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Carr wrote a number of books intended to lead to smoking cessation and loss of excess weight, some of which were best sellers. He subsequently left his job as an accountant in the same year and opened the first "easiest way" clinic, to help other addicts. More information about the Symonds Method can be found here.After 30 years of heavy smoking, Carr quit in 1983, at the age of 48. What smokers are helped to do is to understand why they’ve been in such a predicament for so long-and how simple it is to escape from it if you go about it in the right way. No so-called psychotherapy or guided imagery is included. You can’t do this if you’re smoking up to the last minute. This is because it’s important for clients to become aware of and to talk about what they feel- if anything-when they haven’t smoked for a while. With the Symonds Method there are, by design, no smoking breaks. It’s interactive and takes place on a one-to-one basis, though couples can also be accommodated. The Symonds Method does not use lectures or seminars. This can’t be done by being talked at for several hours. That is why stop-smoking counselling, for best results, needs to be tailored to the situation and needs of each person. Is merely listening to a lecture with regular smoking breaks an effective way not only to stop smoking but to stay stopped?Īll smokers have the same problem: addiction to the poison nicotine. Obviously the seminars are really lectures, and there can be little, if any, individual attention. And they accommodate up to twenty-five people. There are five smoking breaks and this may explain why the events now last six hours. The sessions are called seminars and are run by facilitators. Then you smoked a symbolic final cigarette, after which another would never touch your lips in the rest of your life.
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You were allowed and even encouraged to smoke, and it seems the reason for this curious feature was that you wouldn’t be distracted by an unsatisfied need to smoke and would therefore be able to concentrate better on the content of the lecture. What was remarkable about the Allen Carr Easyway To Stop Smoking session was that everyone smoked throughout-it was in the days before smoking in enclosed public spaces was made illegal. So they discarded their half-finished cigarette packs and lighters. The object seemed to be help the attendees achieve a relaxed state of mind to remember the content of the lecture and face a smoke-free future.Īs the attendees were leaving the room they were invited to throw onto a growing heap on the floor anything they didn’t need. You were instructed to imagine yourself lying on a beach on a sunny day and visualise a boy and a girl throwing a large multi-coloured ball back and forth. The session ended with what was called psychotherapy, and this is where the reclining chairs came in. He made brief comments on some of them such as, ‘Yes, I see, no problem there.’ Near the end of the session the therapist picked up and glanced through the sheets on which the participants had written their smoking histories. And he kept this up without hesitation for something like four hours. The person running the session, the therapist, entered the room and greeted everyone in a friendly and reassuring way. They also had filled in questionnaires about their smoking histories. There were, as I recall, eight participants who were all seated in comfortable reclining chairs. Some time ago I had the opportunity of observing an Allen Carr ‘Easyway To Stop Smoking’ group session in London. Today I’ll tell you more about these seminars. In a previous blog about Allen Carr I critiqued his ‘Easyway To Stop Smoking’ book and looked at the claimed success rate of his stop-smoking seminars. Is Allen Carr’s Easyway To Stop Smoking Really Easy?