Great Advice to Quit Smoking (BBC Horizon)
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Stumble ThisYou wanna quit smoking? Listen to this guy. At least he's got some interesting points...
this is from a documentary entitled "We Love Cigarettes"
this is from a documentary entitled "We Love Cigarettes"
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The Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Join the Millions Who Have Become Non-Smokers Using Allen Carr's Easyway Method Book added by: rottenseed 
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I'm still trying to figure out what he says for the 3rd reason (3rd poker chip) to not smoke. It sounds like he says... Slavery?
So, if not for the reasons given by him Flood, why do you smoke, and why do you have no desire to quit?
You don't care about your health? You don't see yourself as addicted ('I could give up whenever I want, I just don't want to')? I am intrigued.
What does your name mean?
hypnotic!
Now, is it me, or does he sound drunk?
Oh, and I completely agree with Bidouleroux.
What does your name mean?
"Bidou" is simply a nickname and "leroux" means "the red(head)".
This is pretty much exactly like religion vs. atheism, with religion being of course smoking.
Anti-smoking is by far the more religious. Smoking is blamed for a host of sundry afflictions with scientific support that no one has the courage to challenge. People want it to be evil and that's what they get. No serious scientist would do any unbiased research, because if he found anything remotely pro-smoking the political fallout would ruin his career overnight.
Our surgeon general states that 70% of lung cancer victims got it from smoking, but lung cancer continues to rise with nary a blip - even though smokers per capita have fallen under 25% and have been there for a decade. If you want me to support this claim with data, sorry I can't. Neither the CDC or the ALA, or any other site I could find, will release any data cross referencing lung cancer victims and smokers. You can easily find how much carcinogens a black single mother of 2 will inhale in a 12x12 room with one smoker, but a table lookup of smokers v lung cancer victims will get you a 404 error. Try it.
That's religion. People needing an evil, ignoring the facts, suppressing the research of facts, all holding hands and attacking with fervor.
P.S.
My lungs get a clean bill of health every year, even though I've been smoking for over 20 years, simply because I've never tell the doctors I smoke. Ask your smoking friends to try that, it'll give them a chuckle.
Up-voting even though I personally had a hard time relating to this guy's message. I'm a smoker, and so I watched it because even though I have no desire to quit, I'm open to ideas that challenge my own. What's strange is that half of his poker chips wouldn't even be on the table for me, they aren't a factor either way. Boredom? I don't think I've ever lit up because I was bored.
I'm still trying to figure out what he says for the 3rd reason (3rd poker chip) to not smoke. It sounds like he says... Slavery?
I also smoke. I am going to try and utilize his philosophy as it makes a bit of sense to me. I'm not one of those "self-help" nuts, so I don't think I'll be going to the extent of buying his book, but I can relate to his message. Smoking really doesn't make my life better (anymore). It, in many ways, hinders my life in more ways than just my health.
...this is day 2, we'll see how it goes
I think this mindset is the only way people really can permanently quit. Someone who quits and doesn't go back has it straight in their head that they really do not want to smoke. The ones who miss it end up going back to it.
The way it works is you smoke all you want while reading the book and once you're done you quit cold turkey. While you read the book he deconstructs all the reasons you want to smoke. It might feel good at first but it always goes back to being a very unpleasant slavery to an addiction and there can't be any other outcome. Then he deconstructs the physiological need - ie he convinces you to go cold turkey instead of using patches. The thing that convinced me was his point that you can sleep all night without needing a cigarette, in fact you can wake relaxed but if you try quiting for 8 hours you'll be climbing up the walls (unless you get it straight in your head you don't want to smoke first). Physical nicotine addiction doesn't last long... unless you prolong it endlessly with the patch.
I used to smoke a pack and a half a day for like 4 years.
</End evangelizing>
re: nicotine addiction -
I agree with him about using the patch or gum - trying to kick an addiction to a substance by ingesting that substance is absurd. Ever hear of someone weaning themselves off of smoking heroin by shooting it? (Methadone is a completely different substance - not the same as using nicotine gum.)
On the other hand, the bit about withdrawal symptoms not getting worse is just a load of horse shit. This ties in with alizarin's paraphrase from the book about being able to sleep for 8 hours without smoking. Well, I've known people who can't. They wake up in the middle of the night because of withdrawal and have a cigarette. Also, that 8 eight hours of not smoking is the reason why long time heavy smokers light a cigarette before even going to the bathroom or putting their slippers on - because the withdrawal symptoms are stronger after 8 hours than after 1.
Don't know if he addresses this in the book, but physical addiction is also tangled with behavior. Certain activities that a smoker associates with smoking usually spark the desire to smoke, even if it wasn't there immediately before. The point being that part of being addicted to cigarettes is psychological, and for many, that is the harder part to deal with.
Why I smoke? Other than the physical satisfaction (the stimulating effects as well as the appetite suppression), I'd say the main reason I smoke is because I do some of my best thinking during my smoking ritual, which always involves having to go outside.
I quit once for 6 months due to a health issue, but it turned out the issue was due to my allergies and not the smoking. I made the choice to go back to smoking because I never found a substitute for the ritual. I tried going on short walks, meditating, but I couldn't find anything to substitute the critical thinking I could accomplish during a single smoke. There is just something about that combination of removing distractions I can't find a substitute for.
Purely psychological addiction, I know. I don't feel like I smoke enough to be physically addicted (half a pack of lights a day).
I remember reading a psychology paper a friend of mine wrote which explored his smoking addiction one of the major themes of his paper was that the act of smoking allowed him to disconnect with the world and slow down the chaos around him, it was pure psychological on his behalf but he said it allowed him to manage easier at times of stress.
What do smokers do when they get stressed? Light up.
"I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."
>> ^Bidouleroux:
This is pretty much exactly like religion vs. atheism, with religion being of course smoking.
Anti-smoking is by far the more religious. Smoking is blamed for a host of sundry afflictions with scientific support that no one has the courage to challenge. People want it to be evil and that's what they get. No serious scientist would do any unbiased research, because if he found anything remotely pro-smoking the political fallout would ruin his career overnight.
Our surgeon general states that 70% of lung cancer victims got it from smoking, but lung cancer continues to rise with nary a blip - even though smokers per capita have fallen under 25% and have been there for a decade. If you want me to support this claim with data, sorry I can't. Neither the CDC or the ALA, or any other site I could find, will release any data cross referencing lung cancer victims and smokers. You can easily find how much carcinogens a black single mother of 2 will inhale in a 12x12 room with one smoker, but a table lookup of smokers v lung cancer victims will get you a 404 error. Try it.
That's religion. People needing an evil, ignoring the facts, suppressing the research of facts, all holding hands and attacking with fervor.
P.S.
My lungs get a clean bill of health every year, even though I've been smoking for over 20 years, simply because I've never tell the doctors I smoke. Ask your smoking friends to try that, it'll give them a chuckle.
You obviously didn't look very hard for data then. With almost zero effort I just came accross this in a high-profile peer-reviewed medical journal. There are hundreds of studies comparing mortality rates between smokers and non-smokers with data going back 100 years. I just want to point out the data in that study was from 1951-2001. In "survival rates from age 35" the difference in survival rates between smokers and non-smokers increases to about 20% difference by age 70. That is, you are looking at about 20% of all non-smokers being dead and 40% of all smokers dead. You can always look at the graphs for much more information than I can type here, but it's all very damning.
"But cancer continues to rise!" I hear in a myriad of different "X does or doesn't cause cancer" topics. What you mean to say is cancer diagnoses have continued to rise. 50 years ago we knew a fraction of what we know now about cancer. This is just one example of why statistics is a profession. There's so much to it I can't begin to describe it here.