Allen Carr famously made his fortune from his patented ‘Easyway’ approach to stopping smoking, which he used on his own three packs a day habit before stopping thousands of others. A superb publicist of his own methods, he divided critics sharply - into those who thought he was a genius (a host of celebs used the Allen Carr approach) and those who couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Celebrity clients included Sir Richard Branson, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Charlotte Church.
The Easy Way to Stop Drinking was an attempt by Carr, who died of lung cancer in November 2006, to extend his system to other habits, with other titles dealing with losing weight, enjoying flying (not fear of flying notice), and stopping worrying. Now if there is a criticism of titles like this, it’s the use of the word ‘easy’. Carr’s titles use the system common to a host of self help books - identify a problem, say that the author has a proven system which differs from other systems that don’t work, and say that the solution is ‘easy’. Critics would go on to ask why, if a system is so easy, does it need to be buried within several hundred pages of prose rather than written on one side of a sheet of A4.
I’ll leave aside the realities of having a product to sell (put in the dumbest of terms, nobody is going to pay you £9.99 for a sheet of A4, they want a book thanks very much) . I also see no reason why Allen Carr, Brian Tracy, Pat Riley or whoever shouldn’t profit from the wisdom they’ve accrued … and Carr’s method does work for a lot of people. Okay, £9.99 well spent if you do quit smoking or drinking as a result, but what about the criticisms? The big one I’ve read is that the reader is led, and led, and led through the book with the promise of the secret but that there IS no secret. The key is that you didn’t really want to drink anyway, it was all just a con and peer pressure, and that the craving you get for the drink is largely to assuage the withdrawal symptoms from your last drink. Easyway is, in a nutshell, a debunking of the benefits of fags, booze, cream cakes (you don’t like them really) and a reminder to hold firm through the minor cravings of withdrawal you will feel. Carr is very dismissive of physical addiction, arguing that for alcohol and tobacco, even for heroin users he’s dealt with, the actual physical withdrawal is nowhere near as tough as people claim.
And it’s true that the psycholological addiction to cigs and booze is considerably stronger than the physical one. For many of us it can be incredibly hard to resist the six o clock drink, but we don’t open a bottle with breakfast. We might never want a cigarette but it’s very hard not to light up when your friends do down the pub. Where people really take issue with Carr is the ‘you only think you enjoy it’ argument. Carr will say ‘red wine tastes horrid’ but readers will cry ‘I enjoy red wine’. But critics are kind of missing the point here. Carr’s argument that booze must be horrible because it’s the product of fermentation (ie rotting foodstuffs) doesn’t do it for me; after all, by the same token you would automatically give up cheese or a lot of soya products.
The real point of Easyway is that he has to persuade you to change the way you think. What’s really struck me reading his books is that they are an exercise in waking hypnotherapy, and this clicks with some people but not others. You are reading the book because you’re unhappy about drinking. You could try willpower, but we know how hard that is. You’re left with the constant pain of resisting having a drink if you use the alternative method (willpower). How much easier to simply decide that you don’t want the drink in the first place. This is where all or nothing comes in, another bugbear with Carr’s critics. He rightly figures that you can’t continue thinking drinking is okay and succeed in giving it up. So he must persuade you it’s not okay. Fine say critics - persuade me it’s a ‘bit okay’ so I can drink just a bit a day. But this doesn’t work - you cannot send mixed messages and be persuasive here.
So Carr, like a good hynotherapist, doesn’t focus on ‘it’s lovely, but resist’, which is a recipe for frustration, misery and a constant focus on what you’re missing. He tells you instead to decide that life is much better without booze, fags or whatever. How effective it can be without deep hypnosis depends hugely on the individual - personally I’d rather be hypnotised and have a deep store of almost subliminal programming to draw on! Perhaps it’s the word ‘easy’ that’s the problem. It may be simple but it isn’t easy. But again, that’s the method. Decide it’s easy, really decide, and it becomes so. A bit like faith really.
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