watch, no theatrical command to feel sleepy. What worked was a single throwaway phrase the hypnotherapist used during the session: that smoking was nothing more than nicotine addiction. That phrase, combined with some medical literature Carr's son John had left lying around the house, broke something open in his head. And once it broke open, the cigarette he had just put out turned out to be the final cigarette of his life. He never smoked again. He did not even find it hard.

That is the strange, almost mystical claim at the heart of this book. Carr is not promising you a method that requires gritted teeth and white knuckles. He is not selling you a substitute. He explicitly rejects nicotine gum, patches, lozenges, sprays, inhalers, herbal cigarettes, and gradual reduction. He thinks they all make quitting harder, not easier. What he is offering instead is a complete rearrangement of how you understand what smoking actually is, and his bet is that once you see it clearly, you will simply stop, the way you would stop banging your head against a wall once you noticed you were doing it.