[blairbeckwith]

I sort of agree with this, but I do know lots of people – myself to a certain extent – that have had success with mild re-programming, via Allen Carr's Easy Way method[0]. I'm not the type to buy in to this kind of thing, but it did help me quit when nothing else did, and I never felt this sense of longing for something. Nobody else I've known that has had success with that method did either.

I also think it's really unhelpful to talk about quitting smoking in such hopeless terms. If I was still a smoker, being told I was inevitably going to be craving cigarettes for the rest of my life might almost convince me not to quit at all.

It doesn't have to be this way.

[0] https://www.allencarr.com

[version_five]

I should mention (because I posted a hopeless sounding post below and didn't consider how it could come across), I quit smoking by taking up running. It was not a switch, I started running as exercise while a still smoked, without even considering quitting. Obviously the habits are at odds, but less than you'd think (I was in my early 30s, smoked about 15 years).

At some point, I had an established new hobby i enjoyed (running), i knew that smoking was holding me back, and i had a partial coping mechanism for dealing with craving and depression that comes with stopping.

10 years later, I still run, and I'm still happy with the tradeoff on my level of fitness, which is something that helps remind me of why I stopped when I have a craving.

(I know a lot of people don't like running, but my takeaway I think is that it's better to focus on a new hobby / habit and establish new patterns while still smoking and then try and quit, vs just stopping and then trying to fill the void after). I hope this makes it sound less hopeless.

[josephcsible]

> I also think it's really unhelpful to talk about quitting smoking in such hopeless terms. If I was still a smoker, being told I was inevitably going to be craving cigarettes for the rest of my life might almost convince me not to quit at all.

I think the post was directed at non-smokers, to scare them into not starting to smoke.

[mlang23]

Treating grown ups like children usually does backfire... Or at least not work.

[falcor84]

>... and I never felt this sense of longing for something. Nobody else I've known that has had success with that method did either.

Isn't that tautological?

[blairbeckwith]

Maybe? I'm not sure? It's a fairly throw away comment, I didn't send it to my editor to check for logical consistency or style advice.

[falcor84]

Sorry, it wasn't intended as a stylistic comment. It just seemed you're making a recommendation about a treatment by saying that it works for all the people it works for. Would you have any estimate of what fraction of all the people who tried this fully succeed?

[blairbeckwith]

I gotcha, it was poorly worded.

My sample size here is extremely small – I know of three people who have used the method (2 read the book, 1 took the seminar) and all three were successes. I don't know of anyone who's done it that hasn't succeeded, but I expect there are tons of those. People who believe in it because it's worked for them are much more likely to speak broadly and loudly about it.