Free Yourself From Smoking

Since reading this book I haven't had a single cigarette - not a single drag, and I'm confident now I'll never smoke again. The key thing this book taught me was you can be free, totally free, from cigarette cravings. It's not like being an alchoholic, you won't have to take it one day at a time every day for the rest of your life - you can be free. When you're on the fags its hard to imagine life without them as being anything other than miserable, always being deprived of something you enjoy. But that's balls, I can see that now. Give up smoking using this book and you'll see you're actually adding something to your life, and that smoking is totally negative. You only ever smoke - ever - to temporarily remove that feeling of wanting a fag. Break that vicious circle and you're free: you won't just have stopped smoking, you'll have stopped yourself wanting to smoke, permanently. That's the message here. I'd really recommend this book, it's really helped me.


Free Yourself from Smoking   January 14, 2006
 4 out of 5 found this review helpful

At last, an intelligent, well-written guide to stopping smoking. It helps you to understand just why you smoke, and guides you through every stage of giving up, including what to do if you relapse. It is written with great depth of understanding and humour by a self-confessed ex-smoker, who also happens to hold her doctorate in this field. If you really want to give up once and for all, this is the book for you.


Genuinely helpful book with distinctive ideas   January 10, 2006
 5 out of 6 found this review helpful

Getting to grips with the ideas in this book about WHY people smoke has fundamentally changed my beliefs about my own smoking and is really helping me stop.

Lots of "self-help" books are thin on ideas but padded out with waffle and repetition to make the reader think they are getting value for money. This isn't the case with this book, which has a very soundly researched underlying strategy based on what psychologists call Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

The text is broken up with illustrations as well as insightful diaries from quitters and would-be quitters, which keeps things reasonably lively. The author's professional experience with smokers shows through clearly.

One helpful device is a character called 'Nitch', which the author uses to personify our own inner voice that encourages us to continue smoking. At first I though this was just a gimmick but actually the thoughts this little voice expresses are spot on, and seeing them in black and white on the page does help one realise how illogical our own cravings are.

Let's face it, giving up smoking is never going to be easy, but this book does provide some really helpful tools. I suppose I can't promise that the approach presented here will work for everyone, but the book does encourage the reader to really challenge some very deep ideas about why they smoke, and what the author writes here really does ring true for me.

A definite thumbs up from me.


Great book   January 8, 2006
 2 out of 3 found this review helpful

This book was brilliant. It was unexpectedly funny, very accessible and full of excellent advice from everything to preparing to quit, quitting, staying quit and learning what to do if you relapse. Definately stands out from the other smoking books I have read.