How I Quit Smoking Overnight Without Cravings (Allen Carr Review)

I don’t remember my last cigarette six years ago.

I guess that’s a testament to how easy it was to quit smoking.

But I do remember the failures.

Dozens of attempts to quit smoking that resulted only in tears.

“I’m quitting smoking today!”

I liked to tell people that.

“Yeah, yeah,” they said. “Whatever, Ben. Heard that before.”

They were right to laugh at me.

I was pathetic.

One time I announced to everybody that I’d be quitting smoking “for good”.

I had my ritual “last cigarette” and then…

Less than five hours later, I bought another pack, huddled over in the rain, and smoked it in secret.

I hated myself.

I was a failure.

Another time I tried to smoke five cigarettes in a row to make myself so sick that I’d quit forever.

I made myself sick but I was back smoking again the next morning.

My smoking story

My nicotine habit began when I was 13, puffing a cigarette here and there to look cool.

At 14, I’d go to parties and blitz through a pack of Marlboros in an evening.

I wasn’t addicted at that point.

I got well and truly hooked around 16 when I transferred to a new school.

The stress of not knowing anyone drove me to smoke every day.

Smoking gave me friends, an instant social group.

There were about 15 smokers in my year at the new school and we hung around together.

By the end of sixth form, I was smoking 10-15 cigarettes a day easily.

The real turning point was university.

I probably could have quit at that point and made a good go of it.

Smoking was an ingrained part of my life but it had only been a few years.

Unfortunately, the same impulses that drove me to smoke at 16, continued to drive me to smoke at 18.

New university, shy, enjoyed the instant social group that came from being a smoker.

I started smoking 20 a day.

On days I drank alcohol, that number doubled.

Smoking was linked to EVERYTHING.

• Before a meal? Smoke.
• After a meal? Smoke.
• Before exercise? Smoke
• After exercise? Smoke.
• Before studying? Smoke.
• Study break? Smoke.
• Before bed? Smoke.
• Wake up? Smoke.
• Coffee? Smoke.

You get the picture.

I stunk like an ashtray, I was always in a state of anxiety about my next cigarette, I couldn’t climb up a set of stairs without wheezing, and my arms and legs would could numb throughout the day.

In short…

I was fucking sick of smoking, sick of my weakness, sick of being addicted, sick of myself, and sick of my life.

But I still couldn’t quit!

What didn’t work to stop smoking

I tried everything.

• Gum
• Patches
• Inhalers
• Weaning
• Will power
• Cold turkey
• Hypnotism

Nothing worked.

Gum tasted like ass, made me want to throw up my stomach lining, and still left me craving.

Patches messed up my heartbeat and made me angry.

Inhalers felt like a crappy substitute for what I really wanted.

Weaning flat out didn’t work. I’d get to a certain number and it was like my body would not let me keep going.

Will power – LOL – don’t make me laugh. Trying to be “disciplined” only made me miserable.

Cold turkey always led to a swift relapse (often in the same day).

Hypnotism was a waste of money. I lit up immediately after the sessions.

I wanted to quit more than anything in the world but I was getting pretty close to resigning myself to be a smoker forever.

Then I read Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking

A fellow smoker friend shoved it in my hands when she saw how distressed I was getting.

Ironically, she refused to read it herself.

She said she was too scared that it “would work”.

All smokers can sympathise with that fear.

I was also pretty skeptical.

“How the hell can a BOOK get me to stop smoking?”

I already knew all the scare tactics.

Everyone in the world knows smoking causes cancer, costs a ton of money, and makes you age prematurely.

But after flipping through the first few pages, three things the author Allen Carr said made me go for it:

1. He would use zero scare tactics (because they don’t work)
2. You are encouraged to keep smoking while reading the book
3. He went from smoking 100 cigarettes to 0 overnight without pain

A 100-a-day smoker saying he’ll get you to quit smoking effortlessly while still smoking is quite the promise.

So I puffed away with the book in my hand and read the whole thing over the course of a week.

I must have been a funny sight…

Reading a book called ‘Easy Way to Stop Smoking’ while furiously puffing on my cigarette.

Then something magical happened.

Something all the inhalers, patches, and hypnotism couldn’t do.

Half way into the book, I just didn’t want to smoke anymore.

There was no will power involved.

I simply did not want to keep smoking.

But I did keep smoking until I got to the end of the book, as per Allen Carr’s advice, and then…

At some point I extinguished my last cigarette and never looked back.

It’s impossible to explain how the book did this unless you’ve actually read it yourself.

The only way I can explain it is that Allen Carr de-brainwashed me.

He undid years of ingrained beliefs about why we smoke and what it does for us.

He even undid misconceptions about withdrawals and cravings.

The way he explained everything shifted my entire view on cigarettes and my relationship to them.

• Listen to Allen Carr’s Quit Smoking for FREE on Audible when you follow this link (you’ll get 2 free audiobooks)

After the last cigarette, I do remember a few withdrawal pangs for maybe 2-3 days.

But these were nothing like the pangs I had felt (or thought I had felt) every other time I’d tried to quit.

These withdrawals were nothing.

In fact, they were so mild and I saw them only as an indication that the filthy poisonous drug was leaving my system that I LAUGHED.

I smiled and laughed my way through the withdrawal period.

Every other withdrawal period had been hell on earth.

But this withdrawal was fun.

I immediately became a new person.

I became a non-smoker.

Life as a non-smoker

I’ve wanted to write about how I stopped smoking for a long time now.

But I wanted to wait a suitable amount of time so I can really look back on the period as a completely different person.

I think six years is a good enough distance.

I can’t even really remember what it was like to be hopeless chained to a deadly habit.

I can’t remember the pain of having to leave the dinner table before dessert because I was craving a cigarette.

Now I enjoy my meals to the full, savouring and cherishing flavours I never could taste as a smoker.

I can’t remember what it was like to walk through fields of flowers and be carried away by the scents.

Now I love spending time outside – not because I’m forced to in order to smoke – because I love the smells of flowers, the waft coming from bakeries and barbecue restaurants, the scents of life.

I can travel all over the world now without being chained to my filthy habit.

I remember taking an 11-hour plane ride from London to Phoenix as a smoker…

It was hell.

Even though I brought those stupid little nicotine lozenges with me, I was crawling out my skin the entire journey.

I practically ran through customs so I could get my puff.

Now I’ve taken 30+ hour trips and the only problem I had to deal with was jet lag and boring in-flight movies.

I can take a trip to Prague and lounge around in the gorgeous spring air by the waterside without a care in the world.

The old me would have ruined this beautiful scene by sucking on a red-tipped phallus.

I can go anywhere and do anything, confident in myself.

I realise now that smoking actually made me anxious (socially and generally). It made me stressed and frustrated.

Now my baseline level of calm and happiness is tremendous.

You don’t even know the difference until you take the leap.

It’s like gaining a superpower.

I’m thrusting Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking into your hands

If you feel like you’ve tried everything and you still desperately want to quit…

This is how you do it.

Pick up that book and give it a read.

You can keep smoking while you read it.

But you’ll find that you won’t want to somewhere along the line.

Your life will change for good.

You can read Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking here.