Allen Carr (September 2, 1934 – November 29, 2006), an avid smoker who smoked five packs of cigarettes a day until 1983, is best known as the author of books on the fight against nicotine addiction.
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Born in London, Allen Carr began smoking during his military service, at the age of 18. In 1958, he earned a degree in accounting. Finally quit smoking in 1983 after a session with a hypnotherapist, but to break up with nicotine addiction helped him not hypnosis. The session gave him the opportunity to realize how easy it is to quit smoking. From that moment Allen Carr began active work to popularize the new method among smokers.
In June 2006, Carr was diagnosed with lung cancer and was predicted to have no more than 9 months to live. Carr responded that “since I smoked my last cigarette 23 years ago, I have been the happiest person on Earth. And I still feel that way today.”
Allen Carr passed away on November 29, 2006, at the age of 72, at his home in Malaga, Spain.
From Carr’s perspective, smokers do not actually experience the pleasure of smoking cigarettes: smoking merely relieves the unpleasant symptoms that occur as nicotine leaves the body after the previous cigarette. This is how nicotine addiction arises and persists. Carr states that the “relief” a smoker feels when smoking a cigarette, the feeling of returning to a “normal” state, is experienced by the non-smoker on a regular basis. Carr also notes that the dependence on smoking is actually much lower than is commonly believed, the symptoms of quitting are actually generated by the mind of the former smoker, and if you put aside the doubts and fears associated with the process of quitting, it will not be so painful. In addition, Carr states that in order to stop smoking, you do not need to have tremendous willpower, because willpower is not required for a person to stop doing something that he does not want to do.
